Sunday, January 20, 2008

Making money on the Internet by writing a blog, truth or fiction?

People kept telling me that I could make money online, that there is contract work available for people who write blogs. I was quite sceptical about it; I could get paid to blog, right. I had to many of the get rich working from your home spam emails. I had one person telling me, on a forum, about how he was making so much money by writing web site reviews. I thought sure, and when are you going to ask me to sign up and give you all my information. Well strangely enough he never did. What he did was answer my questions honestly.

He had been writing a computer technical blog for years and one about software, coding and programming. The blogs built up a huge readership over the years. He had been approached about doing reviews for different companies, everything from the technical side to reviewing games, and programs. They would pay him to write about their product with a link back to their website. He started small and now gets paid any where from about $100 to $500 per article he is contracted to write. So of course everyone was asking were to sign up to do this. He explained that at this point he is usually contacted by the company directly to review their products or sites but that there are quit a few different companies out there that act as a middleman. They have bloggers register with them, and then will either offer them a job to write an article at a specific price or will let them bid on jobs and let the companies pick who they want to write the blog.

I was expecting him to tell us to all sign up to one company, as some companies will pay for everyone who registers under you. He actually told us to look on the Internet and find ones for ourselves. I liked that. He gave us the information we needed and then told us to do the work. I spent some time looking at some of the different sites that I could get paid to blog. I signed up for several to see how they worked. So far Smorty has offered me assignments that actually fits with my blogs. I have found Smorty easy to navigate and I don’t feel any pressure to take an assignment. I don’t think that I am going to make large amounts of money doing advertising blogs or website reviews. I do think that I can make a little money writing about things that interest me and I would probably have written an article anyway. Mind you I am only willing to write about things of interest to me no matter if someone wants to pay me or not.

I think that if you are already writing a blog then doing blog advertisements that fit with your blog then it is not a bad thing, as long as your writing the truth and just give your opinion on the site. If you are writing about some thing that is of interest to your readers, with a link to a site that has more information or might be useful then that is actually a good article, even if you were paid for it. However if you are thinking about starting a blog just to write blogs for money it is not going to work. People are not interested in reading ads about anything and everything, no matter how well written. Like every other business decision you have to do your research and don’t do something because someone told you that there was a lot of money to be made. The reality is that if you are writing blogs to make money you have to put time into it and the payout is not going to be the big bucks for a very long time, if ever.

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