Paid to Write Online: Articles, Forum Posts and Blog Comments

There are tons of webmasters out there who want one thing: traffic. Traffic is the holy grail in terms of websites. Now one of the best ways to get traffic is to get backlinks (I will discuss this in more detail in my upcoming posts "Monetizing your website"). Basically back links are links to your website from other websites. The higher the page rank of the site on which your link appears the better it will be for your site in terms of Google ranking. Since webmasters do not have time to create all these backlinks they often hire people to write these for them. They come in three main formats: articles, forum posts and blog comments.

Payment wise this may not seem like the most lucrative option as the going rates are about $1 per 100 words for articles, 0.10 cents for forum post and blog comment. However, you have to look at it this way, lets say you can write 500 words in an hour, so that is $5 an hour which is not bad. Considering you can work whenever you want and however long you want. Personally I have never attempted the forum posts or blog commenting as this is way to monotonous and I couldn't stand getting paid only a couple cents for something, but its really up to the individual.

The trick with this strategy is finding the work. You may be asking yourself right now 'where the hell would I go looking for these types of jobs?' The 'job market' for these types of 'assignments' is usually a forum where you can post your going rate and webmasters can find you or you will see posts by webmasters and you can just reply to those. Be aware that this is higly competitive, within seconds of a new job coming up there is already a person asking for it. Most ask for a sample of work so make sure you have some sort of article (around 300 words to send them). Also remember to LIE LIE LIE. Say you have been doing this for several years, or that you write for a newspaper. Trust me you will have a hard time finding something without that. One last thing, make sure you have a paypal account set up, its free and easy to do and it is the most accepted payment method for these types of jobs.

The site I have found is the most useful is Digital Point, its free to register and they always have tons of new jobs. Its a little tricky to find the right section of the forum so you have to make sure you scroll down and go to the "BUY, SELL or TRADE" section and then continue to the "CONTENT" thread. Good luck.

Advantages:

• easy to do
• how much you earn is up to you

Disadvantages:

• highly competitive - pushes the rates down
• very monotonous

EARNING POTENTIAL:

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