To start, you need to have a topic, keywords, and word count.  The keywords will be repeated once or several times throughout the body of the article, without making it obvious they are purposefully thrust into the article.  Sounds easy, right?  Consider this:  What you are reading has already used the phrase “how to write an article” twice, the word “write” three times, and the word “article” four times.   For SEO content pieces, the word count is usually 500; occasionally 300 or 1000 words will be required.

The next step is to research your topic.  Spend a little time finding some credible Internet sources, and copy and paste content into your Word document.  You will not be using these words to plagiarize!  Write your own copy, every time, but use the content to pull key dates, sources, or even the general tone of your article.  Never use the exact words expressed by another writer.  If you are going to plagiarize , find another business.  While you do not need to reference sources if you have sufficiently altered the text, attribute any direct quotes or stats to the source, as you would with any other publishable document.

Don’t spend a huge amount of time on research.  While you do want to sound educated on a topic and pass along correct information, you are not creating a scientific treatise on how to best treat lymphomas.  Your topics will generally be non-scientific, and not terribly technical.  Those types of articles are necessarily left to experts in the field, and if you are not comfortable imparting “wisdom” about a given subject, then either pass the assignment along to someone else, or make sure you give the subject the critical eye to detail it deserves.  Sometimes, even though writing SEO content does not pay a lot of money, you have to bite the bullet and do a little bit more research work than you had intended.  Hopefully, your professional integrity is such that you won’t pass off bad information as good; and that any statements used can be proven as fact, not fiction..

Articles shouldn’t take a ton of time to write.  If you are even marginally adept at stringing together sentences, you can learn to write around three or four 500-word articles in an hour. Each article should be researched, edited for spelling and content, and saved and attached for your employer.  You can expect revisions on the part of your editor; so do not necessarily have a hand in the finished product.  Hopefully, your raw text was adequate and does not demand a large amount of editing from your employer or proofreader.

Make money blogging!

Okay, really, I just wrote that title to score some clicks – but in the end, that’s really what making money with a blog is all about. To have a successful blog, you can do one of two things. You can be an amazingly funny and witty person, with a lot of interesting stories to tell, and a lot of dumb luck…or you can do it the hard way.

It seems that most any strategy for making money involves an easy, dumb luck method, and one that will only give you satisfaction after you pour your heart and soul into it. Well, in case you were holding your breath for dumb luck, let me be the first to tell you that there are no quick answers here.

Now, I’m a firm believer that anyone who intends to market any good or service needs a blog. Even if you don’t have a revenue plan for it, there’s just something very satisfying about having an open forum where you can say whatever you like about yourself, or your business. It’s like having your own rock band poster in words. On the internet. Like a good rock poster, blogs proclaim who you are at high volume, with arresting text and graphics. Even if no one comes to the gig, at least you’ll feel better for having done something to promote yourself.

And that’s where the money comes in. There are a lot of ways to make money with a good blog. You can do it passively, by advertising yourself, and hoping someone reads your sales pitch, and buys what you’re selling. You can also go aggressively after sales dollars. I can’t offer much advice for the passive route, since that’s all down to being as convincing as possible, but I do have a few tips for the people who want to pick up some spare cash by blogging, and don’t want to rely on their rhetoric alone.

Step 1 – Find a good team of copy writers. This is imperative. To make any real money, you’ll need new content all the time, posted in a million places. Unless you’re on 36 hour days, there’s just going to be too much for you to keep up with, even if you go at it full time. Get a team of copy writers who can handle large volumes.

Step 2 – Find some websites with affiliate programs. Sign up for them, and stick the banner on your shiny new blog. Send the product or business you’re affiliated with to your writing team, and let them generate some copy for you. You’ll be busy elsewhere.

Step3 – Using the copy that you have, post your articles in article directories, with links back to your blog. Do this as often as you can stand. Some suggest using software to do it for you, and that’s an option for the tech savvy.

Step4 – Let your writers keep filling your blog with content full of links and backlinks. This will generate some search engine hits, especially if your writers are SEO writers. You may even want multiple blogs at once, that all link back and forth between one another.

Step5 – Just keep plugging away at it. I never said it would be easy! You can also pick up some revenue from google Ad sense, if you’re ranking well enough. Try out a lot of different things!