Writing for Your Wealth

One of the coolest things about writing for yourself instead of working for others is that you can choose what to write about. But if you want to make money–the kind of money that comes in while you sleep and play–you may need to rein your impulses in a bit and consider profitability potential.

I’m going to talk more about picking a “niche” later on, as variations of “What niche is best?” are some of the most commonly asked questions in forums devoted to affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, and other revenue generators for websites. Today I want to talk more about how the kind of content you write should go hand-in-hand with monetization methods.

The first thing to consider is what method of making money appeals most to you. Yes, there are many options for writers. Certainly you can use a combination of methods, but something might call out to you more than others. Let’s take a look at three biggies:

Advertising

For me, selling advertising is my thing. Much as a magazine sells ad space within its pages, I place ads next to the articles and blog posts I write.

That might be in the form of copying and pasting a simple script onto my site to show ads through Adsense or Chitika, or it might be renting out space directly to sellers (i.e. selling text links or banner space). I love advertising because it doesn’t require me to sell anything, nor do I have to write copy that sounds like a sales page. Selling just isn’t something I enjoy, but I don’t mind having ads next to my writing. Shoot, sometimes I even visit the advertisers’ sites and find nifty new things to blog about.

The advertising model works very well for me, but it’s not the only fish out there.

Books/Ebooks

If you do enjoy selling and marketing, then you may be a candidate to create your own books (whether paper or digital) and use your blog as a vehicle to sell those books.

If you’ve been rejected by agents and traditional publishers, that doesn’t mean you can’t make money from your book. Ebooks cost virtually nothing to produce (okay, you may need to hire someone to design a cover and set up a shopping cart on your site but that’s a minimal one-time expense), so you keep all the profits. Even on books published through vanity presses, the royalties are often higher than a traditional publishing house can offer.

Even if you aspire to eventually selling to a big name New York publishing house, that doesn’t mean you can’t start with ebooks or self-published books and sell them through your site.

Today, where the world is on information overload and competition is intense in every field, the best way to sell a book is to build up an audience and a community first and then approach an agent. There are all sorts of stories out there of bloggers who have gotten book deals because they have a popular blog. Why would a publisher want to take a chance on an unknown when they can buy someone who has 10,000 people (people who will buy the book when it comes out) already subscribed to a mailing list and/or RSS feed?

Affiliate Programs

Another means of making money is through affiliate programs. This is where you sign up with a merchant, put links on your site or in newsletters to your email list, and make a percentage of the purchase price when an item is sold through you.

A percentage of my income does come through affiliate sales, but it’s a distant second to advertising. Sometimes I will place an affiliate link in an article if I have come across a product on Amazon or Commission Junction (something of a virtual mall of merchants, all with affiliate programs) that is related to what I am talking about. However, most people who do well with affiliate programs do a bit of selling or “pre-selling” to be exact, which again isn’t my forte when it comes to writing.

Now back to the original point. The big thing every profit-hungry writer should know about making money online is how to approach writing about their chosen niche.

What type of content goes hand-in-hand with all three monetization methods I’ve mentioned?

Information. Information that gives genuine value to the reader.

Why Information?

People log onto the internet for entertainment, for community, and for information. It’s when they’re looking for stuff that falls into that last category that they’re most likely to be in “buy mode.”

If I’m playing Literati on Yahoo games, and there’s an ad up on top of the board, do you really think I’m going to click it? Of course not. Not when I’ve got seven letters that make up a word and, oh, there’s a triple word score open!

But, if I’m on the web looking for information on how to save money selling my house, I’m a prime candidate to click on an ad for a service that lists houses FSBO in my area. And if that ad happens to show up on an article you wrote on “How to Sell Your Home FSBO,” you just made the money from my click. Congratulations.

You can break “information” down even further (how-to articles, news, product reviews, etc.), and in future posts, we’ll look more into which specific types of information writing work well with various monetization methods.

What About Fiction?

My fiction-writing friends out there may be wondering if I’m saying you can’t make money from selling entertainment.

You certainly can, but the road is a more difficult one. I recommend creating freedom and financial independence with information-based writing first. That will give you the time for writing and marketing the Great [insert adjective for your country] Novel later.