Making Your Blog Pay
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If you write, you can make money online – or so you’ve probably heard. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it looks; you may make money, but getting rich, or even a living wage, is a little trickier. This article collects some ideas for your consideration.
First, you’ll want to make sure that your own writing is up to snuff. Sure, you can name any number of places online with deficient writing, and so can I for that matter. But bad spelling and grammar gets in the way of your message, and web users with short attention spans will not want to cut through the chaos. This should be basic, but some of the sites I visited while researching this article reminded me that it isn’t.
Beyond the actual writing, there are certain matters of formatting you might want to consider. Jennifer Osborne, writing for Search Engine People, completed a very good article called “10 Golden Rules of Blogging.” Much of it involves keeping in mind the special points that make writing for the web different from any other kind of writing. For example, there are things you can do to encourage more people to read what you’ve written, such as including buttons for submitting the article to social networking sites. And remember that short attention span I mentioned? You’ll want to cater to it with:
- Killer headlines every time that grab the reader.
- Blog entries that are short and succinct, perhaps 400-700 words long, and mostly substance.
- Posts that are easy to scan, with bulleted lists, bold text, and enough white space to allow the content to “breathe.”
- Pictures and images that help convey your point. Clip art does not look professional for a business blog, but an on-topic image, regardless of the topic, is not hard to find.
Osborne lists a number of important rules, and I recommend you follow the link. But even she admits, “They’re just table stakes to make it even possible to sell.” I’ll come back to that point later in this article. In the next section I’ll discuss a couple of firms that actually pay bloggers to write.
Next: Pity the Starving Writers >>
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