Write for money online - Part 5 - Your own blog or website
By Xin Lu 8 comments
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Write by the trial In parts one through four I reviewed various revenue sharing websites. There are actually many more of these sites out there that share a part of their revenue as long as you provide the content. So in this final portion I will write about the pros and cons of earning from your own website or blog.
Pros
- You do not have to share your revenue with anyone! What you earn on your own website is all yours. This is probably the best thing about writing for your own site.
- You get to write in any format you want and write anything you want. You are not restricted to the formats of any revenue share site.
- You own all the rights to your writing and you can resell your writing to other sites or people that accept it.
- The look and feel of your own website is your choice. You can do anything with it to express yourself.
- The advertisements on your site can be chosen by yourself. You can promote your favorite products.
- You get to see where your visitors are coming from.
- You can use your writing to build a brand for yourself.
Cons
- It takes time and patience for you to build traffic to your own blog and monetize it properly. It actually took me about six months of blogging before I saw a single cent. Basically you need to put in considerable initial investment to get exposure.
- You need to have a little bit of technical knowhow to customize your website and place ads. Revenue share sites take care of the technical side of things.
- You may need to pay some upfront costs for web hosting or domain name registration. These costs are fairly minimal, but they might not be worthwhile for people who write only a couple articles a month.
- You will have to find advertising opportunities yourself. This also takes time, and many advertisers do not want to deal with small sites with very little traffic.
- You need to figure out how to accept payment and deliver advertisements
With that said, I think even if you have your own blogs you could still benefit from revenue sharing sites because you can promote your own websites through on the revenue sharing sites. You can use your revenue sharing sites' posts to build backlinks to your own website and gain search engine rankings, and also leverage the community of the revenue sharing sites to drive traffic to your own blog.
My suggestion is to try a bit of everything if you want to write for money online. Some programs are easier than others to start writing in, and different people have different amounts of success in each revenue sharing site. Some programs such as Squidoo or Hubpages require you to promote your pages as if its your own blog to be successful, and in those cases I would say you should just promote the same article on your own website and keep all the money. The bottom line is that there are a lot of opportunities for you to showcase your writing and earn a little bit of cash online, and it is up to you to find out what works for you the best.
If you missed the first four parts of this series. Here they are:
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Xin, as with anything if you do it with passion the money will follow. I think passion is key to making money in any endeavor.
-Nate
Yes passion is perhaps the biggest thing that leads you in the right direct and lines you up with money, but what attracts the money itself is giving value. The more value you can give, the more value you will receive. Put both passion and value together and you have a recipe for wealth.
If your blog is tightly tailored, there are other money-making opportunities as well. I started writing about manga (Japanese comics) almost four years ago because my kids were reading them and there wasn't much information about them on the internet. It took about a year, but the blog caught on and led to a number of paid freelance writing opportunities.
Last year I noticed that while there was a lot of buzz around comics for children, no one was covering that field either. I rounded up a group of writers and started a second blog, with me as editor. That blog did so well that the editor of School Library Journal invited me to put it on his site, which I did—for a monthly fee. This allows me to pay the writers, cover expenses, and still have some left over.
A third income stream is to sell review copies on E-Bay. I'm not very good at this—the money isn't that great, so I'd rather keep the comics or donate them to a library. But I know other reviewers who pick up beer money that way.
Great post! I for one would love to hear more about your journey over those first 6 months- from concept to execution to profit. I'm sure others would like to as well.
Keep up the great work
Ethan
ethanwaldmandotcom
Xin, keep up your great works.
Thanks for sharing these wonderful money making opportunities. I liked the second one.
Hi Xin,
Thanks for sharing these tips. Its true, there are various pros and cons to making money online from writing on blogs etc, but it is worth it in the long run. Just a matter of keeping with it, and sticking it out for the long term.
Matt
I've been looking at revenue sharing sites while trying to convert my already tailored blog into a money making hobby. I'm very proud of my work and have invested a fair bit of time, money and effort into it already. The prospect of making that money back (or possibly more) is really hard to resist but I don't want to "sell out" my hobby to someone like suite101 or Xamba. I just don't want to see my Internet identity and outlet for expression be shaped to suit someone else's format.
This article helped me re-consider revenue sharing sites. Perhaps I can use them as a tool instead of a host.