Can You Still Earn Money Writing Articles Online?

The idea of getting paid to write articles isn’t anything new. It’s been the first choice of many work at home enthusiasts for a long time, and for a good five or ten years, some great money could be made writing articles online.

Places like Squidoo, Hubpages, and other smaller “Web 2.0″ sites would pay people for writing articles, on virtually any subject, and publishing them on their platforms (called web 2.0 because you don’t own the site yourself).

It was pretty easy for anybody to get started this way, and after a few months’ work, you could earn a few hundred to a thousand dollars a month this way. The best thing was, you didn’t really even have to do any selling, just writing and providing information!

Of course, you could also make money as a freelance writer, providing articles for website owners too busy to write their own content, and other outsourcing needs, although this is typically harder for newcomers to get into.

Additionally, you could even make your own website and write articles on there, cutting out the middle man and earning a higher share. It was a longer term project, but with a much higher payout.

Generally those were the main ways of earning money writing articles.

What About In 2014? Can You Still Earn Money Writing Articles?

Things changed a lot in 2012 and ’13 though, and a lot of people are wondering if you can still earn money online writing articles.
You can, and in this article I’m going to discuss the various methods you can still use, and the merits of each.

Squidoo, Hubpages And Other ‘Content Farms’

I had a lot of love for Squidoo a couple of years back. I honed some of my writing skills there and earned a decent amount of money for a couple of months too.

Squidoo’s model was based on Amazon and Google Adsense earnings. When people visited Squidoo and bought something from Amazon or clicked a Google advert, Squidoo got paid. At the end of the month, they’d share that revenue with the writers who created the content.

The better your article was ranked on the Squidoo site, the more it would earn. One or two of my articles were earning me around $40 a month at one point. If you could get 10 or 20 of them, you’d be doing well!

As mentioned before, there were lots of sites like Squidoo, and a lot of people flocked to them to make money. This was ultimately what resulted in their downfall.

As more people joined, the general article quality declined. People were seeing that it was quite easy to earn money there, and that it was just a numbers game (the more you write, the more you earn), and ultimately it became a case of quantity over quality.

In late 2012 and as 2013 evolved, Google slowly gave lower rankings to articles on these sites, which meant less traffic, less revenue, and less earnings all round. The result? Sites started banning low quality writers, tweaking their rules more, and fiddling around in a desperate attempt to please Google.

These days, it’s becoming less and less worthwhile to write on sites like this, your content won’t get much exposure in search engines, so it won’t result in much earnings. It was fun while it lasted, but their time is done.

You can head there and write some articles if you want, but there are some much better options for you now.

Earning Money Writing In 2014 – What Alternatives Are There To Web 2.0?

Build a website and earn money from it. It’s the best way to make money writing articles.

Now before you run away, hear me out, I’m going to walk you through how easy it is to get started, and exactly why you MUST build your own website.

Here are five reasons why you should build your own website:

1. You get 100% of any income earned.
2. After you build up the site, it’s like your own online real estate.
3. You can write about your passions and become an authority in your category (also known as a niche).
4. It’s cheap and easy to get started, and you can earn as much as you want.
5. Once you’ve built up a website or two of your own, the income is virtually 100% passive.

Setting up a website is nowhere near as hard as it used to be, you can do it yourself (read more here), or you can pay us to do it for you (read more here), either way, it’s very much worth your while to do.

Here’s An Example

Let’s say you want to write about something you are interested in. For this example, I’m going to say Women’s fashion. So you get yourself a website set up, and just start writing about women’s fashion (or a particular aspect of it). You might think that there’s no way anybody would find your site, but over time they would.

By choosing a niche, you can carve out your own piece of internet and become an expert. I’ve started sites on Kettlebells for women, luxury shaves for men, watches, and even stop smoking, and all of them gradually became well known and appeared in teh first pages of search results in Google.

Once you’ve started getting traffic to your sites, there are almost unlimited ways you can earn. You can refer people to useful products in your niche (maybe they want to buy something related to women’s fashion), or you can place adverts on your site, anything!