Write ten short articles a day to earn over R10 000 per month in 3 years time

Okay this is based on the fact that I currently have about 300 web or blog pages and am earning about R300 per month from Google Adsense. I cannot guarantee that 10 articles a day will earn you over R10 000 per month in 3 years time, but, it doesn’t seem impossible either. If you’re keen to earn over R10 000 (that’s about $1 362) per month from home within the next three years, and are prepared to try write 10 articles a day, of say 300 words each, hear me out! It’s what I’m aiming at anyway. UPDATE! (27 Sept 2010) Rather make those 300 word articles 400 words and double your money (or get to R10 000 in a year and a half instead of in 3 years) – or, write just 5 a day instead of 10 a day (and still take 3 years.) It’s still early so I’m really just guessing at the future – but, currently, Helium is giving me the same average earnings as my own sites are. I’m making just one article (each article) work for me in more than just one way.

My oldest website is already 2 years old, so why am I not yet earning R7200 per month from Google Adsense through my article writing efforts? Simple: I haven’t managed to write ten articles a day yet, every day, so it’s going to take me longer. Why haven’t I managed to write ten articles a day yet? I’m also busy with other freelance work to keep the money coming in until such time that my articles and Google Adsense alone can bring in enough money.

So, you’re keen to try? What is it that you need to do?

Firstly, realise that this article is quite long, but if you’re serious about making money online, really serious, read every word, and when you’re done, read through it all again. It is also important (if you’re really really serious about making money at home) to follow the red links to other articles that will help you learn more – you need to perhaps go get yourself a cup of tea, come back and make yourself comfortable. Also, I’m not selling you anything – this is free advice – use it.

Well, you need to have Internet access and a computer at home, and lots of time to write many articles. Then you need a place to put those articles online, and you need to have a Google Adsense account.

But I’m not an expert writer…

If that’s what you’re thinking you may as well stop reading right now, because then you’re not keen to even try. You’re not going to earn money sitting around – you have to work for money. And if you can write an email to a friend, that is legible, you can write articles. If you do enough hard work for a few years, though, you may very well be able to sit around at least a bit thereafter, because your articles will always be there online, with the Google Adsense ads next to them earning you some money whenever people visiting your articles click on those ads!

Okay, you’ve decided to at least learn more? Read on!

Where do I get this figure of over R10 000 per month in 3 years time from?

I currently have 336 web or blog pages. I’m not including the three free Blogger blogs Tony and I have, as they don’t get as much traffic as my other sites, or earn me much at all, not yet anyway. I spend much more time on my other sites – the ones where I pay for hosting and domain reigstration. This is two websites, where the one website has four WordPress blogs attached to it (this WordPress blog you’re on now is one of those four), and three other self-hosted WordPress blogs too. I’m currently getting a R1000 cheque in my postbox from Google Adsense every three months. So that’s roughly R333 per month. That means that, on average, each web page is earning me R1 per month. Okay, things are far from exact, and some pages will go a whole month or more without getting a click, but others get a few clicks per month and earn me more than R1 a month.

My 4th R1000 Google Adsense cheque is due to arrive in mid October – three months after the third one arrived. The third one arrived three months after the second one. Photo of me and my third Google Adsense cheque. The second one arrived three months after the first one. It took me a year to get to my first one though. I noticed that the more pages I added to my sites, the more I earned from Google Adsense, and I tried to make a greater effort at adding more pages more frequently, and was and am pleased with the results. I just wish I had more time to write more articles more frequently, but don’t (have more time) just yet, as am working as a freelancer in the meantime, to make ends meet.

If you’re worried about your high school children struggling to find work when they finish school, let them start a blog now already, so that they can slowly start building up content for their blog, and earning from the ads on their blog – you can put everything in your name, until they’re 18.

Hm, I’ve branched off the main (recent) topic of how do I come up with the R10 000 figure in three years’ time – see how easy it is to write, so don’t tell me you can’t – just think out loud, through your fingers onto the keyboard, and before you know it, you’ve got an article – this one is considered quite long – you need to write only about 200 to 300 words and you’ve got an article! Longer ones do seem to get more traffic, I’ve found, at least, so if some of your articles end up being a bit long, so be it!

The above is 865 words – surely you can manage 200 to 300 words?

Ok, R1 per day average per article (or web or blog page), and 10 articles per day in a month is 300 articles in one month (and R300.) In a year that’s 3600 articles and R3600 per month. 3 years would be 10 800 articles, and R10 800 per month.

Okay, okay, there will be people who say I cannot predict the future or predict how many people will click on my ads each day, and this is true, so please don’t take my word for it that you’ll make this kind of money in three years’ time – all I’m saying is I’ve based this on what’s happened with me so far, and that I see great promise for this idea, and I’m certainly going to try and do it – I am already trying to do it and it frustrates me I cannot do it quickly enough. Perhaps you have more time to devote to a project like this – or are happy to also let it take more than just three years.

I’m excited at the prospect of what if I could manage more than 10 articles a day, and if I am also prepared to do it for more than three years, aren’t you?

Some people make a living from only blogging, and I’d like to be one of those people. Some people even make large amounts of money, only blogging, like John Chow. Watch the interview with John Chow below, where he speaks about how he makes money blogging.

Lisa Irby is doing quite well too, and offers great advice:

Another of Lisa’s videos about how she made nearly $6000 in ONE MONTH:

I know it’s hard work, but I’m not going to stop trying. Because this R10 000 per month doesn’t happen right away, I have to do other work in the meantime.

Still keen? Let’s get back to what you need to do, already briefly mentioned further up:

Internet access? check
Computer at home? check
Time to write a lot? maybe
Know what to write about? huh?
Know where to put my articles online? huh?
Got a Google Adsense account? huh?

Let’s start with that Time to write a lot? huh? and combine it with Know what to write about? huh?

This article on this same blog will help a lot To make money blogging what should you blog about? but I’d like to add to that: You can speed up the time you spend writing by getting somebody in the family to help you from time to time – a parent, a teenager, your husband or wife, your girlfriend or boyfriend. Also, where are your old school projects? Or your child’s old school projects? Each page of that old school project could be an article for you, that you just have to copy and type up – no thinking – or maybe it’s already stored on your computer or child’s computer from when it was typed up for the project. Please, if doing this, and you got the project information from the Internet in the first place, make sure that what was written for the project was written in your own words (or your child’s own words) as duplicate content is a no no when it comes to the Internet.

Why is duplicate content a no no?

The original article is the one that is given more power in the eyes of search engines like Google – yours may never get found! Okay, if it’s on your site, and people are reading another article of yours and then see a link to that duplicate one, they may pop over and read it too, but you have to think of other things regarding duplicate content too:

If people have already seen that article somewhere else, you lose credibility as a writer when they see it on your site or blog too. People don’t want to believe what you say if you come across as just somebody who copies other people’s writing.

Also, somebody took the trouble to write that original article, maybe even did a few hours’ research before writing it – and then you come along and just take it??? – if you get caught or fined for copying somebody else’s work, you deserve to be.

Now, regards duplicate content and also if you have a lot of pages on your site or blog, and people like to read your other articles too, and you get a lot of visitors, then sometimes duplicate content can be okay – as long as that duplicate content is your own, with your same name appearing near, above or beneath it. More about that later…

Ok, another method to speed up writing, besides using pages of old school projects is to use recipes from an old family cookbook of recipes passed down through the generations – that’s usually pretty unique content.

Yet another method of getting articles onto your own site more quickly – although this mostly suits sites that are already getting quite a bit of traffic – is to let people write articles for you! Why would they want to? They can advertise their services or products for free! You get quick free content in return, more content for search engines to find, and more eyes seeing those Google Adsense ads that are mostly related to the article on the page, and thus “invite” or “tempt” people to click them to learn more. Never ever click your own Adsense ads, or ask anyone to. This could spell big trouble for you – all your hard work wasted if you’re banned from having a Google Adsense account.

Knowing what to write about might be tricky at times – but perhaps you do know a lot about a wide variety of topics! What then? Just plop all your articles about a wide variety of topics all on one blog or site? Well, you can, and I’ve done it on some of my sites, but then I started to rather create a few niche sites. A niche site is a site that pretty much sticks to one main theme eg this Work at Home Jobs site of mine, and then some other sites I have eg my School and Stuff site.

It was sort of just by experience that I discovered niche sites seem to draw more traffic, and also learning which type of niche sites do better than others – well, it almost goes without saying that computer game sites do well, but I don’t know too much about that and it would take a lot of time coming up with content for those sites, as I would have to do research first, and it also goes without saying that dating sites do well, and gambling sites too. But the content on my sites is family friendly, which I’d like to stick with, so I avoid those topics.

I started with a bit of a variety site (my first and main site where Tony and I offer our freelance services) and then added a blog to the main site, also covering a wide variety of topics.

Through checking my Google Adsense account, and also checking the stats of my sites, I discovered which pages were receiving the most traffic (visitors) etc – and it is this that made me realise I’d like to have a few niche sites too (some pages were/are getting a lot more traffic than others – one is my work from home IDEAS list page). This was before even seeing all over the Internet that, yes, it’s a good idea to have niche sites.

Right. Let’s move onto the Know where to put my articles online? huh?

There are free methods of putting your articles online, and Tony and I even use them from time to time, but we prefer putting our articles on our own sites, as have found these pages, owned by ourselves, get the most traffic. We don’t feel it’s because of the content on the sites (our own sites) but because we’ve seen that other people using their own sites for articles etc also seem to get a lot of traffic. Perhaps Google views these self-hosted sites as more important, but I can’t be absolutely sure about that – it just seems to be that way, perhaps, so I’m sticking with believing our own sites get more traffic – more easily, at least – what I mean by that last comment is that it is certainly possible to get plenty of traffic to your articles on other sites (not your own sites – or on free blogs like Blogger), but on other sites where your articles are, and from experience, to us it seems that then a lot more time has to be spent on marketing those other site articles online, than spending time on marketing articles on your own sites.) And of course, although we do market our articles a bit, we’d rather spend time getting more articles written and uploaded to our sites, than spend time running around trying to get traffic to our articles.

This blog of mine you’re on now, I hardly ever market and it’s getting a decent amount of traffic – seems like plenty of people want to work from home and are looking for ideas – so they type in search words on search engines like Google, and if some words match words in my articles here, and appears on page one or two of Google search results, voila, they click the link and come visit to learn some more. I seem to get more luck with my articles being found easily if they’re on my own sites. Once again, I will say I do have some articles on other sites, but I’m not too happy about some of the places they’re on and I’m sorry I’ve wasted time putting some of them there. They’ve earned me a little, and I won’t close my accounts there just yet, but, so far, the most earnings come from my own sites. I have more control over my own sites too – I can write what I like, even make a few grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes (although I mostly try not to!) without having to wait and see if a site accepts my article or not, plus I can place whatever ads I want on my own sites, wherever I want. These advantages do also apply to having a free Blogger blog – but I definitely find that my self-hosted WordPress blogs are getting more traffic than my Blogger blogs. Perhaps it’s because a Blogger blog is not a totally unique web address eg how many millions of blogs end in blogspot.com? I don’t know – I still like my totally free Blogger blogs, but I try to spend more time on my self-hosted WordPress blogs.

I know I said I wasn’t trying to sell you anything, and I’m still not, but need to mention that you can get a self-hosted WordPress blog through Tony and I – doesn’t even mean you have to choose us as you may find somebody who can host your WordPress blog for cheaper than we do, including perhaps a cheaper domain registration price (your unique Internet address eg http://onlinefleamarket.co.za – another of our sites.)

WordPress does also take a bit of learning, but once you’ve got it, you’ve got it – and there are free lessons available on the Internet.

You can learn more about our WordPress blog hosting service here. That article does also have links for you to go get a totally free Blogger blog if that’s the route you’d really like to try first. Also see Getting a Website or Blog: Where do I start?

If going the totally free Blogger blog route, this article will help:
Using totally free Blogger as a way to earn an income

Earlier I said I would mention more about duplicate content – how sometimes it can work, and it relates to the current topic of where can you put your articles online:

I belong to some online article writing sites and bookmarking sites. A bookmarking site is pretty much like Twitter – post a link and very brief description about the article, and hopefully people will click the link and visit your site – but you don’t earn anything directly from Twitter – on Xomba and RedGage it is possible to earn a bit from bookmarking your articles on those sites – on RedGage you add “links” – the link (website address) and a brief description – if people click the link you get a visit to your article – but what also happens there is if people just view that RedGage page that has your link on it (not the page where many links etc are displayed – but if they follow your particular one to it’s own page on RedGage) then you can earn a very small income from pageviews of that particular RedGage page of yours – it differs, but I’d say it’s roughly $0.01 per 20 views. The further advantage then is of course if visitors actually click the link because they want to learn more, and they come see your article – where you will have ads on the same page, perhaps links to more articles of yours, perhaps brief info about wonderful services you offer, or brief info about wonderful products you sell. It’s not a lot of course (the RedGage view earnings), but for example I’d rather bookmark my articles there than on Twitter if I had to choose just one of the two. Plus I can also upload photos to RedGage and earn from views of them too. Do you get paid for views of your FaceBook photos?

I’ve branched off the topic again! Duplicate content can sometimes work, if the articles are your own duplicate content, and you know how to make each article work for you: I also recently joined Factoidz. You can upload articles there that are a minimum of 400 words – they have to be relatively good though, and error free, otherwise they get returned to you for revision, or for you to try put them somewhere else – why not on your own site then, or somewhere else, so no harm in trying Factoidz. Just keep your username the same on all articles you write – I find it easiest to just use my real name – create, maintain and popularize your brand – your name. What I like about Factoidz is that just like RedGage, you can earn a few cents from pageviews of your articles (views of your articles.) You can also earn a bit from just being active on Factoidz. – uploading articles, commenting on other people’s articles, etc.

Now, the other thing I like about Factoidz is that once an article has been there for 30 days (an original article appearing nowhere else online) you can republish it elsewhere. I’ve done this with a few – some I put on Constant Content – another article writing site, where you can sell your articles! I studied Constant Content a great deal first, as heard it was difficult to get articles accepted there, but I think because I spent a lot of time studying the site first, I managed to get lucky – and even sold one of those articles the very next day for $17 (I get about $11 after they take their commission.) I chose to sell it with usage rights only, which means I can sell it again and again. Because I’m selling it for usage rights only, I can also put that same article on my own site. My point here is, that from just one article, I can earn from pageviews of it on Factoidz, I can sell it again and again on Constant Content, and I can earn from Google Adsense clicks next to it on my own site! Wow! It doesn’t end there either! I can bookmark that article on RedGage or Xomba – and earn from pageviews of my RedGage bookmark, and can earn from Google Adsense clicks next to my Xomba bookmark of it. Factoidz and Constant Content pays via PayPal – if you’re South African and you don’t yet have a PayPal account, don’t panic. I thought it would be difficult sorting it out, so kept putting it off – once I just decided to just do it, it was easy – I tell you exactly what it was I did, PayPal and FNB linking explained for South Africans here.

I wrote an article on HubPages – yet another article writing site – all about how I studied and joined Constant Content, a description of Constant Content, and how I sold my first article on Constant Content (all just this month.) If considering joining Constant Content, I really advise that you read this article first. It may help you not get your first article submitted to Constant Content rejected.

HubPages? I joined fairly recently too, and although I love the community there, and have earned a little from Google Adsense clicks next to my articles there, it takes quite a bit of work working at getting and keeping traffic coming to my articles there – I would rather do this on my own site – where I get to put ads where I want to, and don’t have to worry about articles not being accepted, or how many affiliate links I put in my articles, or how much I market the other freelance services I offer, or market my other articles.

If the above disadvantages about HubPages don’t bother you, then HubPages is perhaps a good place to add your articles to, where you can earn from Google Adsense clicks of the ads next to and between your articles. You may not feel ready to get your own blog or site (you may need to know a bit of html coding to manage your own website really effectively – a blog is easier), so if this is you, I would recommend starting with Xomba and HubPages.

Okay, although it involves Xomba too, we now move on to the Got a Google Adsense account? huh?

If you don’t yet have your own site or blog, and want to go ahead with making money online from writing articles, Xomba is a good place to start. You see, if you don’t yet have your own website or blog, you can’t really join Google Adsense. But you can if you’re already a member at Xomba. You give the Xomba address when you sign up at Google Adsense for your own Adsense account.

I would suggest joining Xomba and writing about 4 or 5 articles there – they only need to be minimim 150 words each – that’s nothing – and articles generally get accepted very easily at Xomba. Why I say write a few articles first, before applying for a Google Adsense account, is, although I’m not sure it applies to Xomba, if it’s your own site or blog address that you give when signing up to Google Adsense, you’re supposed to be getting a bit of traffic first, and have some content on your site or blog. If this is not the case, it’s easier to sign up to Google Adsense with a Xomba address. There are also step by step easy instructions on Xomba to help you when you sign up for an Adsense account – and further easy steps on how to link your Adsense account to your Xomba account. Remember that it’s not just short little 150 word articles you can add to Xomba, but also short little 50 word bookmarks, that you can not only earn from the Google Adsense ads next to it, but that can link to your other online articles (where you also have Adsense ads appearing.)

Once you have an Adsense account, that’s it – you don’t need to get a new account for each site you later create – you just add that site to your Adsense account – in fact you don’t even have to add the new site, to earn from Adsense clicks on your Adsense ads on the same pages of your articles – you need only add the sites or pages to your Adsense account if you want to go look in your account from time to time to see which sites or pages are earning you how much. To add Adsense ads to my WordPress blog, I go to my Adsense account, choose adsense setup, choose adsense for content, make the ad, and copy and paste the coding they give me into the area above or below my articles, or in the sidebar in a text widget I add. I am allowed three small link unit ads, and three (bigger) block ads per page. I can choose that the block ads be text or image. One cannot make choices about your adsense ads on sites like Xomba and HubPages. You just have to accept whatever they put next to your content, and also have to accept where exactly they put the ads.

Once you have an Adsense account having gone the Xomba route, you can join HubPages, adding your Adsense publisher ID there, to earn from HubPages too (when people click your Adsense ads there).

If moving on to getting your own blogs or sites, add articles, then when you know you’re getting a fair amount of traffic (50 visitors a day should do it) then add Google Adsense ads to your very own pages too. If South African, joining a site like MyScoop can help you easily see how much traffic your site is getting, if you’re worried about learning how to read the stats on your site’s server.

Although there is a lot for you to learn about marketing your articles, and about the Google Adsense program policies and terms of service (you DON’T want to go to all this trouble and end up just getting yourself banned from having a Google Adsense account!), – you will also need to add a privacy policy to your own sites. They’re quick and easy to make (follow the link.) The most important thing to remember is to WRITE. Write as often as you can.

Once you have your own blog, realise that Google Adsense is not the only way you can make money from having a blog. It may be best to only entertain these thoughts when you have quite a lot of traffic as, from my experience, Google Adsense is one of the easiest ways to monetize a site, and to see decent results. Other methods take longer and don’t bring in as much, and you need a ton of traffic to have them be effective – you can also have other ads on your pages (check Google Adsense program policies as some are not allowed), but as said, they take longer to earn from than Google Adsense (in my experience.) I do also use Amazon, Clickbank, and Offerforge, but earn nothing or next to nothing from these places, even though my main site with its four blogs attached is currently receiving about 1000 page views a day. Maybe I need about 10 000 page views a day. Or, I need to write articles about the Amazon, Clickbank and Offerforge products I’m promoting.

Other ways to earn from your blog if it’s getting a decent amount of traffic is to obviously advertise services you offer, or products you sell!

Also, again saying only if your blog is getting a decent amount of traffic, other people will want to advertise on your site and you can charge them! I’m not referring to the content they give you when they want to advertise for free, like I mentioned further up, but I’m speaking about selling or renting them ad space, like a banner of theirs that can be placed on your site, advertising and/or linking to their own site, and they pay you for the privilege of having a link to their site on your high traffic site. I wrote an article on Triond about this – I don’t think I plan on wiritng more for Triond – it was a bit tricky adding that site to my Adsense account and drove me mad – that one (Triond article writing site) has to be added to your Adsense account unlike most of the others, to earn from Adsense. Plus the earnings are pretty dismal and I can only see earnings and traffic to those articles improving a lot if I spend night and day marketing my articles there. Then, when traffic dies down, spending more time on marketing all over again. One can also not moderate comments before they appear on Triond articles, and I get a lot of spam comments so have to check back regularly to go delete them. Here’s the article on one of Triond’s sites though, about renting or selling ad space on your site or blog.

Also remember that having a blog means you might get comments. You might get more comments if you can find the time to be friendly on other blogs, and leave nice comments there, related to what the person wrote about. They, or even somebody who sees your nice comment there, might visit your blog and leave a comment for you. All those comments add up, and provide even more text on your article page, for search engines to find! You will have to learn to recognize spam comments though, and not allow those to appear – you may even get more spam comments than normal nice comments – spam comments are when people don’t even read what you wrote, and just leave some silly comment and a link to their site. You don’t want your site linking out to rubbish sites – if your site is family friendly, you don’t want non family friendly links even appearing on your pages – as that’s text that Google can read, and may not like. You can’t really do too much about unsavoury type sites linking to your site (and Google understands that), but don’t link to these sites. Also see Can’t all you spammers at least get a little more creative?

While writing for your own sites – or other online sites, you may discover that you know more about a variety of topics than you originally thought you did. You discover that you enjoy this writing thing, and that you’re not bad at it! You can start offering a writing service (advertise it on your blog or site of course) or can join freelance sites like oDesk and bid on various writing projects. Here’s an article all about my experiences on oDesk. This article Freelance jobs available right now on another site of ours is a shorter article about oDesk and should give you a rough idea of how to go about approaching the idea of making it work for you.

Why am I giving all this information away for free, and not trying to sell it as an ebook or something? Well, gee, for starters I’ve tried to help quite a few, but although they sound interested – and are even struggling to find ways to earn an extra income from home, not many at all seemed to be prepared to do the work. Seriously, it takes work to earn money. I keep trying to help and maybe somebody will find the information useful, use it, and be happy about their income.

Well, if you are serious enough, and are prepared to work hard, please browse through our sites – there’s tons of free helpful information for you – you just need to read, and do. Reading a lot is just as important as writing a lot.

Another reason why I keep trying to help others earn an extra income from home or online, is that I’m South African, and things are not too “lekker” in South Africa right now. Although anyone in any country can use the information I’ve given above, it’s really geared towards South Africans.

I don’t have the money to leave South Africa and even if I did, I’m not sure I want to. This is the land of my birth and I want to stay here. I also don’t have enough money to afford all the security that would make me feel a little safer, and, struggling to earn an income from home as a freelancer, I don’t have the time to homeschool my kids – unless I slept maybe only two hours a night??

Crime is high, jobs are scarce. For people struggling to earn some extra money – or even find a job at all, I want them to know that it’s certainly possible to earn money online – if you only want to, and put in the work.

Now, coming back to not being able to afford to leave South Africa if that’s what you want to do – or wanting to stay in South Africa and be able to afford better security:

Working on your computer is a way to earn an extra income. If you do leave South Africa, you can continue working online from anywhere in the world!

You have enough money, want to stay in South Africa, but can’t quite afford the private schooling you’ve been thinking of for your children, or can’t afford to put aside enough money each month to ensure a good future for your children? Do some online writing for an extra income.

You have enough money because you have a good job, want to stay in South Africa, but want to homeschool your child yourself? You’d need to quit your day job for that, and will need to make some extra income.

If you’re not going to do anything about all this free info right now, the very next time you say something like “I need an extra income” or “I want to work from home” come back here, and go through all the info again. It’s all here, and on many of my other sites’ pages too. What to do. It’s not gonna happen if you don’t do anything.

Write, my friend.

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2010

ps, this article above is almost 6000 words long. That’s like almost twenty 300-word articles – and I managed that in one morning. Update – this 6000 figure was 5100 earlier today, but I’ve thought of other things to add to this article this afternoon – didn’t take me too long adding them though.

Perhaps not that difficult to manage ten 300-word articles a day? Hey, if you write 20 in one day, you can have the next day off!

pps, please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments – I will supply the answer right there in the comments – if I know the answer! or may be able to steer you in the direction of an article I’ve already written, or that somebody else has written, that may help you. Your question may even inspire me to write an article about it. See how having a blog can even give you ideas about what to write about!

ppps, I’m going to bookmark this article on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and, or course, definitely on Xomba and RedGage too. It’s the type of thing you should do with articles you write too.

pppps – note how I link to my other articles in the above article. You must do this too in your articles – it helps them get some extra traffic.