When you start trying to earn money by writing online, there are a lot of things to learn and keep straight. However, the most useful online writing tip to make money is the simplest.
Just write something.
Current and Fresh = Active and Used
When it comes to earning money from your website content writing, the reality is that you are going to need traffic. In order to get traffic you’ll want to build an audience, and get subscribers, and develop and email list, and a bunch of other things. You’ll also want to show up in search engines when people look for content on your websites. This is where writing something, anything, is so important.
There are literally billions of webpages out there. The search engines, whether it’s Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, or whatever else, all have to index and rank those pages for their search engines to work. They use programs called spiders to move around the web finding and indexing content. As you can imagine this is an intensive process.
In order to make it all work, the different search engines all have various shortcuts and algorithms that help them rank and index faster. Many of these tweaks are trade secrets, but one well known maneuver used by all search engines is noting the freshness, or current state of various websites and acting accordingly.
So, for example, if this website gets updated every day, the search engines will eventually decide that they need to come check and index new content every day or two. If this website gets updated monthly, they’ll notice that too. If it doesn’t really get updated at all for a while, they probably only show up when a new link points them this way.
More importantly, for most of your online money making endeavors, a fresh, or current website, ranks higher than older, stale content, and its links are more powerful as well. So, if you have a knitting website which links to your sewing website, the links from the knitting website are much more powerful if they are not considered to be coming from an inactive website.
Current Content = Powerful Content
While it is important that the content you are actually trying to get ranked highly, and that which you actually want to drive traffic to on all of your websites, should be the highest quality, best effort you can manage, the posts necessary to keep your page “alive” in the minds of the search engines can be less inspired. No one is saying your posts should be low quality. However, not every post has to be an amazing, inspired idea. Write good quality posts, just write about those less in-depth things as well.
In other words, just because you are a professional writer doesn’t mean everything you publish must be a 1200+, in-depth, treatise. Don’t forget, 300 words can be just as useful if you are making a quick point, or answering a simple question.
(Note: This assumes, as most things on this website do, that you are a good writer. A good writer’s efforts are often higher quality than a non-writers best effort.)
Keep your websites active by updating them on a regular basis, and watch your online writing portfolio increase its income and value. Otherwise, your ad revenue from AdSense and others will dwindle, not just on the websites you are not updating, but on those that depend on the incoming links from those sites as well.