As a follow up to my how to make $100 in a day case study, I thought I should post some further advice on how you should go about writing articles. I know when I first tried to write an article on an unfamiliar subject, it took me 2 hours! So here are some great tips to bring that time frame down considerably (around 20-30 minutes should become easy) while still maintaining a high quality.
Always start with the title
If you were asked to write a 500 word article about acne for example, your head would start filling with lots of general ideas. Unfortunately most of these ideas are quite vague, so it doesn’t help you to write the article. If you took that subject and first created a title, everything could flow from there. So let’s come up with a title and call it Do natural acne treatments work? From there we start forming lots of ideas based around that, such as what are the common natural treatments, what are the alternatives to natural treatments, what products use only natural ingredients and so on. Use questions for these ideas, because then that particular section of your article has a purpose – to answer the question.Set out your article structure before you begin
Now that you have your title and have formed some general ideas as mentioned above, it is time to structure your article. If you use subheadings, it makes the whole task much easier because it feels like you are writing 5 x 100 word articles, and shorter articles always feel easier to write. For a 500 word article you would generally go something like –INTRO – 50 words
FIRST IDEA – 100 words
SECOND IDEA – 100 words
THIRD IDEA – 100 words
CONCLUSION – 150 words
So if we continue to use the natural acne treatments example, I might come up with the following:
INTRO – general introduction to the topic, mentioning what your article is going to explore (do natural acne treatments work?)
FIRST IDEA – what are the common natural acne treatments
SECOND IDEA – what are the alternatives to natural treatments
THIRD IDEA – what products use only natural ingredients
CONCLUSION – a quick recap of what your article has explored, then the final conclusion or answer to the original question posed in the title.
Researching your topic
Google is your friend. It’s important to note here that you should never copy someone else’s content, but it is fine to read it and even to rewrite it. So if we look at the first idea, I would simply type into google “common natural acne treatments” or “natural acne treatments”. I would then have a quick look through a few of the sites and start noting down a summary of the natural treatments that I found. Writing 100 or so words on that would become very quick and easy to do. Then I move on to the second idea and follow the same process.Final thoughts
That’s it! There is no real magic to it, but if you set yourself a structure to follow and break the article down into smaller sections or subheadings, you’ll have no trouble writing it. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you are able to do this once you have practiced a few times.Remember to start with the title so you give yourself a clear and concise direction. Then ask questions and google the answers and rewrite them into article format. Don’t think you can’t write because you don’t know the subject matter. The attitude of finding reasons why you can’t do something should be replaced with finding reasons why you can do it, or finding ways to learn how. Making money online is not glamorous and the thought that it is is actually a barrier between dreaming and doing little and actually getting in and doing the hard work and hours needed to succeed. So you can make $100 per day. Not huge, but you will have fine tuned your writing skills which can then be used to make your own websites or gain the experience needed for higher paying writing jobs. This can give you enough money to leverage into whatever path you wish to take.
Also worth mentioning is that if you are writing at iWriter, the requester will often give you further information on how they want it structured. While looking at a large list of special instructions may seem intimidating, it actually helps you to write an article exactly how they want it and get 5 star reviews for your work!