Are there any more online marketing tips that you should be applying to your business in 2012? Here is a final list of good pieces of advice that you can use to increase the results that you will be getting from your online marketing campaigns. As always, remember that these are just general tips and you can think up of your own online marketing strategies that will help you gain more from your online efforts.

• Take Advantage of Different Advertising Opportunities

One thing that you should do at the start of this year is to review the online advertising and marketing methods that you’re using and see if they’re bringing you the success that you wanted. While it’s always a good thing to keep doing what works well, there might be some additional online marketing opportunities that you might want to explore to see if they would fit in well with the type of business that you’re running, as well as your budget and online objectives. For example, you could use social media marketing, video marketing, classified ads sites, media buying, etc. Do some research on the different advertising methods and how they work.

• Create Both Short and Long Term Objectives

It’s important to have goals, but the term of these goals should also be considered. Make some goals for what you hope to do and accomplish now, within the current month. Then make some goals for the rest of the year. How would you want your business to grow? What other opportunities would you want to explore during the year? These are all good examples of what you could include in your long term online marketing plans.

• Don’t Forget to Protect Your Data and Have Backup Plans

Nothing can ruin a business like data loss. While this isn’t a marketing strategy per se, it’s more of a business survival tip and is included here because many small business owners and independent online marketers don’t really do. Remember to make backups of both your local files on your PC, as well as of your business website. Viruses, hacking and equipment failures could have a disastrous effect on any business. Having recent and up to date backups can help minimize the damage and get you back up on your feet faster than ever. Having backup plans doesn’t simply involve protecting data, however. It also means knowing what to do when something unexpected happens. For example, one advertising network that you’re dealing with could go out of business. Or an affiliate network that you’ve been running offers for could go bankrupt and leave its affiliates holding the bag. Have some backup partners and marketing options that you could fall back on if something goes wrong with what you’re currently doing. Being prepared for the unexpected is a very good strategy, whether it’s for online business or any other line of commerce that you may be operating in.

Previously we’ve seen some ways to get your ads on classified ad sites to stay there and also to make a maximum amount of money while minimizing problems. Here are some final tips on how you can run successful affiliate campaigns by using classified ad sites:

• Look at the other ads

When you want to put ads on Craigslist or any other classified ads site, the first thing that you would need to do is to take a look for yourself about how all the other ads in the section look like. Look at the titles, the formatting as well as the wording used in the ads. Do people post pictures? Do they post contact information in the ad? What words or expressions are used more often? These are all things that will help your ad look normal and make it less likely to be flagged or reported as spam. Also, you should obviously avoid making any outrageous claims in your ad to draw attention to it such as “Get a free house!” or things like that. If you do, it would probably be flagged as spam very quickly.

• Use a local IP

Classified ads sites such as Craiglist and Backpage are mainly designed for local people to post local offers. So if you post an ad in a city that is not yours, you will need to use an IP address that is located in the area that you are targeting. You might not need this for all the classified ads sites, however Craigslist is known to be very strict regarding this and your ads in many categories will not appear if the IP address that you are posting from is not local to the area. To solve this problem, there are various workarounds. You could use a proxy, or a VPN service that will give you an IP address in the area where you are intending to post your ad.

• Don’t mislead people or make false promises

Selling something from a CPA offer is one thing. However, deliberately misleading people by making false promises is another. Examples of this would include: promising someone a job if they fill out a survey, telling someone they are approved for a mortgage if they get a free credit report from your offer, etc. With some creativity, there are quite a few ways that you can promote CPA offers on classified ads sites without promising people things that don’t exist.

• Check the rules for the offer you are promoting

Many affiliate networks recognize that classified ads sites are an important source of traffic and are used by thousands of marketers. However, some may have specific rules as to what kind of ads can be posted, as well as the sites they can be posted on. On some offers, classified ad traffic may be banned altogether, while on some you are not allowed to direct link to the offer itself. In any case, make sure you check the terms of every offer you want to promote before starting a campaign.

Yesterday, we have seen some tips on how to reduce problems while advertising CPA offers on classified ads sites. You’ve seen some tips such as not using an autoresponder, not direct linking and also being creative in your ads. Here are some more tips for you which will help minimize instances of your ads being flagged or reported as spam:

• Don’t use a sales copy as your reply

You’ve probably seen what a sales copy looks like. This is what you get to see whenever you get on the home page for any Clickbank product, or any other information product that is sold through other channels. Sales copies are cleverly worded with words that are of different sizes, fonts, underlined, etc. Sales copy writing is a million dollar industry, with professional copywriters charging thousands of dollars for a single sales page. Sounds profitable and useful, right? Well, it may be good for a website, but using a “sale copy” tactic in a reply to someone who replies to your ad, or even worse, in your ad itself is pretty much a guarantee that you will get flagged or reported as spam. Don’t do it. It’s just not worth the effort. Even if most people will not flag you, they will simply pass by your reply, as it will look plainly obvious that you are trying to sell them something or are getting them to sign up for something.

• Personalize your reply

The person who replies to your ad has written the message themselves. You should too. Use their name in the message. Answer any questions or remarks that they have made in their reply. This will give the person who is reading your message more of an assurance that you are actually a real, human being and not some spam bot that is sending out automated messages to all those who reply.

• Don’t include your link in the first message

This is another useful tactic in minimizing the amount of times that your ads will get flagged down. In your first email, you will basically acknowledge what the person said to you, answer any questions, add some more information and then ask them to confirm that they are still interested in what you have to offer them. While some marketers may think that making someone jump through hoops to get to the offer is bad and that it will reduce conversions, this is actually not the case.

Yes, there are some people who will flake and not reply to you. Try sending out another message asking them if they are still interested. If they don’t reply, just drop them. The same people who will bail out at this time will be the ones that wouldn’t sign up for your offer in the first place. Plus there are also those who like to play “Internet Sheriff” and reply to some ads, only to see if there will be a web link that looks like a CPA offer included in the message you send to them. If so, they will flag your ad or report it as “spam”.

Even though it may have gotten more difficult in recent times, it is still possible to use Craigslist (and other classified ads sites) to promote some CPA offers, and there are still many merchants and networks which allow this kind of promotion. While these tips work for Craigslist, they will obviously be good for any other similar classified ads site out there.

However, many people report having problems, such as getting their ads flagged within minutes, or having their ads not appearing. Here are some tips that will help you get the most out of classified ads sites when used with CPA campaigns.

• Don’t direct link to a CPA offer

While this may seem pretty obvious, a lot of new marketers seem oblivious to the fact that if you put an affiliate link directly into your ad, you will get flagged down rapidly, or your ad will not appear at all. You basically have two ways that you can use to direct traffic from a classified ads site to an affiliate or CPA offer. Either you build your own landing page and register a domain for it, or you have people email you and then reply to them by email. The approach that you will use will vary depending on what you are promoting, but the second option seems to be the most popular and effective for the majority of CPA offers.

• Don’t use an autoresponder

An autoresponder is an email feature which automatically sends a reply with a pre-formatted message to anyone who sends you an email. Autoresponders have their value and are in fact extremely useful for some types of marketing. However, for classified ads, they are not a tool that you can use. Whenever someone gets an automated response to an email that they’ve sent, it automatically shows that something “spammy” is going on. Therefore, you are highly likely to get your ad flagged as spam very quickly if you use an autoresponder. I know that replying to emails personally takes time, but this is something that needs to be done if you want to have success. The task could be outsourced very cheaply as well. If you have to use an autoresponder (not recommended and we will get into more reasons later on) at least use one which is on a delay of a few hours and does not reply to emails automatically as soon as they are received.

• Be creative in your ads

There are certain words such as “make money online” which will get your ad flagged right away. Furthermore, avoid copy pasting ads that you saw in an e-book or in a forum post that details some money making method for Craigslist. These have a high tendency to get flagged right away, since chances are there are many other people who have used them before you. Therefore, the bottom line here is: the ad that you post needs to be creative.

Craigslist is a popular and free online classified ads site. While it certainly isn’t as popular as say Google or Facebook, it is still one of the most popular sites on the internet, with millions of users from all around the world visiting it. This has given online marketers a lot of ideas on how to monetize all of this traffic. Unfortunately, Craigslist is not what it used to be when it comes to internet marketing and you have black hat marketers to thank for that. What some people did went far beyond just spamming CPA offers to downright lying to people such as promising them jobs or mortgages if they complete a CPA offer for a credit report or a biz opp. As a response to that, Craigslist has upped its security mechanism and has even posted warning in many of its sections that specifically mention affiliate marketing.

But this doesn’t mean that is is completely useless to online entrepreneurs. There are a few ways to use it for your online marketing efforts. Here are some of them:

• Promoting your e-commerce site

If you have a website that sells merchandise, then you can still use Craigslist to promote it. For example, if you sell clothes or electronics in your online shop, then you can post an ad in the proper section of Craigslist and get some traffic to it that way. Make sure to post in the right section, or your ad will be flagged down rather quickly. Also, don’t post the same ad in different cities at the same time. While there is nothing wrong with a global e-commerce site posting ads in multiple cities, remember that Craigslist is not mainly aimed at internet marketers, but rather for small, local businesses to post ads in the city where they operate.

• Providing services

If you offer some services that can be done over the internet, then you can use Craigslist to get some business too. For example, if you create websites for businesses and individuals, then you can put an ad in the right section to promote that. There are plenty of services that you can do over the internet and have your clients pay your by Paypal or another payment system. Some examples include: translation, writing, graphic design, flier/advertising design, promotional video creations and a whole lot more. If you want to appear more professional and therefore more trustworthy when providing these services, you can always create a simple “business” style website that gives details of what you do and your prices, as well as get a toll free phone number to get your clients to reach you. You can get one for a few dollars a month and then forward it to your cell phone, or just leave it to always go to voicemail. Here’s a tip to get more sales: put a special discount or coupon code in your ad and tell readers to mention it when they order.

If you want to make a full time income online, there are plenty of business models to select from. Of course, it is possible to earn some decent money by providing services to others, such as doing web design, writing articles, sales copies, etc. However, there are some things that you can do to make a full time income without spending all day actually doing the services.

What you can do is to outsource the actual service creation to other workers that you can find on classified ads sites, freelancing sites as well as forums. If your business gets really big, you always have the option of actually getting a physical office and hiring a full time staff.

Here are two business types that you can start:

• Web Design Agency

A lot of small and local businesses right now are getting online and would like to have a website. The thing is, very few business owners have the skills to create a good looking website and many of them do not want to spend the time it takes to learn how to put one together. This is where you come in.

All you need to do is to put together a team of a few freelancers that specialize in web design. It is always good to have people with diverse skills on board, such as one who specializes in blogs, while another one that does flash websites, etc. Basically, you would get clients to pay you for a website. Let’s say you charge $100 per site and pay the freelancer $60 for their work. You would then pocket the difference.

• Digital Marketing Agency

Plenty of business owners are also realizing the potential that the internet has when it comes to attracting new customers. This is where you will be helping them. You can offer a complete marketing package to small businesses, which would include optimizing their website for SEO, building backlinks, creating articles and uploading them to directories, creating and managing social media pages, putting up ads and listings in business directories and classified ads sites, managing their ad campaigns on PPC and media buying platforms, etc. This can be a very profitable business model, as there are plenty of local businesses that would like to advertise online, but don’t really know how to.

Getting Clients

Remember that most of your clients aren’t really up to date on the whole internet marketing scene, so advertising on IM forums is not really the best idea. It would be better to advertise in local classified ads sites, business directories, as well as in local businesses. Doing direct mail campaigns as well as calling up local businesses can sometimes yield quite good results, although these methods of advertising are a bit more expensive and time consuming for you. However if you do great work at competitive rates, you are likely to succeed in building a full time income.

When we talk about internet marketing, many people instantly seem to think that it is related to affiliate offers and building a website to host some Adsense ads. Sure, these things are what many people do to earn money on the internet, but they are not the only components of online marketing. If you have a local business, you can use the internet to draw more clients and above all, to get your business known in the community. There are various options for you to use to get the word out. Yesterday, we have talked about local SEO and your options for doing it. But search engine traffic is not the only way for you to get visitors to your website and clients for your business. Let’s examine a few other ways to get what you are looking for.

Getting Traffic

Whether you are pushing affiliate offers, or have your own, physical small business, you want traffic to your site. Traffic simply means visitors that look at your website. There are many ways to get this traffic: SEO (which we talked about yesterday), online classified ad sites, social media sites and targeted media buying. We will explore these one by one to see what the advantages (and sometimes drawbacks) are of using these methods. That way, you will be able to make a decision on how to advertise your business online.

Classified Ads Sites (Craigslist, Gumtree, Backpage, Kijiji and dozens more).

There are various sites which let you place a classified ad, which is similar to what you would see in a newspaper. There are some main, worldwide sites such as Craigslist, but there are also some local sites which could be geared towards people in your locality. For example, in French Canada where I live, the website Annonce123.com is very popular with people and attracts a lot of local traffic.

In order to maximize your chances of success and to take the highest advantage of the sites it is recommended that you:

• Post on all the sites. That’s right, both the national sites which have a section for your city and the smaller, local sites (if present in your locality). Posting an ad on these sites is free and takes 2 or 3 minutes. Remember, even if you only get 10 views a day for your ad, one of these viewers could be your next biggest customer. Say if you own a car rental place, the viewer could be a diplomat from Monaco on a temporary assignment in your city, who will rent your most expensive car for 6 months. Think of the money you will make with him. Sure, this is rare… but you never know… and if he doesn’t see your ad, well he never know your car rental business existed and use a competitor instead.
• Make you ad look interesting. Your ad should stand out and be engaging to the users. Thus, use a good title and also, make sure that you use proper spelling and grammar in the ad. Believe me, it helps.
• Use the “featured” or “upgrade” options if possible. Many sites, for a small fee of (varies from $0.50 to a few dollars) will let your ad be “featured”. This means that it will be either on top of all the other ads, or will have highlighting that will draw attention to it. If you have a few dollars to spare, use this option.

Tomorrow, we will examine social media sites and how they can be useful for marketing your local business on the internet.

When you are looking to advertise online, you will find that there are plenty of ways to do so. But one complaint of many internet marketers is that they don’t have much of a budget for their marketing activities. But this is not a problem if you are serious about succeeding online. There are plenty of ways for you to get the word out about your website without you having to pay anyone. Sure, it will take a bit more work on your part, but the results will definitely be worth it. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Article Marketing

One of the most famous ways to get the word out about your business, product or website. All you have to do is to write articles which are related to your niche and include a link to your website either at the end of the article or in the body of the article (this depends on the rules of the site where you put up your articles). You would then submit them to various online article directories.

Video Marketing

Video marketing means creating videos about your business and then uploading them to popular video sharing sites such as YouTube. Users will then watch the videos and have the opportunity to continue on to your site by clicking a link if they like what they see. If people really like your video, there is always the possibility that they will share it with their friends, who will then share it with theirs, etc. This creates what is called the “viral effect” and means that your video could potentially be seen by millions of people everywhere.

Social Media

Social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook are being used by millions of people from all over the world. Creating a presence on these sites for your business is an excellent way to get visitors to your site. Remember, the traffic is already there on these sites. All that you have to do is to capture it.

Classified Ad Sites

These sites function in a way similar to newspaper classified ads, except that they are more flexible and powerful. On most sites, placing an ad is free. Certain sites allow you to include a link to your website, while others charge you a small fee for each ad in order to do so. Classified ad sites are definitely worth checking out to see if they are a good marketing tool for your business. These cost much less than newspaper ads and are much more likely to generate traffic and customers for your business than print advertising.

This is just an overview of ways that you can use to market your site. If you want to succeed in the world of internet marketing, you definitely should get familiar with them. Remember that these aren’t methods only used by “cheap” or small time marketers who can’t afford other ones. Even successful online businesses that make millions each year use them, so why shouldn’t you?

Now that you know how to find a virtual staff, it is time to go forward and to actually set up your business in an efficient way to take full advantage of the opportunities that having a staff to help you will provide.

There are basically two things that they can be helpful for. Either by helping you with your own internet marketing efforts or by providing services to other internet marketers.

Let’s say that you are an affiliate marketer that is pushing Clickbank ebooks. You can use your staff to do certain things, such as writing articles that you will submit to article directories, building landing pages for you, building backlinks, etc.

You can also provide services to other internet marketers and business owners as well. This can be done by simply applying the “Buy low – sell high” concept that nearly any business in the world uses. Now say you own a landscaping company. You would charge the client a certain rate for landscaping services, which would factor in the cost of materials, operations and wages for your employees. You would then picket the difference as your profit.

The same thing can be applied online as well, and doing so actually is more advantageous in many aspects than running a “traditional” business for many reasons. First of all, you won’t have much overhead, as you don’t need a physical office from where to run your business. You can run everything from home… or anyplace that has a computer and internet access, for that matter. It’s that simple.

All you have to do is to find clients that will pay you for your services. This can be done by putting up a thread on internet marketing forums or on classified ads sites that will attract customers who will pay for your services. You will then outsource the work to your virtual staff and pay them a lower price than what the client is paying you and thus pocket the profit.

Say, for example, that a client is paying you $6 to write a 400 word article to promote their website. You would then pay $3 to the outsourcer and then pocket the profit. While this may seem like just a few dollars a profit, if you get larger products and many new clients you can make a lot of money by outsourcing services to your staff members.

One of the best things that you can do with this method is to basically do a combination of both providing services for others and using your virtual staff for your own marketing efforts. That way, you have two streams of income at any time.

Now, how do you make sure that all your operations will run smoothly and that the staff that you hire will be the very best? Join in tomorrow for more information about how to ensure that your staff members will be capable of doing the job and how to avoid common scams.

You aren’t required to be a SEO expert to understand the fact that in order for your website to go up in rankings on Google, you will need to have lots of quality backlinks. These are essential for anyone who is trying to get more traffic through organic search results. While building enough backlinks to have an effect on your traffic can take some work and requires patience on your part, the results will be well worth it. A question that is often asked in webmaster and internet marketing communities is how to get more backlinks for your site. There are many places that you can get backlinks to your site. Here are a few examples:

Article directories

These are sites where you submit an article that is related to your niche. Depending on the rules of the article directory, you can either include links inside the body of your article, or in a signature box at the end. This will help you get traffic in two ways. You will create backlinks to your site and will get some traffic from people who read the article and then click through to your site. Search engines hold article directories in high regard, so they are an essential tool for you to use in your search engine optimization efforts.

Blog comments

On many niche blogs, you can leave a comment after reading a post and include a link to your website. It is important, however that you do not simply spam comments and actually write something useful. Also, make sure that the blog you are commenting on is related to your niche to give you the maximum quality backlinks.

Classified ads sites

Here again, you can get traffic in two ways. Either from the increase in search engine ranking due to your backlinking efforts, or from the people who will see your ad and click on to your site. Not all classifieds sites allow you to insert links in your ads, so check beforehand. Some let you post a link if you pay a small fee.

Video sharing sites

These are places such as YouTube and Dailymotion, where you upload videos for other viewers to watch. Creating your own videos and uploading them is a great way to get traffic from video sharing sites. But a fact that a lot of people forget is that you can also make use of these sites in order to get backlinks as well. Many sites allow you to place a link back to your sites in various places, such as on your profile, in the description of videos that you upload, as well as in comments on other people’s videos.

Remember, backlink building is an activity that will boost your traffic, but it has to be done gradually to have the best results. If done correctly, you will soon notice that your site is increasing in position in search results for your desired keyword and that you are getting more visitors from search engines.

When you start your own web marketing agency, one of the most important questions that you will ask yourself is: how do I get clients? After all, without any clients for you to do work for, you won’t be making any money. There is also another thing that you need to take into consideration: how much will you charge for your services.

Getting clients is not as difficult as it may seem at first. You basically have two options: either you can have people come to you or you come to them first and offer your services. In order to maximize your chances of success, it is recommended that you adopt an approach that would combine both concepts.

Having people inquire about your services means that you need to advertise in order to let others know about your business. You can use a variety of methods to do so. For example, you can optimize your website for certain keywords such as “internet marketing (your city)” or “web site creation (your city)”. This will allow it to be found more easily on search engines. Targeting “local” keywords means that you will be facing less competition as you will only be competing against web marketers that are located in your area and not around the world.

You could also combine your SEO efforts with PPC campaigns on both the search and content networks to see if this gets you results. Of course, you should also use free or low cost advertising methods that are highly effective. Posting on classified ads sites under the “business services” section and including your agency in online business directories is highly recommended, as many of your clients might be looking at those places if they are in search for someone who could start or improve their web presence for them.

Another thing that you can do is actually contact business owners to see if they are interested in your services. Of course, this requires a bit more effort than simply putting up a web page and some ads. You will also need to deal with rejection quite often. However, when you do direct marketing, this is all part of the game and simply something that you have to live with.

To accomplish that, you first need to make up a list of potential clients who look like they could use your services. Here again, there are numerous ways to make that happen. Check out online classified ads sites for local small businesses, such as hair salons, car dealers, plumbers, cleaning companies, etc. Do they have a website? If so, does it look like it was made by an elementary school kid for his computer class? Then you can offer them to redesign the site and make it look more professional and attractive. Even if they do have a site, you can still contact them and offer to promote it for them so they get more traffic and thus more customers. Another possibility is to print out a nice pamphlet with details about your offerings and send them to local businesses in your area.

Starting your own web marketing agency and acquiring clients who will pay you for your services is not as difficult as it seems like in the first place. You can start this with just a part-time, one man operation and then scale things up when business starts picking up later on. Now we’ve already covered the basics on what you need to get started in the previous post. It’s now time to actually put things into action and get going.

First thing you need to do is to build your website. Just a simple one will do, all you actually need is to describe the services that you are offering as well as give customers your contact information to get in touch. Putting in a simple contact form works well too.

Now some of you may be wondering here: what kind of services will you have to offer? The short answer would be everything needed for a business to maintain an online presence and make profit from it.

The first thing you would need to do is to offer basic web site creation. If you are experienced in building multimedia, flash websites, then you can offer that too. However, all that is really needed is the ability to create a functional website for a business that will showcase their products/services, give background information on their company, and allow customers to contact them. You can either opt to host it on your own hosting account (it’s better to use reseller hosting, so that the client can also log in and make changes to their site). Or you could have the client sign up for a web hosting plan with your affiliate link and manage their own site after that.

What you also have to offer is web promotion services. How will you make this happen? Easy. You will need to offer a combination of various ways to attract traffic to your client’s site. Here are some:

Classified ads

Very simple to do and practical. A lot of small, locally owned businesses use these sites to advertise online. All you would have to do is post ads on a regular basis for the client, based on their specifications.

Social networking

Here, you will create a social media page for your client. Again, nothing complicated. All you would need to do is create a page with information about what they do, their products, current promotions that they are running, etc.

SEO

Optimize your client’s website so that it gets a decent rank for relevant keywords. Depending on competition in the niche that they are in, this could vary in difficulty from easy to quite hard. Follow best practices for SEO, create and upload original articles to high traffic sites which have a link back to their site, etc.

Paid ads

You could also create a pay per click, or media buying campaign in order to attract traffic to your clients sites if you are experienced in this method of advertising. You will simply charge them a bit more than what you are spending on advertising to make profit.

Now you have seen a few ways to find work if you want to become an online article writer. The main places where you can find work are internet marketing forums, article writing sites and freelancing sites. Even if those are the main places to get some work, they are not the only ones.

You can try searching for article writing work on classified ads sites such as Craigslist, Gumtree and Backpage. Although it is not guaranteed that you will find something there, if you do it will more likely be long term projects rather than just people who seek to order a few articles. This can work out to your advantage, as you will then have some regular clients who will pay you for your writing. Some of them could even offer you full time work for many months in a row.

Another way to find work is simply by networking with others. By participating in various online marketing communities, you will make contacts who could offer you some projects if they need content written for their sites or introduce you to someone who does. In the internet marketing industry in general, networking can be very profitable for you. Just because you are self employed doesn’t mean that you can’t share ideas and information with others in the industry. Networking will also give you the chance to learn new things or find additional sources of income that you wouldn’t have discovered on your own.

Now that you have some ideas on how to find some projects to work on, you are probably wondering about some ways to increase your earnings from freelance writing. The first thing that you need to keep in mind is that the amount you can earn will increase gradually. While it is possible to make a full time income from article writing, it may take a few weeks or months before you are able to reach that level.

Here are some tips to maximize your profits:

Always do the best quality work and follow the instructions of the clients. By doing so, you will increase your chances that they will either give you repeat work or recommend your services to one of their friends or business partners that could use them.

Respect deadlines by submitting your work on time. Believe me, there is nothing worse for a client than to have a service provider not complete a project by the time they need it. Clients don’t want to hear excuses or be left wondering as to whether you are actually going to complete their order or not.

Seek out long term partnerships and projects. These tend to pay more in the end as you will be spending a lot more time actually writing rather than searching for work all over the place. You are also more likely to get work on a niche that you are familiar with, which will be easier to write about than a few different articles on various topics that you are only vaguely knowledgeable about.

If you think you have what it takes to become an online freelance writer and want to get started, then read on. I will give you some advice on how to get started and to build up your income over time.

The first thing that you need to take into consideration when you get started is the amount of money that you will make. There are a few products out there which claim that you can make $150 – $300 or more each day by writing online. This claim is similar to those of websites that claim you can make $500 a day pushing affiliate products on Google Adwords. It is not a lie: yes, you CAN make these amounts. And yes, some people do make several hundreds of dollars each day writing online. However, it would be VERY rare for you to make such amounts from the beginning, unless you already have significant experience in writing (say in journalism or magazines) and have contacts that can get you high paying jobs. So don’t quit your day job just yet.

Much like in many “creative” industries such as cinema and graphic design, those who start out usually get the lower paying jobs. But how do you get some jobs to start your career?

Well, you basically have four choices where to look for work: online writing sites, internet marketing forums, freelancing sites and other sources such as classified ads. Each of them have some unique advantages and drawbacks. Let’s have a look:

Online writing sites.

These are places such as Textbroker, Helium and Constant Content. The way they operate is relatively simple: some allow you to accept orders from customers and start writing, while on others you will write articles about certain topics and wait until a client purchases them. Depending on the site that you work with, you may be required to either submit samples of your previous work or pass a writing test.

Advantages:

• Many of these sites offer a lot of work and writing on various niches.
• In most cases you will be sure that you will be paid as long as the work is done correctly.
• May allow you to get repeat orders from the same client.
• The pay per article is relatively decent when compared to other places to get work. However, bear in mind that this means you must submit articles which are always of the best quality.

Disadvantages:

• Payment is usually not immediate. Certain sites pay you every two weeks, some once a month.
• Could be difficult to get accepted if you do not have previous writing experience, as some places ask you to submit a CV along with a portfolio of your previous work.

Check back tomorrow for more information on where you can find online article writing work, as well as some advice on how you can maximize the amount of your earnings in a short amount of time.