Writing for Profit

Once upon a time, a writer needed stacks and stacks of books if they wanted to have reference material available. These days, you can simply use internet resources to look up what you need to know.

There is really no excuse for misspellings, poorly researched articles and horrible grammar from writers on the internet.

If you’re having problems coming up with things to write and write about, it can help to read what other people are doing. The Letter Project is a project started by someonw who wanted to practice their letter writing skills.

Maybe you don’t care about writing letters, but perhaps you could do something similar? Maybe you want to really press yourself and offer to write a short story about the person (after they give you an occupation and a few other attributes)?

There are many variations on this theme that you could do, try to come up with a few more.

If you have your own website, you simply must have an FTP program to be able to upload things. If you don’t know how to use one and haven’t got one, I’ll explain how to use it later. But, for now, we’ll pretend that you know how to use it and want to know what plugins to add.

Plugins, for WordPress, are something that adds additional features to WordPress. Some are barely noticeable, some are indispensable. The ones I simply couldn’t live without are:

• Google Analytics Plugin - This one requires you to sign up for Google Analytics, but is really handy. You’ll be able to track who’s visiting your website and where they are coming from.
• WP ShortStat - This is another statistics program. It also shows you who’s coming from where, but it does not go into as much detail as Google Analytics does. It’s handy for a quick check, however.
• TD Word Count - Falls into the ‘you do not really need this, but it’s still kind of cool’ category. It automatically calculates how many words are in individual posts and how many words you’ve written total. This can be handy if you want to make sure you’re not getting too wordy and boring people.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags - This is for displaying any sort of video on your site. It’s not good to have your entire content be videos, you want some text, but every so often you may want to link to a video on various websites (YouTube, Google Video, IFILM, etc.) and this plugin makes it as easy as possible.
• Notable - This one has a bit of a learning curve attached to it. It’s not a simple upload, you have to edit your theme files. But it’s still handy, if you want people to be able to easily use various social bookmarks, for example to Digg your site. You can see what this does by looking at the end of my posts at the icons between my post and the comment area.

I think that does it for essential plugins.

Next time, I’ll explain FTP and how to use it to install plugins and new themes.

In my last regular post, I covered signing up for a webhost. However, setting up WordPress is so simple that I almost don’t have to tell you exactly how to do it.

If you’ve signed up for DreamHost, sign into your panel. You can do this from the front page or by going to http://panel.dreamhost.com. Once you’ve signed in, click on ‘Goodies’ and then click on ‘One-Click’ installs.

Make sure “WordPress” is selected to install (not ZenCart, phpbb or anything else) and scroll down.

For ‘install to’, make sure your domain name is selected. If you want to have more than one blog on your site, you could install it to a subdirectory (like a folder) by typing a name after your domain; something like ‘writingblog’. People will be able to see this, so choose carefully. If you only want one blog and you don’t plan on having anything else, just leave that part blank.

Now you’ll be asked which database to use. If this is your first site, you’ll be asked to create a new database. Type a name in the new database name field, any name (it doesn’t really matter, but you should probably pick something related to your future blog’s name).

For the hostname, you’ll have to pick a new hostname. ‘mysql’ is fine, though you might want to choose something more unique.

First user… this is NOT what you will be logging into your site with. Pick something unique and use a random password. By that, I mean a password that’s a random string of at least 6 letters and numbers.

Now click ‘Install it for me now!’ and wait for a few minutes.

After 5 or 10 minutes, go to your website. If you installed it to {yoursite}.com, go there. If you installed it to {yoursite}.com/{blogname}, go there instead.

It will tell you that you need to run install.php so click on that link. This is where you’ll be asked for your email and your blog’s name. Unfortunately, you can’t choose your login name. You’ll have to use ‘admin’. You’ll also have to use the randomly generated password (at least until you change it).

Go ahead and log in, start poking around.

Next time, I’ll tell you how to actually configure WordPress and some handy plugins you might be interested in.

I wrote about Associated Content (AC) awhile back as a way for people in the US to make money without actually having a website. This is still true, and they will still pay you for your articles. However, they have changed how they do this.

Instead of paying you just once for your submission, they now pay once and then they pay you per page view. The amount you get paid varies depending upon your keywords and the day. But, you are still earning off of things you’ve written.

It’s not a terribly huge amount (I’ve got $0.15 for one article that has less than 100 page views), but it can add up over time. The main downside that I can see (for now) is that you have to accumulate $15 total in this residual income to get paid. My article with $.15 will need approximately 10,000 page views before it makes $15. However, if you have many articles written and get a few popular ones it can really add up. If you have 100 articles that each get 100 page views, that’d be about $15 right there. Of course, if you have better or worse keywords, your results will vary.

The other thing about earning this money is that you have to keep submitting articles or they will deactivate/cancel your account. That’s not that bad, since you only need to submit an article every three months. I’m sure you’re going to be wanting to write a lot more than that, even without the residual income.