10 Steps to Become a Paid Online Article Writer

Apply to Become a Writer Now

Author: Lemburis P Kivuyo

To be a successful writer you must love it, commit time to it and start writing something small and simple so that you can grow to a bigger experience

By becoming a writer you will be able to achieve your dream of being self-employed and make more money from that career than you can do with regular employment.

Pre Writing Stage

Do not quit your job so early to be come a writer, you can use your phasing out strategy by starting writing during your ample time and when you reach a commercial stage then you can quit the job.
Make sure you get initial training on how to become a writer. You can subscribe to budget live training online or video or ebooks. This will enhance and speed your grasping period while removing unnecessary silly mistakes that can cost you later.

Step #1: Plan Your Career

As now you want to become a writer, please put into plans. Figure Out your vision for the next 5 years in terms of what kind of a writer do you want to be. May be writing article to big companies and magazines. May be earning an income of more than US$8,000/ per month, may be owning a big blog/directory or website with million of visitors per month etc. Put an inspiring vision and that which is SMART = Specific + Measurable + Attainable + Realistic + Time Bound.

You should also narrate the business or activities that your are going to partake to achieve your dream. For each activity, associate with a measurable indicator

Step #2: Analyze Yourself Using Swot Analysis Tool

To know your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and Constraint that will affect your writing business positively or negatively is mandatory

SWOT analysis requires you to know the external and internal parameters that will make your writing business prosper or kill to death your writing career

SWOT long form is Strengths: Weaknesses: Opportunities: Threats:

Definitions and elaboration of terms

Strengths: capacities that you have and you have control of it, eg education, skills, experience, cash, tools like computers etc

Weaknesses: The capacities that you are lacking but you can have them if you want eg education, skills, experience, cash, tools like computers etc

Opportunities: These are situations, the things that make your business prosper just like strengths but they are not under your control but rather they are controlled externally. Eg Policies especially policies that govern the business on question weather within your country or within your market niche. If you are online article writer there are may be policies that favor your business within you country or other countries you plan to rich with your written articles.

Threats: It is the opposite of the opportunities. These are things, situation and especially policies that will kill to death your business. They are not controlled by you but rather controlled by governments of countries on question.

Step #3: Identify Opportunities and Threats Within Your Market Niche

Sometime this is difficult especially when it comes to markets outside your countries, but you should give it a try, you may come up with very useful findings that will make you make better decisions about the business you plan to undertake.

Finding the opportunities available will energize you to go more far to your career and you will be filled with more hopes and faith that your business will prosper as planned.

Please identify all found opportunities for future use within your implementation plan

Opportunities can be

Well establishes friendly policies
Affordable tools to use to effect your dreams
Training available
Enough scope of the market/consumers etc

Threats can be

Dangerous policies
Not available or very expensive tools
Training unavailability
Rigid market/consumers base etc

Grasp the opportunities and avoid or cope with threats

Step #4: Get Training and Use a Mentor or Coach

It is highly recommended to get some training on how to successfully and professionally write and share you article online and offline. This way you will safe time and avoid writing articles in a wrong way and therefore you may endup be a bad brand example. You can obtain training from local short or long course training institution, use online facilities and or attach and partner with an experienced writer.

Not all mentor/coach relationships require a fee to learn from their experiences and skills. Sometimes their blogs have full of constructive ideas, tips, tactics and tricks for you to learn from them for free.

Relate to someone whose story/ideas inspires you and find out if they offer coaching, mentoring, or products you can purchase and help you to improve your career.

Training from the coach or mentor shortened the learning curve dramatically and reduce indirect costs plus quickening the income generation timing.

Step #5: Prepare the Tools for Article Writing

Tools include website, application, software, devices etc.

Devices recommended is a computer whether in the form of a laptop or desktop loaded with office applications and related software

The website are those which offer training, posting and sharing of the articles etc

As you can see writing of articles doe not requires series of tools and hence easy to start

Step #6: Create a Sample Article Blog

Start by creating a free blog or a standalone blog where you can put you few sample articles written by yourself where you can showcase your experience and depth knowledge and talents.

Step #7: Start Writing for Free to Various Famous Portals

Start writing free article and syndicate to different famous directories, blogs, forums plus social media to gain popularity and increase traffic to your sample article blog created above.

Step #8: Get Organized and Manage Your Time

Whether you are employed or writing articles is your part time job, make sure you set your time to do this job and have a discipline on your time. If you will not do that, the dream will die and you will not become a writer for sure.

Step #9: Start Earning and Track Your Income

Subscribe to directories where you can get the job done. there are a lot of well paying directories when you write an article for their clients. Read below for the list of paying directories

Step #10: Asses Your Work

Visitors and readers reviews and rating

Ask your viewers and article consumers to say something about your work so that you can detect where you do well and where you have to improve. set your blog or article to receive comments and rating from visitors and readers. This very critical if you want to become a professional writer and also will help you get used with different critics.

Assessment and evaluation

Asses the way you do your business if it will lead you to your dreams and vision on set time. Create feedback mechanism for short, medium and long term improvement. To achieve this make sure during planning put your objective in short medium and long term. Use the set indicators to asses if the dreams and goals will be achieved as planned. Use also the consultant to conduct an evaluation capturing the set indicators and the actual achievement so far.

Way forward

Use the reviews, rating and assessment and evaluation to improve where you are weak and get better where you are good. Start from #1 above to improve areas found to be so weak and continue ahead for areas that you are doing well.

Apply to Become a writer now

Free Article Submission Websites

EzineArticles.com

Ezine Articles remains at the top of the pile by virtue of enjoying a PageRank of 6 from Google. The website has become a comprehensive source of articles available for your reading pleasure online. It is a great platform for marketers to post their content. The best thing about using Ezine Articles is that it is completely free to use. So, despite the high PageRank among article submission websites and the ability to add two text links per article, you don’t have to pay a dime for posting articles here.

SearchWarp.com

Search Warp is similar to Ezine Articles in the sense that it is also a free website for submitting articles. It also has a high PageRank, 5. The added advantage you gain by using Search Warp is adding 3 text links per page you upload to the directory. This makes it one of the top article submission websites you can use for free.

eHow.com

eHow has the highest PageRank among article submission sites, 8. When it comes to eHow, you need to provide content in the form of how-to articles which does restrict its use. The website already has over a million articles online. And on top of that, it’s completely free to use!

ArticlesBase.com

Articles Base is another popular article directory where you upload your articles for free and make them available to a large audience. With a PageRank of 6, Articles Base is as good, if not better than Ezine Articles. It is a great idea for you to publish your articles on both websites concurrently.

HubPages.com

Hub Pages uses a somewhat different approach to the common article submission websites you can use. While it is free to use and has a PageRank of 6, you can create ‘Hubs’ which are essentially themes or subjects based on which you upload content from time to time. This way you can create a hub for your niche and keep uploading articles for free.