Work Smarter Not Harder

Annalise Kaylor is a very successful freelance writer, editor and consultant. Here she shares her tips on how to “Work Smarter not Harder”.

One thing I have learned over the years of making money from home is that I have to work smarter, and not harder.  This is the main premise of of my eBook package, Writing Online: Making Money and Residual Income With Online Content . Today, I want to share with you one of the biggest mistakes I see made by people who are getting paid to write online: they write too “big.”

By “big,” I mean that they think too broadly.  For instance, let’s use eco-friendly home improvements as an example.  That category itself is HUGE!  There are so many ways people can “greenify” their home.  But, if you go to a popular site like eHow.com, and type in “green home products,” you get more than 2000 articles, many of which all talk about the broad category. Similarly, when I google “green home products,” I get more than 97 MILLION sites.  That is a lot of content for my article to compete with!  Not to mention, with such a broad keyword phrase, how would I ever get targeted ads to earn me money?

Rather than focus on a large category and write a general article, find smaller articles within the category.  For example, I know that low-flow toilets provide are an easy home improvement that allows people to conserve water.  When I google “low flow toilets,” I get 338,000 websites.  That isn’t horrible, but that is still a lot for my article to go up against, and I know I can do better.  So looking at the results from my low flow toilet search, I see a few brand names.  So I google “Toto low flow toilets.”  With only 17,000 sites, I have found a topic that I can write about that, with the right keyword use, can be competitive with other sites.  When I check on eHow.com, a site where I may publish an article about Toto low flow toilets, I get only TWO articles that match that phrase, and neither of them uses “Toto” in the title.  Now that I think I have found an article, I can check to see what sort of money I can earn from this, and which keyword phrases to use (two methods for this are described in detail in my eBook).

This simple exercise took me only five minutes.  I learned that the site that will host my article doesn’t have any competition for my primary keyword phrase.  I have found that the CPC average of the ads supporting the article is decent enough to spend the time writing.  But, most importantly, I have now found MANY article titles:

  • Toto Low Flow Toilets
  • Toto Low Flow Bidets (9,380 results in Google)
  • Installing A Toto Low Flow Toilet (4,060 results in Google)
  • Where To Buy Toto Low Flow Toilets (15,000 results in Google)
  • A Review of Toto Low Flow Toilets (10,700 results in Google)

All of these articles, if written with strong keywords, could appear on the first page of Google.  In this exercise, we took ONE “green home product” and turned it into five specific, targeted articles.  You could easily do this with Kohler low flow toilets, and many other brands.  Now, imagine how many strong, keyword targeted articles you could get if you applied this to each green home product area you had in mind from the start?

And as a final note, remember that people who search for something very specific, (i.e., “toto low flow toilet” vs. “low flow toilet”) are usually looking to buy. . And readers who are looking to buy are much more likely to click on ads. 

 

Annalise Kaylor is a freelance writer, editor and consultant specializing in content for the web. As a writer, her work has appeared across the United States in print ads for Whirlpool, Maytag, Home Depot, and Lowe’s, among others. She is also the author of the fast-selling eBook, Writing Online: Making Money and Residual Income With Online Content, which focuses on the many ways freelance writers can supplement their article-writing income, without a lot of extra work. She also blogs about the process at Write For Cash, so other aspiring internet writers can pursue their writing goals.