If you’re a struggling writer you’ll know how difficult it is to make money from your writing. Juggling home and job means chasing publishers has to be a sideline, which interferes with what you love to do: to write. After years of intermittent income from my writing I finally discovered my five-point formula. And this is what I do.
Point 1
Lay aside your novelist pretensions for a moment. Type into Google or any other search engine a phrase which you imagine people will be very interested in, concerned or preferably obsessed about. Ongoing concerns are in the areas of health, wealth and happiness, to give you a clue. So you could think of ‘how do I find a boyfriend?’ That returns 20m hits. Next put the phrase into quotes or inverted commas: 22,000. Are there sites in a shaded area at the top of the page and down the right side? Yes, dozens. These are paid-for ads: somebody spends money presumably because they’re also making some. So this is a good ‘keyword’, though with a little bit too much competition.
Point 2
To the phrase you’ve chosen add ‘affiliate program’. Now Clickbank.com will almost certainly appear along with other sites which sell ebooks through ‘affiliates’. You’re going to become an affiliate, without a website, without paying anyone any money; all you’re going to do is write. Sign up with Clickbank and/or any other publisher that takes your fancy. Then add your Affiliate ID to any program you’d care to promote. If the merchant asks for a website, make one like this for free at Squidoo.com.
Point 3
Write an article of about 300 words (usually anything between 250-2,500). Use your keywords which real people have used to try to find an answer to a pressing need: in our example, it’s ‘how do I find a boyfriend?’ This is a very good title for your article, and make sure you use the phrase again in the first paragraph, and maybe later in the article too. You need to add a ‘link’ from your article to your merchant’s sales page so that if a sale is made the merchant will know it came through you; the article sites will tell you how. If you know as much about finding boyfriends as I do you’ll need to find information: that’s where the sales pages of those selling the e-books come in very useful. Just be sure to change the wording!
Point 4
Google ‘free article submission’. Submit your article to one of the article sites – making sure your link is included. All the sites have their own rules about how, where and how many links you may include. Write another article on the subject, varying your wording so it will count as ‘original’ content. Write maybe 10 of them for different sites.
Point 5
Let everyone know about your article so they go and read it. This will help push it up the rankings. The higher up the rankings, the more people are likely to click on it. The more people who click on it…you get the idea, I hope. Eventually somebody is going to follow your link, hit the buy button and the merchant’s going to pay you a nice fat commission – often 50-75%! Repeat this over and over with different topics. You could even combine this with research into your novel, about areas you know nothing about (eg finding boyfriends – imagine the person you could create!) In about a year you should be able to devote yourself to the Great Novel as a steady stream of affiliate money comes in from your writing!