Freelance writing is a great way to pursue your passions and make a few extra bucks on the side. Whether you’re looking to get into freelance writing for the first time or you want to expand your current freelance assignments with more work and greater exposure, there are several important things to remember when you’re trying to find work writing online.

First: Choose your subject, and I can tell you from experience that it’s best if you write about something you really care about. Yes, you’re writing to make some money, but you won’t be able to devote your full energy to the business side of things unless you’re committed to the creative side. It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as it’s a subject you enjoy. Knitting? Cooking? Movies? Finance? Technology? Think about what motivates you, what interests you, and what you find yourself reading about online, and then use that to narrow your search until you’ve come up with a topic.

Once you’ve decided which area you want to focus on, it’s a good idea to scour online job boards to see if any established outlets are looking for freelance writers in your field. For example, Examiner.com often hires freelancers in different cities to write about local trends in everything from entertainment and sports to dining and photography. Online job postings can be a great way to discover openings at outlets nationwide for freelance writers, and they also provide the comfort that comes with knowing you’re working with an established organization. Many freelancers who now work on their own projects started out doing smaller writing jobs for other outlets.

Of course, one of the best ways to get your feet wet as a freelancer and to start to build your bankroll is to just get out their on your own and write. Start your own blog — there are multiple free ones to choose from, including Blogger, WordPress, and more — and begin writing regular posts. It’s a good idea to update your blog frequently, so rather than publish bursts of information that are then followed by periods of inactivity, write several posts at a time and space out their dates of publication. That will let you post a new entry every day, maybe two a day, and build a momentum in your writing. More importantly, it will let readers know that your blog is a reliable one, and they’ll come back for regular updates.

Building your blog is just the first step, though. It’s important to establish yourself as a member of the online community, and you can do that by visiting other blogs and commenting there, adding interesting blogs to your blogroll, or just contacting other bloggers to ask about exchanging links. You’ll soon enough find that you’ve got a small but growing audience, and this is the point when you can start to monetize them. There are many ways to do this. For instance, QueryAds lets you set up pay-per-click advertising for your site. Or there’s Amazon Associates, the affiliate program that lets you earn a percentage of Amazon purchases readers make through your site. Or you can use the Romow Directory Affiliate Program, which pays you for referring readers to their site. And believe me, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. By using powerful but subtle ancillary monetization tools, you can start to earn money on your blog all by writing passionately about your interests.

By following and repeating these steps, you’ll be able to grow your site and also sharpen your skills as a freelance writer, both of which will lead to more work as readers and editors discover your talent and drive. There’s nothing better than making some extra cash doing what you love.

By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Jena Ellis, who writes on the topics of Online Certificate Courses. She welcomes your questions and comments at her email Id: jena.ellis20@gmail.com.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Im still in the process of clearing out a lot of junk on this blog. I don’t update Bloggernoob with a lot of new posts, but i still very much work on this site. This blog now has a Google Pagerank of 4. Cleaning up the junk is helping the Noob’s SEO efforts. I think that i was taxed by the big G earlier because of some paid plugs and etc. I wanted to think long term with this blog. The income level on this blog is still very steady. It isn’t a lot but im sure that it’s more then most people ever see with their blogs.

Anyway, Blogger Noob will be more about Search engines. I think that this strategy will give me more passive income. The whole point of growing a site deals with Search Engine rankings. If you want to make money online with your website, you gotta have visitors that find you on Google.

Here is a strategy that i’ve been hammering on about on this blog for ages. Build up your blog or website with your own collection of sites. This “Blog Farming” method works wonders on all sorts of sites. I am able to easily rank well in Google with a new sites because i link to that new site from my older established sites.

You can read my blog farming post to better understand this method. I’ll also do a new update on that post to discuss it in detail.

With this post, i wanted to talk about support your blog or website via article publishing. There are a lot of sites where you can post links to your site. All you need to do is provide some content. This requires a lot of time, but a well written article on one of these sites will yield a lot of Google juice. Meaning, your sites will greatly benefit in the long term. You will have permanent links to your site from Authority sites.

Just write about your keyword specific niche on this sites. Make sure that it is well written and that it provides useful content for people who are interested in that topic. When those pages start showing up on google search results, your site will benefit.

Here is a list to sites where you can submit articles (links).

Squidoo.com
Hubpages.com
EzineArticles.com
Zimbio.com
Gather.com
9rules.com
eHow.com
43things.com
answerbag.com
Yahoo Answers
Wikihow

(The answers or articles that you submit to these sites should have a relevant link to your site.)

This idea doesn’t just stop at answer or article submission sites. You can work your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts on social networking and video sites. Google doesn’t just dig into text and link based websites anymore. They go through a lot of video and social networking sites as well. I think that the whole Facebook privacy change deals with Facebook wanting to control the wealth of content the users put up. So put up niche specific tweets, videos, and friend updates on sites.

Twitter
Youtube
Facebook

Be creative and don’t be lazy. Research similar sites to the ones i’ve mentioned above and rinse and repeat. Noob out!

Popularity: 17% [?]

I want to start off this month with a bang. I spent a lot of money on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I need to start earning some major cash to pay for all the junk i bought. I was really excited to hear about the new promotion going on over at Kontera. If you guys are not familiar with Kontera, you really need to pay close attention to this blog post.

Kontera is an in-text ad program that pays you every time a visitor clicks on the links. This ad program works great on content heavy web sites or blogs. The great news is that you can get paid double per click. Kontera will match your first month’s income. Double is always good in my book. Double coupons, Double dates, Double burgers…

Don’t miss out on these great new holiday promotion. In this dire economy, every little bit helps. If you are new to the Make Money Online game, you really need to sign up with this company. In order to take advantage of this promo, you need to sign up before January 1 of 2010. Then all you need to do is implement the tags on your web site or blog. Remember that they will match your first month’s earnings up to $50. That means double the income! This offer is only available via this promotion link. Click on this link and start earning double this month. Also, in order to qualify for the double income, you need to earn a minimum of $10 during your first month.

I almost forgot about the contest. I will be giving away a Sansa MP3 player to one of my lucky readers who sign up and blog about this promotion. Here is how you can enter to win the Sansa MP3 player. Click on this link and sign up with Kontera. Leave me a comment on this blog post letting me know that you signed up. Write a short blog post about this promotion on your blog. I will verify that you signed up, blogged about this, and enter you in the contest. Be sure to put your sign up email in the email box of my comment section. Also, include the link to your blog post.

Update: Dec 23, 2009 The good guys over at Kontera lifted the limit on this promotion. This is great news for us!

“I wanted to let you all know that we’ve updated this publisher promotion and there is no longer a top limit on earnings– whatever your site earns with us during your first month, Kontera will match—dollar for dollar!

Finally, some of you raised issues regarding previous experiences with our In Text ads and I wanted to invite each of you to get in touch with us through support@kontera.com so that we can look into each account’s individual performance and help you make the most of our ads.

I hope to hear from you, and please feel free to raise any other concerns or questions.

Happy Holidays.”

Popularity: 7% [?]