Make Money Writing Online as a Home Based Business

As the economy takes it's toll on the average person many of us find a need to either supplement an income or replace a lost income. There are many ways to do this but many choose to write online to make money. This type of home based business can offer many benefits and is relatively easy to start. I like many others found myself facing financial hardships with the failing economy. As a contractor in a small Midwest town the construction and remodeling jobs became fewer and fewer. With children to support along with myself I found it necessary to find a way to supplement my income with a home based business other than my contracting business. After a bit of research I learned that there is a demand for people who can write quality articles on specific topics. There are numerous writing jobs available and I will cover those as well as writing your own blogs or web pages to make money online.

First of all if you are considering writing online to make money as a home based business opportunity you must have writing skills. There are thousands of offers out there for people to write articles that pay a dollar or two per article but you can not make a living at that rate. If you have basic writing skills and good grammar you can hone those skills and make yourself a marketable home based business. Here are a few options for writing online to make money. All links below open in new windows so feel free to check them out as you read through this page.

1. Freelancer is a site where writers can get freelance gigs writing content for websites. This website allows you to bid on jobs you are qualified for and set your bid according to what you think it is worth. There are jobs from rewriting original articles to make new content to gigs writing articles from scratch as a ghost writer. The rates will range from $1 per article to as high as $10 on this particular site. There are also opportunities for web designers and other specialty fields here.
2. Elance is a site where you can also do freelance work. The Elance site is a little better than Freelancer in my opinion because of the way the escrow and workroom is set up. Elance protects both buyer and writer by having an escrow option and a workroom where all communication happens. This makes it easy to monitor and track the job specifications and the completion. All files are also sent through the workroom so you are assured that there can be no dispute on if the work was done or not.
3. Constant Content is yet another freelance site for writing online to make money. Constant Content is very strict in it's guidelines for the content that it approves but it is also the highest paying freelance writing site online these days. The buyers at constant content are looking for real quality that they can use on their main pages and websites rather than articles that may be listed in directories as part of an article marketing campaign. Since these articles are on main pages or landing pages they typically have to be much higher quality. The benefit to good writers is that you can easily earn $50 or more per article for certain niche topics.
   

When you use sites like Hubpages or a blog to write your own content the way you make money is through affiliate programs like Amazon or Google AdSense. To make these profitable you need to write quality content and promote it to generate traffic. The idea here is that writing online about a topic of interest will create enough traffic to get people to your page where they will click on ads or buy a product. Writing online and creating traffic is a must if you are not using the above freelance options. Getting outside traffic is the key to your success in getting people to your site and spending money. I have done a lot of writing here at Hubpages to make a passive income for myself. You can sign up for HubPages and then use a couple of the sites I use to promote my writing, YouSayToo and SheToldMe, this will help generate outside traffic that is likely to be interested in your displayed ads.