I, like most writers, would love to make a living doing what I love or at least make a little something out of the slice of the internet that I call home and hobby when I’m not out and about doing my day job.   My biggest problem was where to get started.  There are so many sites on the internet promising get rich quick schemes when, in reality, offer you little to nothing and, unfortunately, that seems to be the way things run for writers both published and hopeful publishees: writers make peanuts for the blood sweat and tears that they put across the page.

For me, at least,  that’s part of the draw.  I make a peanut or two for doing what I’m doing already: posting my ideas out there on the internet for people to read.  At least this way I’m more motivated to actually do it instead of sitting on my thumbs and waiting for someone to offer me a writing job.  There are a few good articles out there that can get you started making some money doing what you love, but none of them really tell you what it is you need to do to get started and that’s where I hope to be different by giving you a place to begin and just to make it all easier, all my links open in new windows so you don’t lose your place.

In order to make money on most of these sites, you will need to sign up with a Google Adsense account.  This is mainly a painless process unless you use Firefox and, like me, couldn’t figure out how to turn off Adblock Plus for a single page.  So if you are one of those lovely Firefox users, you will need to click on the down arrow beside the ABP stopsign logo in the upper right corner of your screen when you go to the Adsense  link.

As with everything you do involving making money, be sure to give a pretty thorough read to the terms of service when you sign up.  Things like clicking your own ads on your articles or blogs and linking to adult content can get you banned from Adsense and then you don’t get paid for all your hard work.

1. Get an email account

Long gone are the days when you had to be referred by someone to get a gmail account, but that doesn’t mean Google email is any less cool or spaceous.  I would recommend, for the ease of signing up and keeping everything straight that you create an email simply for your moneymaking ventures.  This serves a dual purpose.  First, if one of the companies sells your email account, all the spam will go into one email that isn’t the one you have to weed through penis enlargement ads so you can read about Aunt Madge’s trip to the Bahamas.  It also puts everything in one place so you can organize things.  Make yourself a folder that is just for the welcome emails you get with your password to the site you signed up for.  That way if you forget, it’s convenient.  A tip, though, is to make your email address password something different than you are going to use for the websites you sign up for so if you lose one, you don’t lose all the rest of them, too.

2.  Sign up for PayPal

If you don’t already have a paypal account, go get one.  It is the quickest way for most of the sites to pay you and a lot of sites will give you your earnings faster if you have a paypal account linked to your account by not asking for a large minimum payment of your earnings to be accumulated before they pay out.  Anyone with a bank account and an email address can get a paypal account and they’re pretty easy to use.  You can even link multiple email addresses to your account if you are so inclined and use the same account for multiple purposes.

3. Sign up for a Google Adsense Account

First, Adsense is free, so there is no startup cost to you for doing so and it’s mutually beneficial.  Second, if you’re a Firefox user, you’re going to want to go find your Adblock Plus logo and disable on this page only so you can see the form to sign up.  (It took me about fifteen minutes of grumbling and growling at my computer before I figured it out.  Smart move, Google!  Make it so you have to see ads to sign up for an ads account!)  Google AdSense matches ads to your site’s content and audience, and depending on the type of ad, you can earn money from clicks or impressions.   There are three options: adsense for content that automatically webcrawls for ads, search so website creators can allow a search function for their guests or mobile for people with a mobile website.  All you have to do is sign up for adsense by answering a few questions and putting your real contact information so they can actually pay you.

The Publisher ID in the upper right  side of your Adsense dashboard after your account is created is what you put in the blogs and other websites.   Typically it begins with pub- and is followed by a long string of numbers I could never hope to memorize.  For ease of account creation elsewhere I tell you to sign up for this first because it takes a period of time for Google to review and approve your account.

4.  Sign up for an Amazon Associates Account

Again, it takes a short amount of time for Amazon to approve your account on occasion, so doing this before you sign up for the other sites is helpful.  After filling out your personal information,  in the upper left side of your account is a Tracking ID that you will use in certain fields to earn money from referrals.

The way the Amazon Associates Account works is through a couple of different ways; site stripe and linking.  The stripe is on any Amazon page you visit and lets you link to them faster.  There are links and widgets that you can use on your site in order to make money by referring people to their products.  This is especially helpful if you plan on writing reviews of products or books.  When you link to the items and they sell, Amazon gives you a little piece of the action and puts a shiny nickel in your pocket for your trouble.

5. Get yourself all a Twitter

Lame headings aside, Twitter is a spiffy way for people to keep in touch with what you’re up to and you can customize it for whomever is following you.  The account is free and you can have some of the sites publish to Twitter for you when you’ve made a new post as long as you’ve got all your ducks in a row.   Again with the personal information and entering everything in, but then you’re good to go!  Twitter will even send text messages to some of your friends to let them know where you are, what you’re doing and what sites you’ve updated!  It’s a great way to spread yourself around in the non-sexual ways.

Now that I’ve stopped myself from singing Bobby Brown, we can get to the fun stuff!

6.  Try Out Triond

Triond is an awesome site as far as layout goes.  It’s pretty customizable and you can move things around at your leisure.  Triond also allows you to post videos, audio like podcasts and original music and articles.  Everything on the site is pretty intuitive, too, so you can find your way around with a few clicks and be publishing in no time.  Triond is one of the sites that updates your Twitter for you when you update the site, which is super spiffy awesome.  The one catch with Triond, however, according to their Terms of Service of which you must abide is, “shall have not been previously publicly published, in whole or in part, on the Internet or in any other media”.

If you want a little trick of the trade, however, you write for Triond first and then after it’s a month or so old, you publish it elsewhere.  This gets your material out to other places, still gives Triond its excusive rights for a certain time period and you may earn more money later on.

7. Everybody Xomba!

Xomba is a lot of fun.  You can spend a lot of time on the site reading other’s articles, leaving comments and earning points that really don’t do anything for you other than make you feel better about all the time you spend dawdling about on the internet.   You can write either Xomblurbs (a little descriptive paragraph with a link) or Xombytes (articles of 100 words or more) for the site to earn money.  You earn money based off of the links that people click from your articles and profile.

The best thing about Xomba is they give you really great getting started tips if you’re willing to spend a little bit of time reading before you start posting.  They tell you how to format your titles to draw in readers, ways to format your articles to be pleasing and even give you suggestions for what to write about.  It doesn’t get any easier than that!  Just keep it clean and hate free with your own original work  and Xomba is pretty well cool with whatever you write.  You can also earn revenue by referring other users to the site, so keep that in mind.

8.  Hubpages

Hubpages is similar in vein to Triond but applies the KISS rule.  They walk you through and hold your hand each and every time you make a page.  They give you the formula each and every time and you follow it to make awesome pages right out of the gate.  You create a hub, which is a mini webpage about any one topic, provide your Adsense and Amazon accounts and make sure you keep things clean and legal and you’re all set!

8.  Go sign up for a Technorati account

Technorati allows you to claim all your blogs and keep them all linked to one convenient place that you can link to (*cough* like Twitter *cough*) and make it easier for people to follow you everywhere you go on the internet.  It’s relatively painless to claim your blogs and this way you can keep track of what you’ve posted where, especially if you’re a serial poster like I am.

9. Now you can go sign up for all kinds of blog sites.

Especially those that give you money for writing for them like Bloggerparty and YouSayToo .  You post content, you get money.  Post them one after another and see what sites what kind of content brings in best from where.  That gives you an idea where to file everything since each site has a type of blogger and reader that follows what is on them.  Your faithful Live Journal account will work here as well as Blogger accounts.  Personally I LOVE Wordpress and many of my friends either blog there or read blogs from there.

If some of you are review writers or enjoy writing plus minus accounts of the things you use every day, Reviewparty is from the people who bring you bloggerparty.  By having a bloggerparty account, you can write reviews of products you already own in your blog and review party pays you for doing it.   Review Stream is another site that allows you to write reviews on products you already own and use to earn money and you also earn money by reading reviews others have written.  Double bonus.

10.  Sites that Don’t Require Adsense

Helium is like a giant internet magazine where writers publish anything and everything.  Your earnings are based on voting done by users who are presented two stories or articles or set of song lyrics to read.  They then vote which one they like better of the two and this continues through an entire section of the site.   Helium accepts fiction and non-fiction and you can give your earnings to charities that you believe in.  I use this and Free Rice as my good will efforts, even if it doesn’t contribute much.  This is another site where referrals count.  You earn money for the money your referrals earn.

And, as an aside, if you want to kick a little my way for writing this all up for you, show me some love and I’ll send you a Helium invite.

If you’re one of the people who are addicted to social sites like many of my friends, Yuwie is for you.   Yuwie is a social networking site like MySpace where you get paid for doing the same thing you do on MySpace like updating your profile, viewing pages and leaving comments, posting blogs and photos and getting page views.  The only downside to Yuwie is there are a lot of “get rich quick” schemers that you have to block and you don’t start earning a huge share of the profits until your friends refer friends who refer friends and ALL of those people earn money, so it can be really hard to get started and get your friends motivated to do their part.  The site is ad intensive since that’s how they make their money and you’ll have ads that pop up before you make it to your content.  As advice to Firefox and Adblock uers, make sure you temporarily allow eversave.com if you want to skip the offers.  Otherwise it just keeps popping up saying it needs more information.

Now for a personal favorite.

Storymash is an incredibly fun website of a kind of viral quality.  The way StoryMash works is you write a story.  People can read your story and post consecutive chapters.  However,  it isn’t like your normal chain story because literally ANYONE can post a second chapter to your story.  So the beginning you carefully construct can spawn dozens of other stories.  You can also write on someone else’s story and people can vote on what chapters they like best and why.  You can include other people’s chapters in yours as your own personal cannon or you can write something completely different.  It’s like a vicious cycle that isn’t vicious and it’s a great way to improve your writing skills and be exposed to different writing styles.

The hardest part of getting started is knowing WHERE to start.  Thankfully you’ve got a guide for all this stuff that I didn’t have when I began picking through.  It’s taken me a couple of weeks to get everything figured out, posted, edited, tweaked, bookmarked, revisited and fixed and sent to friends.  Now you have a guide to assist you in doing things in a more linear fashion that will get you moving right away.   Good luck and don’t forget to leave me some profile love if you found any of this useful or interesting at all.  Part of why I do this is for the selfish gain of internet friends and what better way to gain friends than by helping them out?

Happy Earning!

Related Articles:

• http://www.bukisa.com/articles/18655_write-for-an-income-10-incredible-internet-writing-opportunities-to-earn-more-money
• http://www.writinghood.com/Online-Writing/10-Killer-Internet-Companies-That-Want-To-Pay-You-to-Write.92618