I just want to write! - Is that person you?

"i just want to write!"

I don't know how many times I have seen that in the forums here. Sometimes just the basics have defeated the would be writer: they have been unable to master the apparently not so simple art of creating a hub (a "hub" is what HubPages calles a web page article).

Those people are rare and the cause of their frustration is usually either a very basic misunderstanding or some (hopefully temporary) glitch with their computer or at HubPages itself.

If that does happen to be you, I suggest reading "Writing your first hub" and visiting the Learning Center. If those fail to answer your questions, post in the Help section of the Forums.

If you are still lost and bewildered after giving the above suggestions sufficient attention and time, well, maybe this just isn't for you. But if you still want to give it one more try, send me an email. yes, I really mean that: if you have read through those two hubs and the Learning Center and tried posting your confusion to the forum and still are shaking your head in frustration, I'll try to help you personally. I can't guarantee that I can help, but i will try.

Now for everyone else, I have a few questions.

Do you want to make money?

No, I didn't ask if you want to get rich or even if you just hope to make a living writing on the web. I just asked if you want to make money.

If the answer is a flat "No", then you might not need to read the rest of this. Go write and be happy. 

The reason I say that is that often the folks crying out "I just want to write!" are people who are baffled and bewildered by the money making aspects of writing on the web. They know the mechanics of writing, they have figured out the mechanics of the web at least well enough that they can create a hub here or at some other site, but they don't understand the jargon thrown around about SEO, SERP, backlinks and all that.

So be confused. If you really don't care and you just want to write, go write. Just do it. You might end up making some money anyway, but if you don't really care, so what? What will be, will be.  Good luck to you and the rest of the group will be proceeding to the next paragraph while you go back to your writing.

Oh, you DO like money!

You are still with us? The rest of this hub is about making money.

However, I need to warn you up front that most people don't make a lot of money this way. There are some that do - but most do not. There are some that make very serious "buy an island money" and some that make enough money that they don't have any other job. There are some that make extra money - enough to pay the car payment, maybe the mortgage, whatever.

But most will not. If you'd like to explore that topic more deeply, you may want to read my "Making money on the Internet: Where is the brass ring?" hub. You don't need to jump and read that now.

Can you write?

You need a Bachelors degree in English Literature and a Masters or Doctorate in every subject you want to write about. Those are the minimum requirements for success as an Internet writer.

Yeah, right. No, you don't need that. I'm not even sure that "good" writing matters very much. What matters is communication with your audience. If you can do that, you can have success on the Web.

Hold on, I have to stop here a moment. I am ignoring aggressive SEO techniques. I'm doing that purposely because this article is for people who want to write, not people who want to bend the Internet to their will. Admittedly, it is possible that someone could want to write AND maximize their SEO efforts too. If you aren't sure about that, you may want to read "Black Hat SEO - Is the Pirate's life for you?". If you already know that the answer to that question is "No!" (it certainly is for me), then you need not bother.

So, back to communication. I think you already have an advantage that you may not fully understand yet. That advantage is simply that you WANT to write and you think you have the ability to do so.

Most people do not. That is, they find writing difficult or have no desire to communicate. You have a big advantage there.  You want to write.

Are you a budding Hemingway? No, I'm not either.  Do you use perfect grammar and punctuation? No, I don't either.  Is that bad for your potential as an Internet writer? Probably not - most of your audience is likely to know less about grammar and punctuation than you, no matter how bad you are.  The literacy standard is rather low on the Web.

Besides: phooey on the grammar nitpickers.  Language evolves, standards change, words acquire new meanings.  Get with the flow or get out of the way.

Can you write for the web?

Oops. Did that question catch you by surprise? Many people who have learned to write in other media (books, magazines) don't realize that writing for the web is different. I can sum it up in two words: sound bite.

In many respects, the web is very much like television. You don't want long paragraphs - never mind what you may have learned about when to start a new paragraph: on the web, you start a new paragraph about the same time that someone reading out loud would pause to take a breath.

Seriously. You can sometimes get away with something longer, but - generally speaking - short, choppy paragraphs work better. This is because web readers are scanners, not readers. You need lots of white space for scanners.

You also need more headlines. A book usually has headlines only at the beginning of a chapter and a magazine article might only use a few more, but on the Web, you need more.

How many more? One less than the number that would be utterly ridiculous.

The reason is once again scanners. Scanners are moving down your page very quickly - they may even be scrolling at the same time.

They will overshoot.

That is, they will spot something that interests them but their eyes have already gone past it. If you have been using lots of titles and plenty of white space, the scanner has a mental image of where the item of interest is located and can easily back up to find it. If you have long, run-on paragraphs, it may not be so easy and your potential reader may just give up.

I'm a scanner. If I see a long unbroken paragraph, I may not even read it at all! Your content will need to be incredibly compelling to force me into reading large text blocks.

Can you write about the right stuff?

There is stuff and there is stuff. For example, this page is unlikely to put much money in my pocket. It falls under the broad category of "writing about SEO" and that is a tremendously competitive market. I am not a well known SEO guru (and don't pretend to be), so the chances of this being widely circulated are very small.

You might consider things like this as pro bono work. I want to write it because I want to help the few hundred or few thousand people who might read it. If it brings in even a dollar or two in my lifetime, well, that's a dollar or two I didn't have otherwise and I did help a few people. That's enough.

If you want more, you will need to think about your target audiences. Yes, that's plural, because you have two: your readers and your advertisers. Money comes from readers,but only if advertisers are willing to pay to reach those readers. The more readers and the more the advertisers will pay, the more money you make.

The path to those readers and those advertisers is through keyword research. There are a variety of reasons why I do not bother with keyword research, but that doesn't mean you should not.

It doesn't mean that you have to, either. As noted, I don't and I make a lot more money than most. Admittedly, I have a lot more content than most, which brings us to the next question.

Will you write?

I've averaged approximately one web page written per day for almost fourteen years now.

I estimate that if you are a pretty fast reader, you could start with the very first thing I ever wrote and get to here in about 80 hours of non-stop reading.

No, I don't know why you'd want to do that.

My point is that the more you write, the more chance that something you wrote will make a bit of money. There are people that make very good money with just a handful of pages, but that's unusual. If you are a web superstar, I'm very happy for you, but most of us will not be. That's just reality.

If you are not a web superstar and just write a half dozen web pages, what should you expect?

Umm, not much.

So, the question is, will you write? I don't necessarily mean setting goals and sticking to them. If that's your thing and it works for you, great. Personally, I don't need to set goals: writing is simply something that I do. It's automatic, it's going to happen. That may be the way it works for you too, am I right? When people say "I just want to write!" and especially when they include that exclamation mark, that's often the case.

If not, well, maybe you do need to set some goals, make some promises, resolutions, ask someone to nag you, whatever. the point is that unless you are extremely unusual or extremely lucky, you need volume to make money.

Some very basic SEO

Don't panic. I'm not going to talk about backlinks. If you want to know about that stuff, I have an introductory article here. However, in spite of what some folks here will tell you, you really needn't bother. Unless you plan on being really aggressive, all that frenzied advertising (you are advertising your pages) isn't necessary.

Some people start out being big fans of link-building and later realize there was little reason. Others still insist that it's very necessary. If you are a "I just want to write!" person, I suggest you don't listen to the latter group because they will just make you feel sad and foolish - and you really should not!

But there are things you can do that will increase your chances of making money. One is the short paragraphs and white space we already talked about. Let's add some more:

Pictures

People like pictures. I'm not saying you HAVE to have pictures, only that people like them and it can add to the visual appeal of your page and help scanners.

I don't always use pictures. That doesn't mean you shouldn't. Sometimes I forget that I am not a peacock.

I have some other suggestions about pictures at this hub.

Meta Description Tag

If you are writing here on HubPages, this comes from your "Summary" information. HubPages will create a summary for you automatically using the first paragraph or so from your hub, but that may not be the text you want.

Why? Because this is the text that Google will show in their search results under the link to your page. Let's do a little thought experiment here:

Suppose you wrote a page about ding-bat bolts. It is an incredibly good resource for people interested in these fascinating little things and Google has recognized that and will show your link when people search for "ding-bat bolts".

Good, right? Sure, but what if you started out that page with a rant about your mother-in-law because, for reasons we won't get into here, the word "ding-bat" reminds you of her. If you let HubPages fill in that summary for you automatically, the potential visitors will see that rant, or at least part of it, and may not realize that you really do have a great page on these marvelous little inventions!

Look at the picture to the right. It shows how you can edit your Summary information here at HubPages.

Just uncheck that "Calculate Summary Automatically" and replace the text with something that will let those searchers know that they should visit your page.

Before I leave this section, I want to revisit the short paragraph thing once more.

When you have a picture to the side of text as we have here, you need to make your paragrahs even shorter, because it isn't really about words, it's about visual space.

A narrower column makes paragraphs visually longer, so you need to make them shorter. Makes sense?

Ad Placement

Google has a "heat map" which shows what they have learned about ad placement. As they have been known to make just a little bit of money from advertising, you might want to heed their advice.

Don't just look at the pretty picture, though: read what they have to say.

Here at HubPages, you can control ad placement by your choice of capsules and what you put in them.

Look at the picture to the right which shows the three text capsules I used at the beginning of this hub. Notice that I did not put very much text in the second capsule but I put much more in the first.

That was deliberate. I wanted enough text in the first capsule so that HubPages wuld put a large ad to the right of that text. I made the second capsule short because HubPages always puts another ad just after the second capsule.

Notice that I left some extra white space at the end of the second capsule and at the beginning of the third. That's to get more white space around the ad. I do the same thing at the top of the first capsule because I think it usually looks better.

Hubpages Tags

People new to HubPages but not new to the web might mistakenly think that these will go into the Meta Keywords tag. They don't. In fact, HubPages doesn't even create that meta tag because no search engines pay any attention to it.

What these do is create pages and RSS feeds here at HubPages. These will be internal links to your pages and will help search engines understand your page. Therefore, you should add relevant tags.

Now, some folks here will tell you that you should add as many tags as you can. You really should not. You are required to have at least two tags,but you do NOT want to willy nilly add tags that are only vaguely related to your content.

If you wrote about ding-bat bolts, you probably will use "bolt" and "ding-bat" at least. You should probably have "dingbat" and "ding bat" too, but if your page just casually mentioned that ocean cruise liners use a great many of these bolts, you should NOT add "Ocean Cruises" as a tag because it really is not relevant.

Was that so hard?

No, it wasn't, was it? It's mostly simple stuff, but even at that I don't want you to worry about any of it too much. It's important, sure, but not as important as what you write.

I certainly knew very little about all that when I first turned on Adsense on June 19th, 2003, but I made $450.57 in the next 11 days anyway. I still don't do a lot of SEO stuff, still don't pretend to be expert at any of this, and yet I still made $976.29 just from Google Adsense in November of 2010.  I do a few other income activities too, so my total earnings were a fair bit more, but it does show you what a big pile of content can do for you.

You will often here the phrase "Content is King" and it is true. Everything else is just polishing - making things a little more likely to make you a few dollars now and then. If you really "just want to write", don't fret over any of this that you don't understand. If the part about tags or ad placement made you break out in a cold sweat, just don't bother with it right now. It will probably make sense in a few months and you can go back and fix your older hubs then.

You can leave your questions in the comments, of course.

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