“4-Figures?” I hear you say. “That’s not much.” Maybe it’s not, but for someone who had just finished school and was trying to figure their way around starting their own online business while going through uni, it wasn’t bad at all.
I don’t want to bore you with my life story of how I got into SEO content writing as a side gig, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll just share with you micro-stories of what I’ve done and how you could do the same thing too.
Story #1 – EmergencyContent.com
This was a domain I purchased one day, when I started thinking about how I wanted to market myself. I had taught myself some marketing fundamentals, and one of the key things was to sell to those with “bleeding necks”, i.e. if you present at a hospital with a cut to your arm, versus having blood spurting out of your jugular, who do you think the nurse is going to triage straight to the surgery room?
The name worked, somehow: I got my first client out of the blue who needed some content written for an affiliate platform that he was launching pretty soon. The content was in the online marketing niche, an area that I was interested in and learning more about, so it worked out pretty well. We only emailed online back and forth and it was a pretty good gig.
Story #2 – Forums, Forums, Forums
Forums were the main place to virtually rub shoulders with who’s who in the zoo and hang out your digital shingle. People shared their threads on what worked and what wasn’t and knowing what to trust and not trust was also an education that you gained from lurking here.
But once you figured out where to look, there were people who wanted pretty run of the mill content created: specific keyword densities, keywords/phrases that were pretty repetitive, in a niche that was somewhat questionable. That was where I probably got good at writing SEO content. You’ve got to enjoy or at least tolerate the boredom. This one guy was even nice enough to ask whether I was comfortable writing about replica luxury handbags. I didn’t mind at the time, and working for him/her was a steady stream of income for me for several months.
Story #3 – EzineArticles.com
Wow, talk about a blast to the past. Before writing this blog today, I hadn’t been back to the site for a loooong time. It looks like it hasn’t changed much. Anyway, name of the game is simple. You log-in, then write content and have it link back to your blog, where you would promote an affiliate product.
Back in the day, I promoted some sort of muscle building e-book. This helped me train up my writing speed and while it was boring at the time, I look back fondly as it’s led me to where I am today: sharing these insights with you. It didn’t result in much income per se, but I did get some affiliate earnings out of it. Lowest leverage of the lot.
So there you have it. Few different stories of how you can write SEO content for money. If you’re good at this, you can actually earn a steady income. You just have find the right customer who respects you, then you’ll be off to the races.