How I started writing articles and making money online

By chrysolite, 21st Jul 2010 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/1wnquk_s/
Posted in Wikinut>Writing>Personal Experiences

No internet connection, no money, no ideas, just the wish to make some money online and getting paid ALWAYS for it, even if it's only a little. Build up a pension maybe in case the German government can't hack it when I'm 65 and 9 months old, maybe ...

• The beginning
• Wikinut
• Redgage
• Articles and/or cartoons?
• Finally "upwardly mobile"

The beginning

As you might have seen from my profile I live in Spain in a remote mountain valley with absolutely no coverage for mobile phones nor electricity or telephone connection. Impossible? I smiled to myself and said: "We'll see ...". A friend of mine shopped round for a little notebook, "dongles" were just coming out promising very fast mobile internet connection everywhere. The prices where prohibitive, I had no money to spend on equipment, so I asked at my bank for a loan. It was refused.

Thinks, thinks, thinks .... then another friend phoned my friend about an offer in The Phone House, seemingly they included an Acer Notebook if you signed a 2-year contract with any of the local mobile phone/internet providers. We rushed to the shop and after 2 hours of frantically waving papers (this is Spain!) and filling in more forms and installing software on the notebook, the girl in the shop said that it would work now, but I couldn't try it out "inside" the shop as there was no mobile coverage. So we took the whole lot to the car, tried it out and it worked.

And at first I didn't realise it. I used to be a web designer back in England, in the early days just "after" Compuserve (yes! ;)). I knew the web back then for about 6 years and then we moved to Spain to do our self-sufficiency bit. 8 years without internet! And then, suddenly, I was back in and it was mind boggling! Almost everything had changed and there was another thing I had "completely forgotten". Back in England I had a fully equipped office and every electronic gadget going and now? Now I wanted to do the same on a notebook (Acer Fab, no doubt!) and a lousy "Orange Internet Everywhere" mobile connection.

I don't have MS Office either, but downloaded the brilliant "Jarte" word processor which includes spell check and word count and it's FREE!

Thinks, thinks, thinks ... I knew I could write and didn't suffer from writer's block. Had written lots of letters, articles in English magazines and computer manuals in my time. My friend recommended Helium and Mahalo. Helium rejected my first article, so I looked up on them and it seemed that they don't accept non-US writers anymore. Mahalo, then. I wrote the first few how-to articles, immediately won a 25$ prize and chucked it all in again. I do recommend Mahalo if you want to learn how to write good "How-to" articles, they MAKE you do it! But ...

Then, I thought I'd go it alone and designed the "Very Interesting Pamphlet (V.I.P)" web site free on Google. I messed up on Adsense, my connection had broken down while I was signing up for them and ever since they don't want to know about me. And, of course, I didn't have any money to buy a domain name. I did finish the web site, even designed a contest for it, but I never put it online. It all felt so daunting, so different ... Plus, I was still in the "habit" of writing personal opinion articles. Well, sometimes, one really feels better after having it out with a certain subject, but it's not what people want to read.

Back to "how-to" articles and recipes. That's an easy start, everybody can do it, but where?

Wikinut

Then a friend sent me an email that she's writing for Wikinut now. I signed up under her, she only wrote two articles and never earned a penny, but I carried on. I had set myself the target of writing 3 good quality articles a day, but it was impossible. The notebook only has battery power for 2 hours and I have to walk a mile to get internet connection. Writing at home and charging the notebook with solar panels is ok, but once online I had to rush through my emails, submit the articles, do the advertising and submitting to Google, Twitter, Facebook and Stumble Upon which is the absolute minimum I do and it seems to work. Slowly but steadily I get the clicks. I don't mind sharing, in fact, I quite like the Wikinut slogan: Write - Share - Earn. But I'm not ever doing anything for nothing and after a while I looked out for more advertising tips and more opportunities to link to my articles AND making money at the same time, which was when I found

Redgage

Nice people there at Redgage and I love socialising with them, but again, with limited battery power (I'm working on a solution here right now!). Anyway, one can upload links (in my case links to articles on Wikinut), documents, photos, videos and own blogs or comment on other people's blogs. There is a constant buzz of people rating your uploads and everybody tells you how much they like this or that. And if they don't like it, they don't comment on it. Quite effective this! :)

This also meant that with my very limited income I had to find a camera that produces small videos and photographs of a decent quality. I did. And now I'm trying out the new camera and the new software and other free software I downloaded - happy days - until one day I can produce something that can be uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, Redgage and Wikinut. Yes. Once on YouTube one can embed the video on Wikinut too! Great!

Linking - Networking again and again - the name of the game!

Articles and/or cartoons?

Well, I do like writing articles and am still learning from others too, but reading the article on Wikinut "Creates comics, creates money" it seemed to me as if there was money in drawing cartoons. Unfortunately the link mentioned didn't work so I thought I'd investigate for myself, but so far I haven't found anything suitable for me.

Maybe you think that I can draw. No, I can't. But I can fill in the "speech bubbles" of the characters real well! ;) So I guess I would have to keep the whole lot very simple with the aid of some free drawing software and cartoon making software, well, we'll see. Besides, many years ago there was a bloke on the internet with a website of cartoons who lived in fog. He couldn't draw either, but could fill in the bubbles very well, indeed. So no self-limitation here!!! ;)

Well, if anybody out there knows a site where one can submit cartoons and get paid per click, I'd be grateful if you could let me know.

Finally "upwardly mobile"

Today is the first day I could try my new mobile internet cafe! It works! And I'm so happy! Actually, it's a car battery (which I load with our solar panels) and a camping inverter 300 Watts (12V to 220V) mounted on a trolley and my Acer Fab Notebook, mobile phone and video camera, lots of cables and lunch in a rucksack and that's how she thinks she can spend all day online in the middle of nowhere in the Spanish mountains at 36 degrees Celsius in the shade and make money on the internet! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear ... ;)

Thanks for calling in!

Mark Gordon Brown moderated this page.
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