As I look to expand my internet marketing presence, I've joined a couple of internet marketing forums to learn about what works and what doesn't work for the business. One heavily-mentioned marketing technique is article marketing.
What you do is write content about a particular product or service, throw in some keywords, and then backlink to the website in the end. Except the writing has to be good and very personal. It can't sound like a sales pitch all the way through or people just won't read it.
And good English is a MUST. What's happened is that many of the big-time internet entrepreneurs have tried to go the cheap route and hire non-native English speakers to write articles. They were paying maybe $1 for 400 words about whatever product they were selling. But the results were horrid. Really bad phrasing. Spelling errors. Passive voice. Too wordy. Instead of "This is how you walk your dog through a park", they would get "this is the way you are able to walk a dog through a grassy community area."
By the time everything's fixed, the marketers have written the articles themselves. They've spent the time to write one quality piece in the time it normally takes for 10.
Granted, my English isn't perfect and within this post my former English teachers might gasp at some of the phrases and incomplete sentences I use. But my English is good enough and I am making active choices to fit the language of the message I am conveying, which is just as important. Non-native English speakers have a hard time doing that. For example, this is a blog post which is loosely formatted and more of a conversational style, whereas a marketing article would almost NEVER use lingo or incomplete sentences unless your client says "make this article loose and conversational".
Remember your first Spanish class? You learned the proper way to introduce yourself and ask where the bathroom is. It would translate into something like this: "Hello. My name is Paul. Can you please direct me to the room with the toilet?"
Internet marketers don’t want that from their article writers. They want people like you and me who know enough proper English to make the articles sound natural. And they pay well for it if you are a semi-speedy typist. At first the pay may seem a little low- $5 to $7 per article. But consider what you take home from other side jobs and consider what minimum wage was for your entry-level position. Two 400-word articles can be done in an hour, even if you only type 30 words per minute. That's $10 to $14 an hour from the house.
Get in good with the right clients and your workload or price can expand. I know this from personal experience. If you've been following my blog, you know that I used to ghostwrite articles for a client that sold instructional DVDs on hair care. Not exactly my lane of expertise. I went from six assignments to 12 to 40 and made roughly $16 per article. He referred me to another client that runs a gym and I did work for him, too.
And I’ll be honest- some of it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. But it’s doable. You are PERFECT for this type of work if your friends are always giving you their school papers to look at.
So yes, your English teacher was right. Learn the ropes while you’re in school and it will pay off in the end.
“I before E except after C”,
Paul
