Web Writing For Profit: the Triple A Solution

The ever growing demand for quality web content results in many opportunities for aspiring freelance writers to do web writing for profit.  The advent of crowd sourcing and citizen journalism is creating more content writers than ever before.

The problem for the freelance web writer is separating the opportunities to create worthless noise from the profitable web writing opportunities.

There are two main types of web writing for profit.

1.  Freelance writing for up front payment and often for specified titles (Demand Studios, Textbroker).  Constant Content is more profitable variation where you write the article and post it for sale.

2.  Freelance writing to earn residual income from advertising revenues directly or indirectly (eHow, Xomba, niche blogs) or to promote your own products such as an eBook.

I’m not going to tell you about targeting good keywords – there are lots of good resources for that.  Rather, we will look at the big picture here.  I  formulated this framework for profitable web writing after months of full time research, trial and error and the application of my previous business and marketing education to the problem.

What really made all the research gel was the good fortune to see a short clip of an interview with a Demand Media executive.  The Demand Media executive said that the basic concept I’m sharing here is THE basis for Demand Media’s very profitable and growing content based company. He just shared a couple sentences though, so I’m fleshing the idea out into something we can understand and use as freelance web writers and/or webmasters.

Remember the Triple A Solution of Web Writing Success:

Audience – Avenue – Advertiser

AUDIENCE

There has to be an audience for the writing or the writing will never be worth much.  No one said it had to be a big audience though. A small or niche audience is actually pretty useful as we will see.

If the whole world is your audience you have no audience for your work.  The audience must have some defining characteristics that separate them from the general population.  Your writing needs to target these defining characteristics of your audience.

In marketing speak, the audience is called the customer.

AVENUE

You need a valid effective avenue to reach the audience for your web content.  The avenue on the web is either a website, blog or an email newsletter.  There might be a big audience for sports scores but if you place those scores in a gardening blog, your target audience will not be able to find the information.

In marketing speak the avenue is sometimes called a channel.

ADVERTISER

You have an audience identified and you have a good avenue identified or built, but to monetize the web content requires an advertiser.  If there is no advertiser interested in using the avenue to reach the audience than it will be impossible to make any money.

Even if there are advertisers, they need to be willing to pay enough to make the web content you create pay.  The advertiser could be through Adsense or some other advertising network.  Or the ads could be sold directly by the site to interested businesses.  Finally, you could be the “advertiser” using the content to market your own products.

Audience – Avenue – Advertiser

CONCLUSION

Think of the Triple A’s as the three legs of a tripod.  If one leg is missing the web content will not support the effort or cost to create it.

So next time to sit down to create web content with the intent to profit from it, make sure it fits the Triple A Solution of Audience-Avenue-Advertiser

I welcome your comments.   Anything I missed?  Does your most profitable content fit this structure?

You might also want to read the resources at eHow Resources (and tips for other web writing) for a more information on finding high paying keywords.

Tagged as: Constant Content, Demand Media, ehow, freelance writing, Triple A Solution