Making money as a freelance writer-

The most obvious to anyone on Hubpages is freelance writing. The trick to making a decent profit is to not sell yourself short. There are plenty of websites out there to use, such as; Helium, Elance, Guru, and Freelancer.

An Easy tip is to combine your articles, giving you the most profit, with only a little research. A great example of this is searching Helium and Freelancer for the question, “How to make Money”. This brings up plenty of results on Helium and Freelancer, where your submissions are limited by the topics. The next step is to do your research and type 3, you read it right, THREE articles. When you have them to a satisfactory quality, submit one to Freelancer, another to Helium, and start a new Hub. In this way you can use one research session on a topic and submit it to three sites for three sources of income. One word of caution though, make sure you don’t even quote yourself while doing this as it may interfere with the terms of service on various sites, such as Helium, who lays claim to your work for 1 year. However, you can even use your other articles you’ve submitted as sources as long as it doesn’t violate those policies, directing views to your other submissions.

Making money with Ebay-

Ebay can be a great tool for making some extra cash. If you know the first rule of investments, you’ll make a profit: buy low-sell high. Check sites like craigslist or do searches in your local area for garage sales and auctions. One good profit if you have a little time, know how, tools, and some start up cash is junk cars. Just check craigslist and search for cars under $500, they’ll usually be “parts cars”. Buy one and start parting it out and selling the parts individually on Ebay. Just a quick search in my area and I found a 1989 Ford Bronco with a bad transmission, a quick Ebay search came back with over 900 results for parts. Everything under the hood and in the interior can be stripped out and resold. As for the Bronco, most parts were going for $60-$150, if you take in account the number of parts that can be pulled off a vehicle you should be seeing $$$.

Sure you might not be able to afford to throw out $500 on a parts car. You might have to stick with scouring through thrift stores, auctions, and garage sales for underpriced items but is that really efficient on its own? Another good addition to your Ebay paycheck is searching for mislabeled items. People post items on Ebay all the time with typos in the name. Many of these items are never sold because the consumers that are trying to buy it don’t see that particular auction. That’s where the profit comes in. Try using sites like FatFingers or use your imagination to find common ways to misspell product names.

As every idea I’ve done a search for an example, this time I used fatfingers and searched for Samsung. I found a Samsung Infuse for only $10. Odds are it will go up a bit, but won’t reach the $120-$150 that its counterparts are going for, with proper spelling in the title. Last week I bought a Motorola Droid Razr, a $200 phone, for $45. Buy low, and turn around and post it back on Ebay, just make sure you spell everything right.

Create your own site-

One idea is to build your own site, with your own content and use things such as Google Adsense and Affiliate programs. You can use it as a blog, an informational site, sell a product or whatever you can imagine. The key to this is look at ads that your sites patrons are likely to have interest in. If you have a blog talking about the new addition to the family, you probably don’t want to put affiliate ads from the military equipment store US Cavalry but Babies R Us would be a good option. This plan varies a lot on your content though, my wife had a blog about being a military spouse and they would both be good options for her to use.

Marketing-

The last piece to using your own site or freelance writing is marketing. The more views you have, the more likely someone will click on an ad, so you can get paid. One option I’ve heard about a lot is social media such as Facebook. While this does have its merits, it might not be the best option for you. Think about the last time you were on Facebook, did you click on that Farmville request? If you did, it’s doubtful that everyone else that got it would do the same thing, so why are they going to click your link.

One option I have successfully used is social sharing sites like Reddit or 4Chan. By producing good content you can post the link to your site, Hub, or Helium article to get more traffic. I wrote one article on Helium and received 10-20 hits per month for the first couple months, on the third I posted it up on Reddit “Today I Learned” and received over 900 views in a day!! After doing this a few more times I noticed a trend. Reddit works by a series of upvotes and downvotes to determine your ranking, but not everyone who views it votes. Only about 10% of those who viewed my Helium article, voted on Reddit. This is important to note as the top entry on “Today I Learned has been voted on 20,000 times by a community of over 3,000,000 subscribed viewers. Even if you only receive $0.002 per view, that’s an easy 40 bucks. Now apply the 10% hypothesis and you have $400 in a matter of days.

If you have your own site, don’t just stop at that. Look what’s popular on sites like Reddit and host your own pictures. Sub-Reddits like TIL, Aww, Pics, Funny, WTF, Advice Animals, and many more have at least 2 million subscribed viewers each and on a site that his viewed by millions of individuals per day. As a final note, the top link on Reddit right now has a view counter, just over 182,000 views.

As a note of caution, if you use social sharing, make sure your content is at its best. The better it is, the higher it will rise in the rankings, and the more views you’ll get. Also please observe your websites policies when submitting content. Not only will this help it rise through the ranks, it will make sure your post doesn’t get taken down by Mods.

So there you have it, maximize your writing efforts, use unique techniques to make money on online auctions, and use the internet to drive people to your site or articles. There’s no telling how much you can make by using these various techniques. They might not be perfect, or the only options out there, but there is profit involved if you put some effort into it.