Writers don’t get paid much. They get paid even less online. But there is money to be made by becoming a paid writer online. A growing number of websites are willing to pay you to write articles or create blog posts. Answer these questions: do you have a good command of the English language? Do you rarely suffer from writers block? Can you type rather quickly? If you answered yes to those questions this may be the right kind of online job for you. So if you have spare time on your hands and knowledge and creativity to share, you should consider becoming an online article writer.

Experience

What makes this online job so intruiging is that you don’t need any experience to get started. Nobody will want to see your resume. It doesn’t even matter if you never graduated high school. The only thing that matters is performance: can you deliver a 500 word quality article on a specific topic.

Time

When you work a regular 9 to 5 job you get paid a certain amount per hour. Every day you earn the same amount of money, no matter what. You can work extra hard or slack off and your paycheck will still have the same total. But when you become a writer online you are working on commission. You decide how much (or how little) you earn. That sounds great, right? But there’s a downside, if you take too long on an article and only get paid a couple of bucks, you may be earning much less than minimum wage. So take time into account when figuring out if this is the path you want to embark on.

Competition

There are a so many people willing to write articles for money. So you might think that you have no shot at making any money. Here’s the thing though, many writers are from India and English is not their native tongue. Therefore there are a lot of writers who use bad grammar in their work. If you are a good writer you can demand (and will receive) a higher amount per article. Quality does count and companies are willing to pay a higher premium for quality work. So don’t be discouraged by the competition.

Sites

One such place that is a good start for aspiring online writers is the Yahoo! Contributor Network (contributor.yahoo.com). They play a flat fee (about $2 – $5) and then pay extra on top of that based on how much traffic the article gets. So if you have a lot of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, you can share it with them and hopefully they all will help you spread it. Great articles can get tens of thousands of hits. You can also write for bloggers who want to keep their sites updated but don’t have the time to write their own posts. One such place to find writing work is at Fiverr (fiverr.com). That site is a marketplace where people offer their services for $5.