Catalog Building: Write in Your Spare Time Today for Passive

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Constant
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Joined: Fri Jun 20, 2008 10:35 am

Catalog Building: Write in Your Spare Time Today for Passive

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One of the risks about writing articles for Constant Content – that an article won't sell right away – is also one of its unexpected rewards. After all, what's not to love about an article you wrote long ago finally finding its home and a nice chunk of change landing in your PayPal account as a result? While you may prefer immediate sales, building a catalog of articles is a great way to squeeze more out of your research and enjoy passive sales in the future.

For example, let's say you've been assigned to write an article about the benefits of yoga and it takes you several hours to research the topic and write the article. As you go through your research, you realize you have plenty of material to write a bunch of articles about yoga – and ideas are flowing like crazy. Take advantage of this and keep writing! You could easily crank out several different articles without having to conduct more research. With this strategy, the amount of research per article drops dramatically, and each new article becomes easier to write because you're on a roll.

Your original customer may or may not be interested in the additional articles, but that's not the point. The point is to make the most of your time and build your catalog of content for sale.

If you wrote just one extra article for each assignment you receive, it becomes possible to get both current and future income from your efforts. Note that this does not mean writing the same article in two different ways; it means building on what you've already discovered. For example, if your yoga benefits article discusses improved posture, breathing, and balance, you could write a separate article covering the best yoga poses for improving posture.

It's smart to consider the types of articles that sell on Constant Content in terms of subject, length, and style. Each month, Constant Content sends a newsletter to writers detailing the most popular categories for sales. In February, the top ten categories were: beauty, marketing, home improvement, real estate, personal finance, finance, online business, careers, travel, and health & lifestyles.

You can also use the "writing ideas" link to see what's selling, what people are searching for, and what Constant Content's inventory currently looks like by category. Use the Category tab to see how many articles are available in each category and consider writing articles for a popular category that look depleted. For example, the sports category was one of last April's top ten categories, yet it's currently one of the emptiest with fewer than 500 articles across all of the sports sub-categories. In fact, there are only five swimming articles.

As you explore Constant Content's catalog, you may notice a category filled with articles available for usage rights only. Don't be discouraged. In fact, this is an opportunity because most customers purchase full rights.

No matter where you get your ideas, keep salability in mind. After all, you don't want to build large catalog of articles that aren't going to sell. If your topic is obscure or overly academic, it will be harder to sell than a how-to article on a popular topic. If your article is lengthy and priced at a buck a word, it will be harder to sell than a 400-word, ten-cents-per-word blog post on the same topic. Your catalog articles should also be evergreen. That is, they should be relevant several years from now.
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