The most obvious way to make money online is through writing, i.e., becoming a “content provider”.

You might, for instance, sell your work directly to one of the many blog networks now out there. Or you might become a problogger, like Darren Rowse, which means tailoring your writing to specific niches so that well-heeled search traffic will find you and click on your contextual advertising, like Google’s Adsense. By adding to your “page views”, they will also make it easier to sell paid advertising off the site.

We’ll be looking at problogging later in this series. For now, I want to concentrate on direct publishing, selling your words themselves in a print format. Here’s an example that popped into my inbox this very morning:

Marti Lawrence runs a blog called Enter The Laughter, which rather speaks for itself. However, to monetize it further she has decided to put her blog posts into book form using one of the “free” publication tools now available on the internet.

Using Lulu.com Marti has stitched her posts together as: Queen Klutz – The Misadventures of a Very Clumsy Woman:

It takes a bit of work to do this, and it’s not as free as you’d think — an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) costs $99, for example. But Marti has done it, cheerfully confessing her lack of technical know-how in this field.

Selling Direct
She describes her effort as “an example of how a blogger can make money while enjoying being a writer, promote themselves, and make their blogging into a business.”

Her stories are “humorous and inspirational, as I have had to overcome a great deal of adversity. All are told with an optimistic outlook, and each chapter ends with a fitting quotation or saying.

“There are excerpts available at the sale page. That is a pretty cool feature – it is just like the excerpts available at Amazon. I was allowed to upload whatever I wanted as the excerpt, or had the option of going with like, the first ten pages. But since many of the early pages are title, acknowledgments, or chapter title index, I made up a separate document with clips from several chapters.

“It is self-published at Lulu, an entrepreneurial adventure for me. Once I have the ISBN, I will also be able to sell it through Amazon and at bookstores. Marketing is solely my responsibility.”

Here’s a good example of an enterprising person using the power of the internet to become a publisher of her own work. Taking responsibility for your output can often pay more dividends than following more conventional routes through trade and small-press publishers.

Buy Queen Klutz from Lulu.