So, I’ve started getting a little bit of cash from my endeavors. Very, very little bit of cash. And technically it’s not cash, it’s electronically transferred funds….in my paypal account, that haven’t cleared yet. But, I got paid (kinda) for writing some quick and easy thoughts I have about really simple stuff in my life. Now that I know they’ll pay me, I need to turn up the volume, roll up my sleeves and start mass producing articles.

What the hell do I write about then? As with any endeavor I undertake, I spend more time doing research and reading opinions than I do actually accomplishing anything. The month of December was pretty much a time for research, and so now that I’ve established a monstrous list of websites, tips, and examples to root through, I think I’ve got the basic idea of how to go about beginning this process.

Step 1: The Feelers
As I did, send in a few articles to whichever site you plan on using. I’m going after Associated Content, though I plan on sending any unpaid work to Helium or Constant-Content. If they take at least one, keep on going. If they take nothing, try and figure out why. Go through some of the articles on the site and see how they write. The style, content, length. There are even a bunch of articles on the sites that will give advice on how to write a better article.

Step 2: Research
Find out what’s hot. Associated Content sends out topic primers every week, asking for specific articles that will guarantee a certain payout (quality permitting). Whatever’s big for the week usually hits the list. So this week is Valentine’s day stuff, the NFL playoffs, and a couple of up and coming computer games. Also check Yahoo! Buzz Words and Technorati’s top search terms. They tend to be a good gauge of what’s interesting to people at the moment.

Step 3: Mining for Gold
Read a ton of blogs. My Google reader has about 30 blogs that update every day on the feed. It’s not really that much, since you can usually skim past any posts that just don’t interest you. But read as many as you can that do, or that look at least important. News breaks fast on the internet. If you can write an article on day one, they’re more likely to snatch it up because it’s one of the first they get.

Step 4: Mass Production
Make a big old list of topics and just start pumping them out. It depends on your writing ability, but if you get the style and length down and have an idea of what you want to say, you should be able to write three or more articles an hour, and whether they take none of them or they take all three, the more you can write, the better the chance you’ll make some actual money just for writing about something interesting.