Okay, if you really think you’re about to learn how to make a billion dollars writing articles online, your detractors are right: you need to lower your expectations. On the other hand, if you just want to make a good living - possibly a very good living - with your writing, you might try an attention-getting title like the one above. Here are some other tips for generating income with your articles.

The basic idea with writing articles for use on the internet is to promote your website with them. Yes, you can write for others, but the competition is fierce, so you might not make much more than ten dollars per hour unless you can really crank out quality content at high speed. There is more money to be made distributing your articles for free, in order to create links - and therefore traffic - to your site or blog. With enough people visiting, there is always a way to make an income from a site.

How do you distribute those articles? It used to be that you could write a six-paragraph article in thirty minutes, submit it to a dozen good article directories in a few more minutes, and then watch as your website became more popular. Only a small part of this was from the readers at the directories who clicked through to your pages. Most of the benefit was because the links from the article to your site were given a lot of credit by the search engines. Get a few articles out there each month - especially to the highly-ranked directories - and you would see your pages move up in the search results.

At some point, however, the search engine algorithms were changed, downgrading the value of those links. It was decided that a link you can essentially create yourself did not indicate the importance of your website as much as a link to your site that another webmaster chose to create. That makes sense, actually, and you still probably get more search engine recognition when someone takes your article from the directory and uses it on their site, keeping your link active.

But because of the general downgrade of directory links, you need to do a little more now to make those articles as useful. It isn’t that the basic process has stopped working. I still use article directories as the base of my marketing plan, and I do well in this way. You could also compensate for the lower value of each article by writing and submitting more. But there are other ways.

For example, there are some services that directly distribute your articles to websites which are hungry for content. Your link remains active as part of the arrangement, and it is a more valuable one than a link on one of the hundreds of thousands of pages of a directory. The catch is that these services charge a fee per article or per month, so be sure you have everything else in place to monetize your website. I would also wait a couple months after starting your site to try this, in order to give the search engines time to recognize that you exist before you try to improve your ranking.

Another approach that takes more work but no investment, is to find sites you like where you would like to see your articles posted. Contact the owner and let her know that you have some good articles she can use for pages if she wishes - provided she leaves the "about the author" info and link at the end. Most will say no or just reply to your email, but some will agree. It can help if you offer to write an article just for their site, so they know they have original and unique content. If you do that though, be sure the site is good enough to be worth it.

You can also use your articles to make an e-book or report. Take twenty of your best pieces of writing on a topic and put them together. Add an introduction and convert it into a PDF using one of the free programs available online. Sell it at a place like Lulu .com to start out for free, or set up an account with ClickBank and design a sales page.

Finally, for a more creative way to make money writing articles, you can buy a program that converts your articles into videos, and then put those on You Tube to promote your site.