Two hundred years ago, writers didn’t worry so much about monetization. They did worry about making money, but back before an easy way to license work — or even copyright it — the options for making money on the written word were pretty much limited to finding a publisher willing to take on your work. You’d get fifty bucks and a pat on the back and never see another cent from your work, no matter how popular it was. If you were especially lucky — like Charles Dickens — you might be able to get a gig writing serials. You’d get that fifty bucks on a regular basis.

These days, though, writers have a lot more control over their work. That holds true online. You can publish anything you want as long as you sign up for a free blogging account. It’s a pretty good deal if your only goal is to get published. If you want to make money from your work, of course, there’s a little more to it. You have to figure out what your monetization strategy is before you start putting words in any sort of order: you have to be able to write around your monetization strategy from the start.

Writing Around the Money

Every method you can choose to make money from your writing requires at least a little bit of a change in your writing style. Your content has to wrap around your monetization. If you’re writing with the intention of getting someone to a particular site and convincing them to click on an add, your content better be up the standards of the search engines. If you’re writing about products that you sell through affiliate marketing, you have to craft prose that doesn’t seem awkward when you add in a stack of links.

Even if you’re a writer for hire, paying attention to how your words interact with your client’s money-making plans can be important. It can be a relatively easy way to ensure that a client keeps coming back to you. If you’re writing for your own purposes, paying attention to such details can help improve your income.