The idea of earning money online is a little scary – it can often involve scams, a large initial outlay, knowledge you don’t have or spending hours doing repetitive actions for a lower hourly wage than your first teenage job.

So I’m going to tell you about a way you can earn money on the internet, using nothing but things you already know, without paying a cent. I won’t say it’s easy, and I won’t say it happens overnight. But I will say that if you keep at it, you can keep earning money even if you decide to stop working at it for a few weeks or even a few months. Plus, it doesn’t require you to annoy all your friends and neighbours – in fact not a single person you know ever has to be aware of how you earn some extra money.

So what is revenue sharing? It simply means that you create content for websites and in exchange they give you a share of any profits from your content, for as long as you leave it on their site.

Where do these profits come from? People from search engines will visit your content. On your content adverts will be displayed – when a person clicks an advert you either get varying amount of money for each click or a commission on everything they purchase after clicking the advert (depending on the type of advertisement.)

What can you write about? On some sites you can simply answer questions on a huge range of subjects. On other sites you can write short, stand alone articles (generally about 300-1,000 words) on any topic you’re familiar with, as long as the subjects are family friendly. Think you don’t know anything? Think about the things you’ve searched online for in the past – simple things like how to clean off a certain type of stain, how to cook the perfect loaf of bread or how to easily change the oil on your car from a female perspective!

How much money can you earn? This really depends on how much time you want to put in and what you write about. The average time to make payout ($150 in Australia from the most common advertiser) is 6-9 months. However the time will usually halve each payout if you keep writing more, so you can expect your second payout in 3-5 months and so on. The reason you’ll earn more as time goes on, is because the older content gets on the internet, the more search engine visitors you’ll get. Plus, if you keep adding content each month, you’ll have a larger base to earn from as time goes on.

How do the websites make money? Revenue sharing means that, on most sites, your adverts will be displayed a certain percentage of the time (usually between 50-75%) and the rest of the time the adverts of the website are displayed. Any clicks or sales during your share of adverts are completely yours to keep, and the websites that you publish on keep earnings from their share of adverts.

Don’t you need to know all about internet stuff to do this? Most revenue sharing websites are set up so you simply insert text, upload images and hit ‘publish’, without having to know anything too complicated.

At the start of 2010 I had never published anything online, had never had a website or even a blog and had no idea what words like ‘revenue sharing’ or ‘affiliates’ even meant. Now I’ve written over 300 articles on revenue sharing websites, have about 15 websites and earn anywhere from $200 to $500 a month, even when I don’t write more than an article or two (the amounts vary because different times of year such as Christmas, usually bring in far more in earnings – a great reason to get started now, before Christmas!)

Is it worth it? The average time for someone to be able to earn a good wage from writing online, when treating it like a normal full time or part time job, is about two years. Different topics, of course, bring in different amounts of visitors and earnings. Writing about subjects that are saturated (such as weight loss or general health) won’t bring in many views because you’re competing with lots of other sites. Writing short stories or blog posts won’t bring in much either, because people aren’t searching for that type of content. But there are plenty of topics that do bring in money. And if you stick at it, not only will you get better at identifying good topics, but you may also be able to use it as a jumping point into creating your own websites.

What are some of the free revenue sharing websites I can write on?

Hubpages- Write articles for a 60% revenue share on Adsense and Amazon plus earnings through Hubpages Ads and eBay.

Wizzley - Write articles for between 50-60% revenue share (depending on number of articles) from Adsense, Amazon, Zazzle & Allposters.

Bukisa - Write articles for 60% Adsense and Chitika revenue share.

Infobarrel - Write articles for 75% Adsense, Chitika & Amazon revenue share.

Webanswers - Answer questions in a format similar to Yahoo! Answers and earn 60% revenue share on best answers, or a share of impressions on questions where a best answer is not selected.

Tipsbase - Share quick tips on any topic for 100% revenue share.

Squidoo - Not my favorite but many people do report getting good earnings here. Payment based on “rank” of your article instead of revenue share in most cases, with some revenue share affiliates at 50%.

Want more information? Have a look at this basic guide to earning online or you can check out this Hubpages specific guide I wrote, although most of the information can be applied to other sites, including your own. If a lot of the information looks scary, leave it for later and just start writing – sometimes it’s the easiest way to learn!

Guest blog by By WryLilt