I am unsure whether to accept this job offer

[DriXnaK]

So why not add some skills?

[Elok]

Skills take time and money to acquire, and in proportion to their utility. Any abilities I could acquire cheaply and quickly would be of dubious value, especially (as I said) in a bunk economy when there's a flood of experienced talent in most fields. So I'm pretty much skating on a wing and a prayer here.

[Aeson]

Writing can pay pretty well, especially if you write for your own website and/or have something interesting to say. Writing e-books to sell on Amazon can work out well too. I sold a website last year that was all my own writing, and between the sale price (which was 10 months earnings at that point) and ad revenue already collected it turned out to be about $2 per word onsite. I wouldn't say I'm a good writer, I'm not a very prolific writer (I have trouble with more than 2000 words a day, while I know people who consistently churn out 15000-20000 a day) and definitely not an interesting writer on most subjects or for most audiences...

I had another article on a 3rd party site that made over $2000 over the course of 2 years and represented 15 minutes of my time.

It's very hit or miss of course. Some topics there's just no money in, others it's too hard to get traffic. Sometimes the search engines just don't like your writing or who links to your site. Most of the people I know who do it full time end up averaging about $1 per month per ~500 word article (combined on-site and off) though. It might not seem like much, but if you can churn out a few thousand words per day it adds up pretty fast. There's usually no money in it for the first 3-4 months though, and it can take a year or two before a website will really start to get love from search engines, so it's not a get rich quick sort of thing.

If you want to try your hand at it you can put up some articles at places like hubpages.com, wizzley.com, or squidoo.com (seekingalpha.com if you can write about investing) and see if any of the subjects you choose to write about are "winners" that will get traffic and earn money. Then you can create your own website(s) around those subjects. Put up a simple Wordpress site with 5000 to 10000 words on it about everything you can think about the subject, throw a few links to it, and just let it age in. $2-10 for the domain name for a year, $20 for hosting for a year, and a weeks worth of writing. Adsense is a very easy way to monetize just about any website.

The other more stable route is to just sell articles to others who will put them on their own websites or e-books. $10 per 1000 words is pretty standard for a no-name author for a random buyer. You have to be prolific, but you don't have to be very good/interesting. It's hell because you have to write about stupid crap you have no interest in. By the time you've written "The best red toasters for 2012" for the 10th time you'll either be in a trance or suicidal. It can be a very good income in a developing country, and not bad for the first world either.

Before going either route, be sure to read "Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." by Edgar Allan Poe several times so you know just what you're getting into.

[-Jrabbit]

I write for a living and make a nice living at it. Been doing it 7 years.

[Elok]

Huh. Thanks, Aeson. I'm working on something for Amazon already, but that'll be a while; it's about 33K words and a little more than one-third finished. I could try articles, though I wouldn't know where to begin. Possibly religion? I've never been to Seminary, but that doesn't seem to stop most of the people on hubwhatsit...

[Aeson]

You could take some jobs at Odesk or something like that to get a feel for the type of writing people are paying for. I started out writing $10 articles for other people to pay the bills until I was able to make enough on my own sites to stop doing so.

If you're writing for yourself, this is where to start:

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none

Look for keywords which have high competition. This is competition from advertisers bidding on those keywords. The more people bidding for ad space, the more likely it's a paying topic. I look for volume in the 1000 to 10000 range using [exact] match type. These are usually obscure enough topics that there aren't a million other people building websites to target them, but still have enough traffic to make them worthwhile.

To find it start with your root keyword. Look for some longer keywords in the returned list. Input those... drill down to more and more specific categories.

As for general topics... never tried religion. Topics where there's clear commercial interest have the best chance of paying off, with a few exceptions. Tech is tough because most of the techies are running ad blockers or are ad blind. Health, insurance, loans, forex/stocks, and making money online are tough because they're very crowded and spammy. I mostly stick to home improvement, gardening, and landscaping topics. They're topics I can write about somewhat intelligently, and doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. The commercial interest there are tools, plans, contractors, seeds, fertilizers, ect. Things people looking for those topics are going to spend money on, thus things that people advertising are going to be spending money to get traffic for.

Just a quick look at religion as a topic gets me to "electronic bible" as a high advertiser competition keyword with 1600 exact match local (US) per month. People searching for that are likely looking for an electronic bible to buy. "Study bible" and "bibles for sale" also looks like there's potential there. Your site doesn't have to specifically be about those topics, but if you were talking about religion you'd want to make sure you're targeting that traffic by using those high competition keywords in your articles, and have a few articles specifically about those topics. To go back to the home improvement example... I generally don't write reviews about specific cordless drills and don't have a site specifically about cordless drills (though product review sites targeting a product category like that can do very well)... but I do mention cordless drills, their name brands, where to buy them, or what specific model I use when covering broader topics where cordless drills are a useful tool. Then I'd also have articles about what to look for in a cordless drill, how to [do specific thing with a cordless drill], ect.

[DaShi]

Attaching dildos to the end of them?

[Elok]

Is that how you do it too, -Jrabbit? I have to admit, the process seems pretty intimidating. Guess I'm a wuss.

[Al B. Sure!]

I have a lot of friends attending or applying to grad schools. They've been giving me essays to edit. Holy crap how bad even grad students are at writing. Atrocious. It's not simply grammar errors; it's the terrible style that shocks me.

[DriXnaK]

Programming is a skill you can pick up quickly and practically for free. There's also tons of jobs for them and they pay amazingly well. I got a job at the first company I interviewed with, and I only filled out 3 applications for a programming position. That was after my marketing degree proved useless and even my information technology degree proved useless. The best programmers I ever met didn't even have degrees. It's all about what you know and what you can do.

[Elok]

Yeah, I've looked at it. I guess it's something I could do--I smoked Basic in high school--but I'm not sure how to learn something useful. I also find it somewhat unpalatable (like trying to supervise an autistic child: you give him orders, watch it go wrong, and try to figure out which order you phrased just a little bit off), but I suppose I could give it a shot and see if it grows on me.

[Al B. Sure!]

Frankly, it sounds like Snoresville to me

[DriXnaK]

That's not even remotely how it works. Most your time is going to be spent thinking about how to design a solution using your programming skills and then trying to implement it. Unless you are really bad, you aren't going to be spending a ton of your time trying to fix syntax errors and figuring out how to make something work from a programming standpoint. That's not to say that there aren't times when that really is all you're doing and it takes a ton of time, it's just not your primary function. Programming is problem solving and the language itself is just your tool for doing it.

[loinburger]

Learn Java, the IDE is free (use Eclipse) and there are plenty of entry-level positions out there. These are the official tutorials, but there are sure to be many others available for free, and you can probably get a Java book from your library. C# is extremely similar, so once you learn Java you can easily transition to C#.

[DriXnaK]

Visual Studio Express is also free. Of course not that you can't find whatever you want for free anyway if needed. Just saying.