Get Paid for Genealogy Writing

Usually here at Free Genealogy Tools, we're doing exactly what the blog-title says:  offering up useful family history tools that you can use absolutely free.

Today, we're doing free one better, and showing you how you can get paid for your genealogy work.

There's a revolution taking place here on the internet, right under our noses.  All manner of sites are making money (in some cases, lots of it) by attracting internet traffic...visitors like you and me.  In order to be successful, though, the sites need good quality, compelling content on just about any topic imaginable.

Could be me, one day!

And that's where you, and your knowledge of genealogy, comes in.  If you can write about your experience in family history research, you can earn some money with the content you've created.  In fact, it doesn't even have to be writing.  You can post photos, images of old records, podcasts of interviews, or a video of a local graveyard.  All manner of content is welcome.

One of my favorite sites for posting is at eHow, where brief how-to articles can, with a bit of luck, earn a surprising income.  One article of mine (took me about an hour to write) has earned $2,000 so far, and it's still going strong, bringing in new income every month.

That's the exception to the rule, but even my mainstream genealogy articles which pay far less are still doing very well, thank you:

• How to Find Old Newspaper Articles Online
  
  
• How to Find Free Family History Military Records
  
  
• How to Get Ancestry Records from the National Archives

You get the idea.

But if how-to's aren't your cup of tea, there are plenty of other sites where you can contribute more free-form content, such as Xomba, Examiner, and Google Knol.

Or of course, you can just build your own website, like my newspaper archives site, or even your own blog, like the one you're reading right now.  These sites won't make me rich, necessarily, but they do bring in a steady (and steadily growing) income while I'm doing some family history writing that I love to do, anyway.

It's not a bad set-up.  You can do it too.


Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.