For a number of years now people have been introduced to being able to write for money on the net. Information publishing. That's it. You find out what people are interested in, research the topic and write a piece on it.

However, to write for money that was anything meaningful to you, you had to do a tad more than that. Most folks learned about affiliate marketing. The free to use websites where you could publish your own content and include your affiliate link within your content.

Your readers follow through to the offer you matched them up with and provided it was a good match, they'd probably purchase something their already interested in. But since you matched them to the product... you're able to earn an affiliate marketing referral commission off of that.

Depending on the network you used, you could receive as much as 75% of the sale.

But...

In recent times the ability to write for money using this technique has become a bit harder than it used to be. You may have heard of the panda update. Then again, perhaps not.

Anyway,

When you write for money through information publishing and pairing people up with products their already interested in, usually new folks would start out the free route. This is (or was) done using free to use sites. They're also known as Web 2.0 sites.

It was the way I started out myself.

3 sites in particular.

• EzineArticles
• HubPages
• and Squidoo.

Were the main sites I used. Later I started using Blogger as well. EZA sent traffic to hubpages and Squidoo where the money links were.

Here's the problems with it a year later. In particular HubPages.

Yesterday all the work I had on there had to be deleted. Well, I didn't have to, but if I wasn't allowed to make money from the content, I sure as heck wasn't letting them profit from it. Sounds selfish but hey. It's business.

All because they shifted the goal posts. (changed the rules). This is always going to be a risk when you use other peoples websites. Now, I'm not against their changes. People on that site have careers as writers using their own affiliate program. I know, flies in the face of the changes they just rolled out. Can't include affiliate links, unless of course it's ours. But, they do have career writers in their community that need to know their being catered for.

Does that mean if you write for money that you can't monetize as an affiliate any more.

Heck no...

In fact, I'd say far from it. And for myself I took it as a positive deleting those.

Why?

It's a reminder that the way I started my business last year, when I first set out to make affiliate marketing referral commissions at the mercy of other peoples sites. Now it's coming back to haunt me as the sites shift the goal posts.

There's still a few free to use sites that still work, but in hindsight, I'd have been far better off spending $1 for a .info domain, setting up on the hosting provided by Wealthy Affiliate and publishing my articles there. Then using my own site to publish content for affiliate marketing. If I was to start again, that's how I would write for money from the get go.