Make more money by answering the following eight questions about every article you write.

Make more money by answering the following eight questions about every article you write! By David Geer 1) Can I negotiate more from this publication on this article before I sign? I have had publications agree to pay up to 25% more than originally offered before the contract was signed and continued working for that amount on future articles. I stated my qualifications, experience and specialization on the topic area and asked if it wouldn't be possible for them to pay more. I never had an offer pulled or made less by asking and sometimes I made more. It really doesn't hurt to ask. In fact, they may even respect you more! 2) Can I hold on to my reprint rights and sell the article again and again? Articles that sell many times while remaining with you each and every time are like having an account principal that never diminishes while allowing you to live off the interest! Learn to write timeless articles that can be published many times for many years into the future and they may pay more in the long run than some articles that you sell all rights for the first time out. 3) Can this article earn me a raise on the next article I write, or the one after that or the one after that? One publication gave me a raise the very next article I wrote for them without my even having to ask. They were a publication of a very large vendor organization and they could afford it. Those who start out paying well usually provide more work with fewer hassles and are easier to get raises from because they have lots of dough to work with. 4) Will this article help me establish myself as a subject matter expert on this topic? If this topic is new to me or this article is another notch in my belt toward expert status, how do I capitalize on it? Can I get more work on this subject in this magazine, for other publications, in corporate or ghost writing? Can I start speaking publicly on this subject? 5) If I hold on to my rights, can I save this article and others like it toward chapters for a book I'd like to write someday? If you write on a subject regularly you may be able to use outlines and research or the articles themselves as chapters in a book you plan to write. Update the articles; write them in the form you would for a book and go to town! Once you've collected a hundred great, published articles on the subject you should have the brunt of your work toward your first great book completed. 6) Can I use my research over for other articles? Just because you don't always hold on to your rights doesn't mean you can't hold on to your research and reuse it again and again in countless other articles. What if half the work for many of your future articles is already done and you didn't even know it? It could be laying right there, in past research and sources that you could give a quick call to for topic updates. 7) Can I market myself as a writer of vendor contributed articles to companies? If you're writing about a company or business owner, do your best work because you may find that you can use this published sample to pitch yourself to write vendor contributed articles. Vendors contribute articles about business or technology to magazines for free to get their byline into the publication to establish themselves as experts for marketing purposes. They will often hire professional writers to ghost such articles and pay you handsomely to do it too! 8) Can I take each subsection of the article, each major point, and use it as a leaping point from which to start a whole new article expanding on just that topic? You may with each sub-point have the beginnings of a whole new idea to query on to the same or another publication! 9) Can the article I'm about to write be pitched as the first in a series? Ah, fooled you, there are actually nine questions you can ask about each article to make more money. Here is that ninth bonus tip! Even if you have already agreed to write this article alone, if you have a good relationship with the editor and believe you would be doing them a service, it can't hurt to pitch it to them. If they agree you'll be viewed as a lifesaver who just relieved the editor by filling two or three slots instead of just one!