Earn Money Online Through Selling Word Clouds

I show you how to create a word cloud and how you can earn money from selling it. This method to earn money online is the perfect starting point if you don’t have much experience nor money to invest.

Investment needed:	None!
Working hours:	A few minutes for creating a word cloud + time for promotion
Earning possibilities:	Between $4 (Fiverr) and $50+ (own website)
Skills needed:	Designing skills are optional – perfect for beginners!

What is a word cloud?

Word clouds, or tag clouds as some people call it, are visualized words that are all related to one topic. For example, a word cloud on internet marketing could include words such as AdSense, Facebook, business, online, money etc.

Often the words have a different size. In this case, the biggest words are either the most important or the most frequent ones. Word clouds can be created around a topic, a website, a book, a person and anything else that can be described with a bunch of words.

This is a word cloud of the website you are reading right now – profitarmy.com:
profitarmy.com word cloud

Who needs a word cloud?

Everyone who wants to educate or explain others about a certain topic. A journalist could use one to explain something to his readers, a teacher to his students, a blogger to his readers, a business to its customers.

Taking the last example, a business owner could make clear what his business website is about with one single graphic instead of a long text. A word cloud perfectly fits on an “About Us” page and many businesses already have one.

I have also seen word clouds on the back of business cards. Word clouds are especially suitable for social media, as an interesting word cloud has the potential to go viral.

Another advantage is that a word cloud is very easy to understand. Think of non-native speakers or very young people, they often don’t have the vocabulary to understand very complex texts. However, such a text converted into a word cloud and they can get the gist of the text easily.

How to create a word cloud

Writing dozens of words would be a bit boring and time consuming. The easier way is to extract key words for the word cloud automatically.

1. Get the main words

It doesn’t matter if you want to create a word cloud of a website or a text, you just need to be able to access it on your computer. Then you can use the free services below.

Use TagCrowd

Go to TagCrowd.com and choose whether you want to extract words from a website, upload a file or copy and paste a text. In the options, you can choose the language of the text, the number of words that should be extracted, if you want to exclude words and other convenient features.

Word tag generator at TagCrowd.com

TagCrowd.com options

This is the outcome for profitarmy.com with default settings.

TagCrowd.com outcome tags for profitarmy.com

There are some unsuitable words I don’t want my site to be associated with. Maybe the same happens with your site, too. Don’t worry, we can replace them with better words before the actual word cloud is created.

Use WordSift

WordSift is maintained by students of Stanford Universiy and is basically the same as TagCrowd. The difference is that you can only copy and paste text for visualization and that the result can slightly vary from TagCrowd.

Screenshot of WordSift

In this example, I copied the main page of profitarmy.com into the box.

WordSift outcome tags

Hint: If you want to make a word cloud on a specific topic, consider using the corresponding Wikipedia article.

2. Create a word cloud

Now that you know how to get the main words of a text or website, it’s time to create a nice looking word cloud. There are three options to do so: you use a free word cloud generator, a paid one or you use graphic design tools and create one yourself.

2.1 Free word cloud generators

Wordle.net

A good and free word cloud generator is wordle.net. There is no annoying licensing stuff to consider and it’s easy to use. You just have to copy the outcome of TagCrowd or WordSift into the textbox and press “Go”. This is also the point at which you can replace or delete words you think are not fitting well.

Create word clouds at wordle.net
Through the Java app you will then have numerous options to edit your word cloud. You can change colors, text position, font etc. until you are satisfied with the result.

Example word cloud of profitarmy.com created at wordle.net

Saving the word cloud is a bit tricky, as there is no direct image export. You can make a screenshot of the word cloud or you print it with a .pdf printer, e.g. with the free PDFCreator.

HTML5 Word Cloud Creator

An alternative to wordle is available at timc.idv.tw. This word cloud generator functions very similar. The advantage is that you can put the word cloud look in a specific shape, e.g. a circle, star and arrow. When you are on the homepage, scroll down to “Copy & Paste” or “File” to feed the generator with your text.

HTML5 Word Cloud Creator

Choose a color theme, shape, font and gap size of the words. Press “Save” when you are done and it will save a picture of the word cloud in .png file format to your computer.

HTML5 word cloud creator outcome

2.2 Paid word cloud generators

Imagechef.com

Another word cloud creator can be found at imagechef.com. However, the outcome will contain a watermark which is only being removed for paying users.

This word cloud generator provides more options than wordle. The best feature is that there are different templates, which will make the word cloud look like a certain symbol, for example, a heart, a lock or a checkmark like you can see below.

imagechef.com word cloud

Tagul.com

The word cloud generator at tagul.com is very similar and also allows to use a range of shapes. The price for licensing an image for commercial use is $5.

Word cloud generator at tagul.com example

2.3 Generators only for non-commercial use

There are other word cloud generators, however, word clouds created by them are only licensed for private use. This means that you can use the pictures on your website, but you cannot sell them to other people. This post is about earning money through selling word clouds. Therefore, I just list these generators here for the sake of completeness.

worditout.com
tagxedo.com

2.4 Create a word cloud yourself

To create highly-professional looking word clouds you’ll need to create them yourself. This is also the best way to get the cloud in a special form, e.g. in the form of your company logo. In my opinion, the best program for that is Adobe Illustrator (because of vector-drawing), but it’s possible with Photoshop and other image editors, too. I have collected interesting and unique tutorials for each below.

Earn money online through selling word clouds

Of course you can create word clouds only for you, but there are people who are willing to pay for word clouds. Journalists, bloggers, webmasters, teachers – they can be useful for a bunch of people. Let’s just hope they all aren’t reading this article 😀

Sell word clouds on Fiverr

The top word cloud selling gigs on Fiverr have hundreds of sales. It might be a good idea to get a piece of this cake!

Word cloud Fiverr gig

Sell word clouds on stock photo sites

People looking for stock photos, e.g. journalists and website owners love to include word clouds in their articles. You could create word clouds on actual or evergreen topics and hope to make some cash.

Word clouds on iStockphoto.com

Word clouds on Fotolia.com

Create t-shirts with a word cloud design

Another method is to sell t-shirts with a word cloud design. You can extract words of a famous book, poem, movie or TV series and create an advertising campaign on Facebook, AdWords etc. targeting fans of it. It’s also possible to choose general topics that move people in some way, e.g. you could create word clouds based on emotional quotes.

The example t-shirt below is taken from zazzle.com. The words are from a 19th century novel by English author Jane Austen.

T-shirt with a word cloud on it

Create your own word cloud service

If you want to make bigger sums of money, you should consider creating your own word cloud designing service. This enables you to charge the prices you want. However, it will cost you some money to create a website where you can offer the service.

Get a domain, web hosting, WordPress + Genesis Framework, a good-looking theme and you are ready to go! Customers can be attracted by advertising or directly contacting businesses that might be interested. You can also search on Google images for sites using word clouds. If they already have pictures of word clouds on their website, they might be interested in having an even more amazing one created by you.

Summary

A word cloud is a visualization of words
They are used by a bunch of people (journalists, bloggers, business owners etc.)
To create one, you first have to extract the main words of a text or website with TagCrowd or WordSift
The actual word cloud can be generated with free websites, such as wordle and HTML5 word cloud creator, paid websites like imagechef or self-created with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and GIMP
You can sell the word clouds on Fiverr, stock photo sites, t-shirt stores and create an own service website

I hope you learnt how to create word clouds and got some ideas on how to monetize this new skill. Just try it yourself. It’s not rocket science.

Good luck!

Earn Money Online Through Selling Word Clouds – Video Tutorial

Click here to read the transcript

Hello, my name is Sgt. Kraut and today I will be showing you how you can create and earn money online through selling word clouds.

The first question is: “what is a word cloud?”. A word cloud is a picture consisting of different words. In this case, the word cloud you can see right here, is about my website – profitarmy.com. But it could also be around a certain topic or about a text or a book or whatever is made out of words.

Okay, now let me show you how you can earn money through selling this kind of word clouds.

First, we go to fiverr.com. I already opened it up here and fiverr.com is a website where people sell things for $5 and this person here sells word clouds. He creates them for other people and you can see right here he has 440 buyers, 100% positive rating, so it works quite well for him.

And another possibility to earn money online through selling these kind of word clouds is to sell them on stock photo sites, like for example istockphoto.com. This a site where people come who are looking for a certain picture: lots of journalists, designers, bloggers, so whoever needs a picture goes to these sites and buys a picture from there. You can see many word clouds are here and whenever someone buys the license for using such an image then the creator gets paid. If you create the word clouds that people are looking for, you will get paid. And this is not only on istockphoto but also on other stock photo sites and not only in English, you can see a German one right here. So in every language.

Another possibility is to create T-shirts with a word cloud design on them. You can see here this site is called zazzle.com. I don’t know how it’s pronounced, but I think like this. It’s a site where you can offer a design and then it will be printed on T-shirts and shipped to the person who ordered the T-shirt. You can see many different designs; some are around a topic, others around a book or a country, or whatever. That’s also a nice possibility.

Now, I will be showing you can create such a word cloud. The first step is we have to extract the main words out of a site or the text or whatever we want to use. For this example, I will use my website. I go to a site called tagcrowd.com. This offers the possibility to type in a text or give it a URL or upload a file and it will then create tags, which basically means the main words of the text. I already typed in my website here. Below that you have some options, like the language of the text, maximum number of words, but for this example I leave everything as it is and just press “Visualize”. TagCrowd now extracted the most important words of my website. The bigger the words are, the more often they occur on the website or in the text. We can use these words, but I don’t want to use every word there because I think some words are not fitting well and I will edit them in the next step.

Now that I extracted the main words of my website, the next step is to put them into a word cloud generator. To do that, I will just copy the outcome of TagCrowd and put it into a site called wordle.net. I have to paste in the text and now I have to edit. I have to remove words I don’t like and I have to replace them by words I prefer more. Let me quickly do that and then I will be showing you how you can actually generate the word cloud out of this text. Okay, now I replaced that I think do not fit well and wrote some words several times. The reason for this is that they then will be shown bigger in the final word cloud. Okay, I press “Go” and have to wait for the Java app to start. Yeah, now you can see this is randomized, so it gives me a random example. Now I can edit the font. Maybe I want this one and the layout, the text; I want some text to be horizontal and some vertical but mostly horizontal, so it can be read easily. I want another color. Maybe like this. I want some more variation of colors, but you can also just press “Randomize” and just press it until you are satisfied. This one looks nice I think and then when you are happy with the result you cannot save the picture directly. You have to take a screenshot or there are also some PDF printers where you can print the picture into a .pdf document and then work from there.

wordle.net is not the only word cloud generator. I want to show you another one. There’s a small difference and that is that we cannot copy the outcome of TagCrowd into the word cloud generator because it would then create a word cloud out of these words. We have to put in the raw text. In this case, every word text that is on my website. I just copy and paste it into this generator. Don’t worry about the domain. It’s a bit difficult to understand and difficult to read, but I will write everything in the description below, so you can click from there. Okay, then I scroll down to “Copy and Paste”, paste in all text and press “Start”. Like at wordle.net it now gave me a random example. Now, I can edit. I can choose other colors by clicking here. Maybe like this and then I can edit the shape. Now it looks like a cloud, but I can also make it look like a rectangle, or like an arrow that points to the right, or like a star. And I can choose another spacing between the words. Maybe so they are closer to each other. I can make the text bigger or smaller. When I’m happy with the result I just have to press “Save” and I can save a .png file to my computer.

I hope I could give you a short overview on how to create word clouds and where you can sell them. Please look below in the description I put in all links to the different generators and if you want to read what I said here in detail, you can go to my blog because I wrote blog post on this topic. And that’s it. This was my first video tutorial. I hope you don’t mind small mistakes and thank you for watching!

Earn Money Online Through Selling Word Clouds