The Best Ways for Modern Writers to Make Money (Especially Online)

Even if your goal is to move mountains of fiction, you’ll probably start your online writing life as a freelancer.

Working freelance means you must always keep your eyes open to new opportunities and remain relatively flexible with what you’re willing to write about. Keep reaching for the diamonds in the mine, but stay on the lookout for the less glamorous jobs that will help you build a solid base as you’re banging away at your dreams.

An entire book could be filled with the different markets and projects for freelance writers. Actually, there is one: The Writer’s Market, published yearly by Writer’s Digest Books. But here’s a brief overview anyway.

Magazine Writer

While magazines have staff writers, most of them also buy stories from freelancers. Pay varies widely, depending on the size of the magazine and the market. Trade publications are often more lucrative than consumer publications, though you may need certain credentials for consideration.

In general, freelance writers send editors a query letter (although these days it’s much more likely to be an email) describing the topic or piece they’d like to write, alongside other details such as length and overall slant. Queries should be short, polished, and contain a hook that will pique the editor’s interest.

Professional Blogger

Many of the larger blogs outsource work to freelancers. Pay varies from $5-$10 per post on the low end to hundreds of dollars at the peak. Depending on the niche, blogging can be fast-paced with a tremendous amount of pressure to either break a story or be first with a relevant take on a hot topic. Writing about something a week after the fact, long after all the big blogs already commented on it, might work for magazines, but blogging is about timeliness. Stay on the cutting edge of your niche, break news, or be among the first to comment on big stories and your writing will be in demand and you can command a higher rate.

Blogging is one of the few arenas where you can craft your own style, mixing journalism techniques with conversational style to create your own identity. Develop yours, but when writing guest posts for other blogs, play by their rules and write to their audiences.

Many blog owners look for writers on job boards, by advertising on their sites and through word of mouth. Establishing a strong online network will help ensure you always have plenty of work.

Web Content Writers

Websites require large amounts of content, from “About Us” pages, to product descriptions, to reader-friendly FAQs. While some opportunities are advertised on job boards, word of mouth and a strong network are necessary to secure the most lucrative leads. Often, web content writers are subcontracted by the site’s designers, so it’s also a good idea to make a few connections in the web design world. Find the right partners and you could find yourself teaming up on many projects.

Many writers look down on writing Search Engine Optimized keyword articles, while others find them a source of steady work to fill in the gaps between more rewarding assignments. Pay ranges from dismal ($1 for a 500-word article) to acceptable ($10-$12 for a 500-word article).

A fast writer can make a decent hourly rate, as long as they’re willing to write uninteresting, keyword-driven copy.

Books

Whether you’re writing your own books or ghostwriting novels or memoirs for others, there are plenty of options for freelancers in this market. In some cases, it’s possible to send your book proposals directly to a publishing house. Others require you to go through a literary agent.

A growing number of writers are skipping the publishing houses and agents altogether. It’s never been easier for a writer to self-publish and market their own material, using the same skills you’ll learn by reading this book. The rapid rise of user-friendly e-readers has opened the market wide and given writers the ability to self-publish without having to spend thousands of dollars on printing and fulfillment.

Though the gap narrows by the day, self-publishing still has its downsides. Most writers don’t have the expertise (or deep pockets) that publishers do, meaning that they either have to pay someone to handle things such as layout, formatting for print and eBook distribution, and cover creation, or learn to do these things themselves. Costs can add up quickly, cutting into whatever profits a book might earn. On the flip side, you can learn to do many of these things with advice freely available on the web. The learning curve can be frustrating, but if you spend some time now, you can save money later.

Another benefit traditional publishers have over self-publishers is a wide distribution and promotion network. This can not only put your books into stores but also publicize your book to millions of people. When you go the indie route, distribution and promotion are entirely up to you. Fortunately, print-on-demand and social media have made it easier than ever to compete with the “big boys.”

Corporate Work

Companies need writers for a wide variety of jobs including newsletters (email and print), annual reports, product brochures and manuals, speeches, and press releases. Some of these jobs are advertised on job boards and freelance sites. Again, it’s having a strong network that will open the back door into most opportunities.

Build a strong professional network, establish an outstanding reputation and keep your eyes and ears open for new opportunities. It only takes a few steady clients for most writers to get their business started right and growing strong.

Most advice aimed at freelance writers would suggest you pack as many clients into your stable as possible. I disagree, at least if you have dreams of writing a book or building streams of passive income. Writing for others is great. It’s wonderful to have people pay you well for your time and your way with words. But writing for clients probably isn’t your dream, and chasing freelance work can quickly grow into a full-time job that pulls you further from your purpose, inch by inch and day by day.

It’s best to book the client work you need to get by, then use the rest of your time to write a better future. Ask yourself: How much business do I actually need?

Make the Most Of Your Time to Make the Most Money

Unfortunately, many writers make the mistake of thinking they need a massive audience or long list of clients to be profitable. This is a stumbling block for many freelancers, and business people in general.

But that simply isn’t true.

You must be smart and strategic if you expect to truly grow your business and pull your dreams closer to you. Good writers can make a great living online, but the stronger your foundation and strategy is from the beginning, the more you increase your odds of success.

Let’s say you want to make an extra $20,000 a month. That’s nearly a quarter of a million per year, which most people would consider a great living.

You can reach $20,000 in countless ways, but don’t make the mistake of believing your income must all flow from one-off writing jobs. Building your own assets is the best way to arrive at a large and growing income, by far.

If you were to try and make $20,000 a month, you would need to either write an impossibly-high word count each month, or have a top-percentage rate to even come close.

Let’s say you were paid $20, per article; you would need to write 1,000 each month to make quota. Assuming you’re working six days a week, that’s more than 40 per day.

If that’s not impossible, it’s pretty damned close.

What if you were to make $50 per article? Much better, right?

Sure, it’s better, but you’ll still have to write 400 articles, or 16 per day. This is doable, but you’ll be burned out in no time. Believe me.

If you shift your aim and worry about building assets instead, your numbers become much different.

Sticking with $20, you still need to move $1,000 units, but now you’re not skinning your nose against the grindstone for every nickel dropped in the jar. EBooks, affiliate commissions, newsletter or membership subscriptions, etc. are all excellent ways to help you quickly build the numbers you deserve. And that’s just based on $20.

EBooks articulating your expertise, affiliate commissions on products you use and respect, and membership subscriptions. Assets can be slow to build and won’t necessarily get you where you want to go overnight, but if you take the time to lay the bricks, you’ll be running down the road in no time.

If you’re dead set on trading time for money, you’ll want to raise your rates and limit your availability as quickly as possible. Focus on the type of copy that has the highest reward and over-deliver with everything that leaves your desk. Good enough isn’t. Make sure your clients love the work you do and they will come back for more.

Plenty of jobs exist for press releases, SEO copy, and even blog copy that pays $200 or more for around 500 words. This rate is perfectly reasonable, but you must be highly focused on securing the work, diligent in getting it done, and delivering something beyond ordinary, while staying undaunted when work is scarce.

But even if you’re getting $200 for copy that takes two hours to complete, there is still plenty of room to grow. If you want to hit $20,000, you’ll have 100 pieces of copy to move through. That’s 200 hours. A great living, sure, but it’s also a full-time job that leaves you little, if any, time to write for yourself.

Don’t think of your $100-an-hour rate as the finish line. See it as a new beginning instead. If you can command $200 for a page or so of copy, you can command substantially more as a consultant.

Many companies with large consulting budgets will pay good money to understand the online space. What if you are a consultant to those companies? A $2,000 fee per month is reasonable to them, and a great boost to your income (while only requiring an extra 10 hours a month from your schedule). Add a couple of companies to your queue, and social proof can double your rate.

Of course, even this is still trading time for money and allowing someone else to dictate your schedule, and therefore not as powerful as building assets. The point is, don’t get trapped behind thick walls of limited beliefs, and don’t get stuck in the same rut as many writers, letting the hamster wheel spin as you do the same things over and over with diluted results. There is no end to the number of ways you can make money. Stay focused, work hard, and never sell yourself short. Draw on the talent and skill set that make you unique, then charge accordingly.

Success is never an accident. Decide how much you want to make, then set a plan to make it.

The Single Most Important Lesson You Should Learn

You MUST build an email list.

This is another one of those points you will hear me stress again and again. Sorry for the redundancy, but even if you forget every other thing I wrote, remember this — you NEED a list.

Though building a list is key to unlocking online limitations, it took me more than two years before I actually did it for myself. Well, at least two years before I did it right.

I followed the advice early, but went about it all wrong. Yes, you want to build a list. More importantly, you want that list populated with potential buyers. I read the advice to “start a list” and so I did. But my list was filled with readers from my first online adventure, Writer Dad. They loved my writing and perspective on life, but they weren’t buyers. And even if they were, I had nothing to sell.

The list you build must be congruent with the products you wish to promote. If you don’t know what those products are yet, give it some thought. Choose a topic you feel passionate about, a subject you could speak on for a long time without getting bored. Your list (or lists) can be extremely lucrative, and readers who opt-in to receive your communication should still be giving you value five years later, provided that you’re still providing value to them.

The right way to build a list is to listen to the needs of your market, give your audience something of tremendous value that they couldn’t get elsewhere, then continue to groom and grow your crowd until they are eager to hear everything you have to say.

This is both easier and harder than it sounds.

Building a list is easy. Every successful person I know online can do this. Yet, doing it well is something else entirely. Fortunately, you’re a writer, which means the one skill most required to both groom and grow a quality list — excellent communication — is the one skill you don’t have to worry about.

Because building a list is extremely important, an entire upcoming post devoted to it. For now, know that having a qualified list of quality buyers you build yourself and maintain by the strength of your own voice might be the single most important thing you do.

Fortunately, growing a list online is the best possible place to do it.

How to Build Your List

Building a list used to be expensive.

Once upon a time, you had to build, buy, or borrow a list. This took a lot of time and even more money. The Internet makes it easy, as long as you know what you’re doing. Websites are easy to build and cost next to nothing, especially if you use WordPress. A quality lead magnet, a highly-optimized landing page, and a few pages of quality copy will give you everything you need to start generating a list.

In less than 24 hours, you can have everything you need to build your list, except traffic. You can see the list of tools and resources that we personally stand behind on our free writer’s toolbox.

Traffic is its own beast, and we’ll cover that more later, but even this can be straightforward as long as you place a bulls-eye on your strategy and avoid the helter-skelter traffic-generating techniques that keep many novices running in circles. Your website will cost next to nothing, and traffic can be free or cheap. This means you can build your list fast and at an extremely low cost-per-lead. Yet, the best thing about building a list online isn’t the speed with which you can build the list, it’s how fast you can optimize that list.

In that same once upon a yesteryear when you had to build your list person by person and stamp by stamp, you would only be able to improve upon your list by sending out new batches of mail, then split testing those results. This is key to maximizing any list, and online isn’t any different.

Split testing and list segmentation are everything; the difference is that online, split-tests can be done in real-time. Free tools such as Google Optimizer, allow you to track what your leads are doing and make the necessary tweaks on the fly.

Split testing has never been easier. You can rotate copy, images, and even the lead magnets (lead magnets are the free quality reports, eBooks, or other giveaway which you offer visitors in exchange for opting in to your list) your visitors see. Whichever giveaway has the highest conversion becomes your control. You can then ditch the rest and start a new test, always improving on the responsiveness of your list.

Constant tweaking leads to superior results. The Internet makes it easy to do more than you thought possible with your list in less time than you ever imagined. But again, it comes down to quality and intention. You can have the biggest list in the world, but if you’re not training your readers to buy, or treating them with respect and over-delivering value at every opportunity, size won’t matter a single bit.

What Kind Of Writing Moves You?

How do you want to make money writing?

Both fiction and nonfiction writers can benefit tremendously from the online writing environment. Up until recently, nonfiction writers have had the edge because they could offer the simple solutions most online searchers were looking for. They could build the info products, coaching programs, and step-by-step programs that could improve the lives of their target market. Fiction, on the other hand, was still just a pipe dream.

As with so many other things in a world that’s never zoomed faster, this, too, has changed. The first year when eBooks outsold print books on Amazon.com was 2010. This is extraordinary and a game changer for writers like you and me. As of this writing, most of the top 100 selling books on Kindle are fiction.

If you’re driven by money, it doesn’t matter what you choose. Both fiction and nonfiction can be remarkably lucrative. The key is to tap into your true passion. Miss this and it’s like sitting in a sailboat without any wind.

Audiences are getting smarter and can see through thinly-veiled attempts to cash in. It isn’t the loudest voice that wins; it’s the most passionate. Put the true you behind everything you do and you’ll constantly inch closer toward the largest possible reward. If writing fiction makes you happy, write fiction. If answering people’s problems makes you happiest, there’s no doubt that’s exactly what you should do.

For the first time in history, it’s possible to be passionate, profitable, and prolific, all at the same time, while passing the publishing gatekeepers who once ordained only the anointed, thereby issuing a silent decree as to what most writers could and couldn’t write.

I want to write everything. Fiction, nonfiction, children’s stories, suspense, murder mysteries, horror, how-to’s, biographies, memoirs, poetry, and romance.

Maybe you’re like me and want to write a little bit of everything too, or maybe you just want to write in one genre over and over again. Cool thing is, you don’t have decide right now. Just get started. Your mind will change along with your momentum.

My writing queue is entirely different now than I imagined it would be two years ago. I have no idea what it will look like five years from now. That’s okay. Get an idea of where you’d like to start, whether it’s freelancing or diving deep into writing your first book. Then get going.

Waiting for inspiration or the perfect idea will murder your momentum. You don’t have to be great to get going, but you do have to get going to get great.

What You NEED To Make It As A Writer

Not to oversimplify too much, but I believe you only need three things to get started: The right mindset, a working computer, and a reasonably set schedule.

We’ve discussed the right mindset required to make it big online. This is non-negotiable. If you think you can enter war without a sword and shield, you’ll quickly find yourself among the broken bodies that litter the battlefield. It’s going to be hard, and you’ll need to be ready.

How deep you want to immerse yourself in this writing life is entirely up to you. Maybe you have a full-time job and you’re only able to write on the side. Perhaps you’re using every waking hour to build your writing career, hurling yourself into the unknown with your arms in the sky and eyes on the horizon.

There is no right answer. Every writer is different, as is every situation. Know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it before getting started. This is the best way to make fewer mistakes and gain early momentum.

You need a computer. Yes, writers can get by on pen and paper. I wrote my first children’s book of around 40,000 words, entirely in longhand. Stephen King wrote all 800+ pages of Dreamcatcher in longhand while lying in bed with a broken body after being smashed by a van. But eventually, someone has to enter the words into a computer (assuming you’re not sending off a typewritten manuscript to a publisher).

Sure, it can be done. But it isn’t just about the writing.

You’re a modern writer and a modern writer needs modern tools. You must be able to put your finished writing in a place where other people can easily find it, and you must be able to network with the readers, fans, and evangelists who will help you get noticed, land lucrative jobs, and, ultimately, sell your assets.

You don’t “have to” do any of this, of course. But if you don’t want to, or are unwilling, you should probably stop reading now. My whole purpose in writing this is to show how online writers can go from good to great and do more than they ever imagined, fueled by their mind, fingers, passion, and drive.

You need to draft a schedule, then do everything you can to stick with it. I’m not gonna lie — this can be hard. And unless you’ve already started freelancing, this is probably harder than you realize. Modern life is frantic. Most of us have trouble keeping up with our day-to-day obligations, let alone adding the Great American Novel or a full-time freelancing career to our plates.

Your schedule will need to be easily adjustable and able to roll with many unexpected punches. Don’t get started until you can set aside a consistent time of day, preferably six days a week, where you can count on being able to focus on your new life as a writer.

This has been an excerpt from the book, Writing Online.

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