Entries Tagged 'How to Make Money from Your Writing Online' ↓

(Before you read today’s post, check out Yaro’s Blog Mastermind opening page. He reopens the program at 10 AM today. If you want to learn to make money blogging, sign up. You won’t regret it.)

If you want to make it as a writer, you’re going to have some bumps along the way.

Make no mistake about it. You’re going to have a client who drops off the face of the earth right after you send her $500 worth of work. You’re going to farm out some work to someone who proves to be unreliable. You’re going to lose a gig somewhere, not because you couldn’t land the client, but because you couldn’t find the damn order in the middle of your chaos.

In my freelance writing business, I’ve been going through some growing, although most of it hasn’t been painful. In the last three months I’ve landed several new clients and found cause to bring some other writers into the fold. I’ve even been able to bring my wife, Angie, on board to help me keep tabs on everything and to help get new clients.

Yes, there have been some dips and hurdles, but overall this growth is good.

I’d just like to say, while I’m here, that Angie is amazing. She’s got something like a 60% conversion rate when bidding projects already. We wondered at first if it was beginner’s luck, but the gigs keep on coming. Yeah, my portfolio is impressive. I do excellent work, and it speaks for itself. But she’s got the goods when it comes to hooking clients and getting them to really consider hiring us.

Along with this growth, I’ve had to modify my business plan. I’ve written many times about the need for both vision and flexibility in that vision. While you can’t guarantee that a given endeavor will or won’t succeed, you can adjust as needed to ride the unexpected waves.

What am I getting at with all of this? Just sharing my journey, folks. That’s what this blog is about, after all.

I’m curious about your stories, though. If you’re a freelancer, are you working solo? Have you had growing pains, and what sort? If you’re not yet making a living with your writing, what do you envision in the long term? Will it be just you, will you have a writing team, or will you just have support staff?

I’ve got a post today over at Freelance folder called How Freelancing Is Like Network Administration. Give it a look, and feel free to add your comments.

While I’m on the subject, though, I’m curious about something. I do most of my writing in good old Microsoft Word 2007. I’ve had clients request everything from Notepad to Word Perfect formats. Usually, I can just write my material in Word and export it. I even do that with blog posts, making sure to paste the text in the HTML editor in WordPress so as to avoid all those goopy Microsoft Word HTML add-ons.

What I’m wondering is this: how do you write? Do you use one of the “writing-room” type programs, or do you use a Word Processor? Tell me why your method is best; I really just need an excuse to dump Word!
photo credit: House Of Sims

As you all are well aware, I’m not in the “Make Money Online” blog crowd. Like I said the other day, I blog when I’ve got something I think will be useful to other writers. I write about common mistakes, ways to improve your writing, and even about some of the online writing tools that I use.

I tend to focus on the “how to be a better writer” and “how to be a better freelancer” side of things, rather than “how to make money online.” There are plenty of folks out there who are willing to tell you how to make money online, I don’t need to do it.

Unfortunately, a lot of those folks are little more than charlatans and thieves. There are lots of bad guys, and just a handful of good guys. One of the good guys is Yaro Starak. Yaro’s free Blog Profits Blueprint was in many ways the inspiration for this blog, and is a good part of the reason that this blog is so successful today.

Yaro’s got a new free 30-minute video, just released today, called “Conversion Blogging.” The video focuses on leveraging your blogging efforts into a full-time income. In the video, he talks about how to get away from becoming a “page view slave” who makes pennies a day on their blog, and making a real income.

Obviously, the video is a way for Yaro to introduce you to his blog mentoring program, in the same way that the Blog Profits Blueprint does. But even if you just watch the video and read the blueprint, I promise you’ll find something that’s worthwhile, that you can apply to your blogging efforts. Even if you’re like me and use your blog more to get clients than you do to make money, Yaro’s got plenty of sound ideas about generating blog traffic that you should listen to. On top of that, his ideas about “pillar content” are especially insightful and tremendously useful, particularly if you’re just starting out blogging.

Give it a whirl, and then feel free to come back and let me know what you think about it.

People ask me, on a pretty regular basis, how they can get started writing on the web. What’s especially interesting about this is the fact that some of these folks are the same ones who, three or four years ago when I started this gig, sort of snickered. They figured I’d fallen into some crazy scheme that would bottom out in a few weeks.

Five years on, and it hasn’t exactly bottomed out. In fact, things are going swimmingly.

My purpose on this blog, as my regular readers are well aware, is to help Internet writers achieve their dreams. There are several ways I go about doing that:

• There are my regular blog posts, of course. While their frequency can vary, I try to always post at least a couple of times a week, though my unofficial goal is four posts a week.
• There are my guest posts, like I have over at Freelance Folder. My ongoing Violent Truths column and my Seven Deadly Freelancing Sins series are examples. I’ve also been featured on Freelance Switch, Remarkablogger, Freelance Writing Jobs, Meryl.net, and many other sites.
• There’s my writers’ mentoring program, which I’ll be talking about more as we get further into the month of July. I’m still hammering out a lot of details, but I’ve got some interesting surprises coming in that area that I think you’re going to be absolutely thrilled about.
• I also occasionally offer product reviews that I think will be useful to my readers. I don’t do paid reviews, but I’ll often do affiliate reviews. Affiliate reviews are ideal because they allow me to unleash both barrels when it comes to a product. Like the Pen Men, I refuse to review something that I think is completely useless or overpriced.

That’s where I want to spend some time today, on that last bullet point. I want to briefly cover four key products that I consider extremely useful for the new freelancer. One of them is free, and you can get all four of them for less than $100. If you’re just starting out as a freelancer or if you’re exploring the freelance route, each one of these resources will give you a huge boost - if you follow their advice. Understand that I put my own word behind these products. I won’t recommend something to you that I don’t fully believe in myself.

Rockstar Freelancer

I’ve done an extended review of this book previously. I still recommended it as an important resource for new freelancers. Several of you have purchased this book and I haven’t heard any complaints. Check out the review for more information, as well as a link to buy the thing.

Men with Pens’ Write For The Web

To my own dismay, I haven’t yet reviewed Write For The Web here. This book is the perfect companion, though, to Rockstar Freelancer. What Rockstar Freelancer doesn’t tell you about Internet-specific writing, this book does. Oh, and did I mention who the authors are? None other than James Chartrand and Harrison McLeod of Men with Pens. Their advice has proven to be indispensable, even for an old hand like me. These boys know their stuff.

Ninja SEO School

Naomi Dunford over at Itty Biz is, in my mind, one of the sharpest small business consultants on the planet. At the very least, she’s the wittiest. Her SEO School is a well-written, highly readable and amazingly reliable guide to Search Engine Optimization. The best part about it is that she truly advocates for good writing, and recognizes that SEO is only as good as the rest of the writing involved.

Blog Mastermind

Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint is available for free download. I’ve said it before, and it holds true to this day: This document was instrumental in convincing me to start a blog, and was also instrumental in helping me get the blog traffic that I have. I haven’t had a single week where I’ve had fewer subscribers than the week before, and Yaro’s Blog Profits Blueprint was instrumental in that. Yaro also has a blog mentoring program that you might consider if your focus of freelance writing is going to be your own blog.

Some of you may already know this.  Others may not.

For the majority of the early part of my writing career, I wrote under a female pen name.  My alter ego produced literally thousands of articles on parenting, pregnancy, conception, and child rearing.  Chances are pretty good that, if you’ve spent any time researching some of these topics, you’ve read my work.

While I enjoyed the work and it helped to catapult my writing career, the time finally came when I needed to break out, and develop my own brand. 

Check out The Violent Truth of Branding over at Freelance Folder today to learn how I did it, what worked for me, and what pitfalls I fell into along the way.

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While you’re at it, make my friend Ritu happy by visiting my post, “The Exponential Power of Collaborative Effort“ over at Marketing Hackz today, too!