Have you always fantasised about being a freelance writer? Maybe becoming a novelist, a copywriter, a witty columnist or a professional blogger?
Freelance writing is an ideal location independent career, giving you the freedom to write from anywhere and travel the globe as a digital nomad. It is however competitive, challenging to get started if you’re a newbie and perhaps not the most instantly lucrative career choice.
The internet naturally opens up a huge range of options for you to earn money from your writing – from blogging and articles to copywriting and ghost writing. Below I’ve listed a few resources I’ve had bookmarked for a while plus a few others you might find useful…
My Advice
As with any service-oriented business, writing isn’t just about using a scatter gun approach and seeing who will hire you. You should consider the following:
- Find a niche area for your writing such as focusing on writing about a specialist topic, writing for a particular industry or for a group of companies.
- Don’t just focus on writing for print publications such as magazines, newspapers and books; consider online opportunities such as blogs, blog networks and ezines.
- Treat your writing business as a business and create a strategic business plan and a marketing plan as a minimum.
- As with any business, it’s all about building relationships – identify key players in your market and consider how you can begin to build a relationship with them.
- Don’t rely on just one source for your income (your writing); plan and create additional streams of revenue for your writing business (e.g. coaching/mentoring, teaching, reviewing others work, ‘how to’ ebooks etc.)
- Above all, take a good hard look at the quality of your own writing and get others to review it and give you feedback. You will only ‘make it’ as a freelance writer if you can actually write well. If you can’t but want to, then focus first on learning and mastering the art.
Blogs For Freelance Writers
- For copywriting skills, look no further than copyblogger and you might want to start with this article.
- For blog writing and blogging, of course there’s only one resource, problogger.
- Chris Bibey’s blog is a useful resource about freelance writing and blogging and he apparently earns on average about $5k per month from his freelance writing.
- The Fab Freelance Writing Blog looks to have some good information about some of the ‘newer’ (less traditional) freelance writing opportunities (if you can look past the overly-productised right-hand column).
- Leo Babauta writes on Freelance Switch about how to become a freelance blog writer
- Yaro Starak features a post on five steps to starting a freelance writing career.
Paid Writing Opportunities
Demand Studios – is “Demand Media’s production house and powers over 50 websites visited by more than 30 million people every month” – and you can apply to be a freelance writer in your chosen topics.
WriteForCash – only for US writers, pays from $10+ per article.
Hubpages – not so much an opportunity to earn from writing but works a bit like squidoo in that you create pages (hubs) of useful information and earn money via affiliate revenue from eBay, Amazon, Google adsense on your Hub from visitors to your hubs.
Become a Lonely Planet Author and submit your ideas for new books/series or pitch your expertise on some of the countries they’re looking to cover.
Use freelancing sites like WriterFind, WriterLance, Guru, TravelWriters and Elance to pitch for ghost writing and copywriting gigs.