In Part 4 of my Freelance Writing series, we’ll be covering the process by which you go from writing articles to bigger projects. The idea is to start pushing yourself out of your normal comfort zone and write long articles, be a contributor to websites, ghost writing ebooks, copywriting, and writing white papers.
You may be killing it right now writing all day writing articles for companies, but do you want to be doing that forever? For me, freelance writing is a short term strategy to get money and build skill for something greater. Think about when you started writing, it was new and you had to get comfortable writing good short articles in a timely manner. Now that you are comfortable, expand your horizons and become uncomfortable again.
Why would you want to change what you’re doing when you are making money? Well, you may not want to. If you are fine with writing articles, rock on and do work. However, if you start doing bigger projects, there’s way more money in it.
Hundreds per article
Tired of getting $15 dollars per article? How about a couple hundred per article? I found this site browsing for different freelance writing job boards. It offers a pretty good list of sites that will give you over $100 per article.
The catch is that it’s usually very specialized information they want and obviously it needs to be well written. That shouldn’t be a problem as you’re a veteran in the game at this point. Step outside your comfort zone a bit and try writing an article for one of these sites.
Become a contributor
There’s a lot of sites out there that will pay you to become a contributor to their site. Usually this means writing an article every week on a consistent basis, but different sites have different criteria.
Sites like this will require you to have a knowledge of the website’s content and history, so before you pitch any ideas take a look through the site and determine if someone already wrote about it.
By the way, if you have a blog, this is a great way to get more exposure as these sites will usually provide a byline that will include a link to your site.
Like writing crazy stuff?
Ghost writing ebooks isn’t anything new. You can use your freelance sites’ profiles to land gigs writing ebooks for people. Question is, what kind of ebooks? I remember back in 2009 reading this article. It talks about a guy who makes a lot selling ebooks. The gentleman who sells the books never wrote them though and just got freelancers to write them.
The game has changed somewhat since then as you can’t sell ebooks for crazy amounts of money anymore. That doesn’t mean the demand for ebooks has gone down.
Enter Amazon Kindle Self Publishing. When this thing launched, people saw a huge opportunity and started releasing book after book on here. The great thing about it is that if you love creative writing, you could be an absolute superstar on here, and have repeat customers asking for your work.
I first heard about this from Robert Koch of 30 Days To X. He talks about how the best performing books on the Kindle Marketplace are crazy erotica novels.
Recently there was a book on there that went viral called “A Gronking to Remember” which was an erotic novel about Patriots Tight End Rob Gronkowski.
The beauty of this kind of writing is that it’s all up to your imagination. You could go anywhere with these bat shit insane stories and make coin.
Copywriting
My story in copywriting was that I sort of lucked into a chance to do it and didn’t balk at all. I got it done and it was well received and led to a big payday. If you can turn your freelance writing career into becoming a top level copywriter, you can make serious coin.
I have had limited success in this area so I would just suggest reading this article called copywriting 101 and getting a feel for it. After you have read this, give some of these articles a look:
- Secrets of a top copywriting pro
- The Middle Finger Project
- Ten Timeless Persuasive Writing Techniques
White papers
I don’t have any experience in writing white papers myself, but I added them because I know that it’s a lucrative writing career to get into. One friend of mine runs a PR company and would write these papers on the side. He was getting something like a dollar for every word and the papers ran something like 2000 words each. He’d bang out a couple a week and make some good money.
Get Writing, Push Boundaries
Start writing more complex stuff as soon as possible. One way to get better at new projects you are taking on is to practice. Even though you may not be getting any money, it’s always good to practice new writing techniques. Try to write a crazy ebook and see how you do. Pick up some random object and write copy for it.
-Tate
Check me out on Twitter
Follow @Tatetime
Become a Freelance Writer Part 1
Recent Comments