You really can make money writing online, and while there’s fierce competition, there’s also a few different strategies. You can become a blogger, write guest posts or be a freelance writer.
Freelancers write for anyone who will pay them and you can find work on sites such as Fiverr.com and Upwork.com. Or you can build a following online with Substack.com. Substack.com is full of creative writers who charge subscription fees for people to see their work.
As a blogger you can create content and publish it yourself on a website. Free blog sites such as Hubpages.com, WordPress.com and Blogger.com allow anyone to create content and publish it online completely for free. You can monetise your work with ads or affiliate products.
But there’s downsides to writing online too. Many blog sites are well over subscribed and getting found in the online noise can be difficult.
If you’re selling a subscription access to your work, you’ll need to build up a portfolio first so people know what they’re getting. With sites such as Fiverr and Upwork, writers work for next to nothing from countries such as the Philippines and India where the cost of living is low. This can mean it’s all the more difficult becoming established as a writer and making a good living from it.
Make Money Writing Online – Blogging
Blogging is one of my favourite ways to make money from the internet. You can monetise a blog in a number of ways once you have built up some traffic to it. This does take time and you should think carefully about your blog topic before you start out. It can take several months or even years to become established as a blogger. But once you are, you can even earn a passive income from blogging.
A simple strategy to make money from blogging is to write about a topic you have passion for and sell affiliate products from your blog.
Initially there’s quite a lot of work to be done with blogging. But over time you should find more and more people naturally visiting your content once you start appearing on the search engine results pages of Google. At this stage you can monetise your blog through using adverts or selling affiliate products. To sell an affiliate product from a blog you can simply link to it with your affiliate link. There’s affiliate programs available in almost any topic you could think of. To find them, just look on Google for “{insert your topic} affiliate program”.
So if your blog was about motorcycles, you would look for “motorcycle affiliate program”.
You could then join the program and promote products relating to the topic of your blog.
Make Money Writing Online – Getting Your Content Found
The hardest part of blogging is getting people to find your blog on a consistent basis. To do this, you will need to create a lot of content upfront, before you can make any money from it. Many bloggers simply blog for pleasure, rather than to make money and there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet. That’s a lot of competition and Google can only rank so many blog posts on the first page of their search results – where most people look for online content.
But once you are established you can even make money from your blog on complete autopilot, making affiliate sales in your sleep! See also how to earn from blogging.
Summary
There’s a variety of ways to make money writing online:
- Use Upwork.com, or Fiverr.com to bid for freelance writing jobs
- Do a Google search for freelance writing jobs
- Become a blogger and create content on a website – sell affiliate products from your blog
- Use a free blog platform such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com or WordPress.com to write for free. Monetise your content with affiliate products or advertising space.
- Create a lot of content on Substack.com and charge a subscription to view your work.
Like any freelance work you’ll likely have to put in some hours establishing yourself as an authority in your writing field. There’s stiff competition online for freelance jobs and for bloggers too with over 600 million blogs online.
Checkout “Niche Blogging For Profit” for more on my blogging strategy.