Can you make fast money from writing online?

Well it all depends what you mean by ‘fast money’. I was browsing on Yahoo Answers recently and it was amazing how many people wanted to know about making money from writing, how easy it was and whether they could do it quickly. All these questions started around two years ago, when the economy was really going to the dogs. You can’t blame them for asking, but why is it I wonder that they all immediately think of writing when they want some fast cash?

I totally understand that many people are looking for extra streams of income. It’s not surprising that they’re looking online for it either. But most people who are actually earning some cash from writing online (or doing anything else online come to that) will know that it isn’t easy and it isn’t fast. It requires effort, perseverance and determination to get anywhere. I remember when I first started looking for writing work it took around three weeks to get my first gig, which turned out to be dire. I learned a valuable lesson from that experience though, and I ended up moving on to my first proper paid gig just a week or two later.

How fast is this ‘fast money from writing’ really going to be?

In theory you could set up an account with one of the outsourcing sites – Elance for example, or ODesk or whatever your own personal choice would be – and start looking for work immediately. If you were lucky you might be able to snag your first writing job within a day or two, complete it in a similar time and get paid shortly after.

But most of the time it is going to take some hard work to get that first paying job. Many would be writers head straight for sites that pay according to how well their published articles perform. Sites like Triond, Hubpages and Squidoo all pay along these lines. You can earn a decent income from them if you work hard enough and you know all the tricks and tips for doing it. It’s something I may write on in more depth at a future stage. I am a member of all three, but I don’t get the time to work on them too much now; client work keeps me busy along with all my other websites and ventures. I have had the most success with Squidoo, although with that said it definitely didn’t earn me fast cash from writing. I do make the odd Amazon sale from there though and I earn a few dollars a month for efforts I put in a few years ago. More than anything my lenses there drive traffic to this blog and to a couple of affiliate sites and links, which is where most of the cash comes from for my efforts.

Is ghost writing the best bet for getting fast money from writing?

I believe so. But you need to get out there and look for work. You can’t expect it to come and find you. The more you can make a name for yourself by creating and maintaining a blog and getting your name known online, the easier it will be to start generating those pennies.

Of course, there are other ways to earn money from writing. Blogging is a distinct possibility, but you need to work at it for a good long while before you start seeing any rewards. This blog started life as a Windows Live blog, before moving over to its own domain a couple of years back. I’ve just redesigned it and gone for a completely new theme as well, so it is in another incarnation. I make a small amount of money from the blog at present, and hopefully this will increase in the future. But it was always primarily designed to help new and budding writers more than anything else. Of course you could always set up a blog on a completely different subject and monetize that instead. If you know all there is to know about growing vegetables, woodworking or any number of other topics, you could be onto a money maker there. But you have to have perseverance – you won’t make fast money from writing a blog.

How can YOU make fast money from writing?

Perhaps this is the best question to ask. My quickest route to cash was to write articles and blog posts for clients. But you may be the best blogger around when it comes to growing vegetables at home. You might know all the tricks of the trade when it comes to getting and monetizing your website traffic. This might appeal to you more than writing for other people.

The point I’m trying to make is not so much to look for fast cash. It’s to look for what will earn you the most money for the long term. Sure you can find a couple of clients and write lots of material for them. If you can do this pretty quickly it could be just what you need to bring in some cash. But if you’re obsessed with affiliate marketing, set up a blog and write some product reviews instead. It might be what you’re cut out for. We’re not all cut out to be ghost writers, after all.

So if you do nothing else today, make sure you ask yourself that all important question: “How can I make fast money from writing?”

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

Now I am very familiar with the fact that doing something for the first time is going to be scary. I’ve been a member of the Warrior Forum for quite some time now, but I have seen it in a whole new light this week.

Let me explain. As you may know from the advert that appeared on my blog a while back, my partner and I now run a PLR store alongside our other online ventures. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while and thanks to Tiffany Dow’s 30 Day PLR Challenge we’ve created lots of packs and started selling them fairly frequently as well.

But we hadn’t run a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) before and we knew it would be worth doing for lots of different reasons. Publicity, promotion, helping us build a mailing list, oh, and sales of course.

So here it is – you can find our special offer for Halloween PLR packs here. We’ve done well with it already and we’re thinking about diving in again in a while with another offer of some kind.

But I certainly learned a thing or two about the sentence, “feel the fear and do it anyway.” You’ve probably heard that one before – and boy does it make sense! It did feel nerve wracking offering something for the first time. But now we’ve done it the next time will be easier for sure.

The strangest thing was writing content and then looking for customers for it. This is how it works with PLR of course, but it made a change from my usual client based work. I’m not planning on scaling back on that side of things for a good long while yet, but it’s nice to know that I have added another string to my writing bow this week.

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

If you have visited my blog over the last few days you may have noticed an ad on the right side of the page that says ‘PLR Articles Online – now open’. This is our brand new PLR store, run by my partner and I, and we already have five packs of articles in it for sale.

Why PLR Articles Online?

Basically I have been wanting to branch out into PLR for over a year now. It was planned to happen last year but never did because there was too much else going on. So 2011 was to be the year when we were going to launch this new part of our online business, and now we have in the form of PLR Articles Online.

PLR Articles Online

I have read a lot about PLR articles online in the last year or two, and there is definitely a good market for it. Lots of writers have branched out into providing this service, and since I am often too busy to take on lots of new clients, I wanted to make sure I could offer another service as well. I got a course from someone I respect a lot online, Tiffany Dow (you may have heard of her) and this course has spurred me on to create some article packs to kick the PLR Articles Online site off with.

PLR Articles Online has PLR article packs available at low prices for anyone who needs them.

If you have a need to buy PLR articles online, come and check out our store now at http://www.plrarticlesonline.com. You’ll notice that we have also added a contact form at the top right of the home page where you can ask for specific packs to be created. They might even be in the pipeline as we have plenty more topics to tackle in the near future.

What will the future bring for PLR Articles Online?

Lots of people have the need to buy content for their websites, no matter what subject they are focusing on. PLR can be a good bet for people who want to get the most for their money, because with a simple rewrite of the content (done in just a few minutes) it can be used as a unique piece of content.

I’ve learned a lot about PLR since we decided to put the site together and launch it. It might be early days but things are looking very good indeed, and PLR articles online will undoubtedly be another focus of mine in the coming weeks and months. Take a look at the new PLR Articles Online site now and see what you think.

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

One recent opportunity that has come to my attention is a competition being run throughout the month of July to write an article for the How To Books website.

Write an article and be in with a chance of winning £200

Write an article for How To Books

According to Nick Lewis of How To Books, the best article submitted to the site in July will win £200.   The winner will be announced in the middle of August.  This should give you a big enough reason to write an article for the site to see how you get on with it.

Write an article for How To Books and keep on earning from it in the future as well

In addition to the prize the site is offering during July, it also pays a portion of Google Adsense earnings that each article receives.  So as well as having the chance to win £200 when you write an article during July, you could start bringing in a reasonable income from any articles you submit to the site that are subsequently published.

This is just one way you could start earning money from writing online.  When you write an article for this site, it could start you off on a whole new career as well.

Need more information before you write an article for How To Books?

If you have any queries about the competition you can direct them to competition@howto.co.uk.  More information is available online at http://www.howto.co.uk/competition.html.  Good luck – and remember, when you write an article for the competition it could be the start of regular earnings with How To Books too.

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

It’s been a while since I wrote anything for Triond, but I decided to try them with a new article yesterday about online ghostwriting jobs which has since been accepted.  You can add your own Adsense code to your articles now too, which is part of the reason I wanted to add another one to see what happened.

Advice about finding online ghostwriting jobs

Are you good at finding online ghostwriting jobs?

It’s called ‘Online Ghostwriting Jobs – Are You Using All The Ways You Can Find Work? and the title is pretty self explanatory.  I’ve touched on this subject before so hopefully you will find it useful.  It seems a lot of people are out there wanting to know how to find the best online ghostwriting jobs, and given the current state of play with the economy and job losses, it isn’t hard to see why.

How many online ghostwriting jobs are out there?

You know, when you first start looking you might think there aren’t enough to go around.  But when you keep on looking you will start to unearth all kinds of things.

Online ghostwriting jobs are there in their thousands, believe me.  It just takes perseverance to find the best ones for you.  It only took me a few days to find my first one (which was a pretty dire job with hindsight, but it got me started) and from then on it was all pretty good news.

Can you find enough online ghostwriting jobs to make a living at it?

I certainly did, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t either.  It just takes time and perseverance (yes it’s that word again) to get the results you want.  I cannot guarantee you will be successful though – that’s up to you.

In the meantime, if I make any further progress with Triond, I’ll let you know.  Until then, why not read the article and see whether it could lead you to your very first of many online ghostwriting jobs?

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

Another hub about online writing?

You bet.  I have been writing a few new hubs about online writing and other subjects for Hubpages recently as part of my online writing efforts, and one in particular has got off to a great start.

Not surprisingly it is about online writing.

I am often asked where I find the jobs I get as a writer, and where I make the connections that enable me to be a full time online writer as well.  So I decided to write this hub to reveal some of those answers.

Clearly it has touched on a popular topic and answered something a lot of budding online writers want to know!  You can read the hub by visiting it here at “The methods I use to find online ghostwriting jobs.”

How much could you earn from Google Adsense when delving into online writing with Hubpages?

I hope you enjoy it.  I also hope you may feel inspired to write for Hubpages yourself.  The main reason why I write for them – apart from the fact that I love writing and I like to do something for myself as well as writing for clients – is to earn some money from Google Adsense.

How does Google Adsense figure in the subject of online writing for Hubpages?

It’s easy.  All you need to do is associate your Adsense code with your Hubpages account.  That’s it!  You can then focus on writing some good hubs that ideally bring in traffic and result in people clicking on the ads that appear next to them.

This starts trickling money into your Adsense account – a trickle that will eventually turn into a flood (hopefully!).  Some hubbers are already reaping significant rewards from their online writing efforts on this site.

So why not set aside some time to try online writing for Hubpages now?

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

How important is your writing income to you?

Knowing how much writing income you earn from your online writing (or any other writing you do, come to that) is exceptionally important.  You may not be so worried about it if you only write part time for some extra cash.  But if you want to turn that part time income into a full time writing income, you’ll certainly need to know what direction you are going in.

Important things to consider as a full timer with regard to writing income

Is your writing income heading in the right direction?

If you are a full time writer it is even more important to know what your writing income is each month.  I’m not saying this because it is imperative you should earn more with each and every month that passes, because this isn’t necessarily the case.  I always try to increase my writing income in different ways each week, and for the most part I do manage that.  But if there happens to be a week when my earnings go down for some reason, I don’t get too hung up on it.  There is more to life than money and freelancing, after all.

The task of monitoring your writing income

But with that said I do always focus on making a note of how much I earn on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.  I always want to be sure I am bringing in more than enough to pay all the bills and get the quality of life I never had when I was working as an employee for someone else.

And since I always jot these figures down in my diary (I always keep a diary and have done for several years) I can look back and see whether I am doing better now than I was, say, this time last year or even two or three years ago.

Keeping track of your writing income is important in lots of different ways.  Primarily I can make sure I am earning enough each day to pay the bills.  In addition to this I can see how well I am doing when compared with the same time last year.  And I can also prevent myself from having unnecessary worries.

Peaks and troughs

For instance certain times of the year are invariably a bit quieter than others.  The run up to Christmas is notorious for going this way, although since my partner and I also have an eBay business this actually works really well.  I get less writing to do and more time to help pack up dozens of orders on a daily basis!

So if I get a quiet time the first thing I do is look back on the previous year to see whether my writing income was the same back then as well.  More often than not it turns out to be just like that.

It’s up to you how closely you monitor your writing income for your own personal reasons.  We’re not talking about how much tax you should pay on it, or anything else official like that.  We’re just talking about the things you personally need to know, such as whether you are hitting the goal you set for yourself for bringing in a certain amount of writing income each day, week or month from your writing.

Find out more about goal setting for writers

If you want to know more about goal setting in writing, go to that section of my blog to read more information and ideas.  And don’t forget, you are in charge of your income as a writer.  If you aren’t happy with it, go all out to increase it.  And if you are happy, good for you!  Only you know what level of writing income will make you truly happy.

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

If you read my post from last weekend – apologies for the silence in between, it’s been a busy week! – you will know that I have found time to create a few hubs.  This week I got my regular hub update email and I was pleasantly surprised by what I read there.

Here is a screenshot of the increase in visits to my hubs and to my profile on Hubpages:

Now that is as a direct result of my effort to add a few new hubs to my account.  This week has seen no new hubs from me so far, although I have plans to add perhaps one or two later on this evening if all goes well.

So let’s see how things go from here.  I have picked up a few new fans as well, not to mention some further comments on my new hubs.  Needless to say I will keep you posted on how things progress from here.

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

If you remember from my blog post earlier in the year, it was my intention to start writing some more hubs for Hubpages this year.  Someone I know very well is making a three figure sum every month from the hubs they have on there, most of which comes via Google Adsense.

Now I finished work early today and I was really in the mood for doing some writing for ME for a change.  So I got my thinking cap on and published three brand new hubs in a fairly short space of time.  Here they are:

• Using Google Reader to help you find online writing jobs – this is about a technique I use to keep abreast of the latest writing jobs available.  You can refine this as much as you like until you get just the right results for you.  I’d definitely recommend it.
• What should you be earning as an online writer? – ah the perennial favourite!  Everyone asks this question sooner or later, but you don’t have to settle for whatever you are earning now.
• How much time do you spend searching for online writing jobs? – as you can see, all these new hubs are focused on writing.  This is my niche and most of the hubs I have published on this topic seem to do well.  Watch out for more coming soon.

So it has been a productive evening.  Let’s see how my Adsense earnings start to add up as I add more hubs over the next few weeks and months.

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time

Many writers often point to magazine writing as being the best of the two.  Online writing, they say, is badly paid.  And that is certainly right if you pick the wrong jobs.

But magazine writing is a lot harder to get into and find regular work in.  Online writing on the other hand is easy.  It all depends on whether you want regular work or not.

It could well be that you can write an article for a magazine and get paid several hundred dollars for it.  But how many of those articles are you likely to have accepted in a single month?  Online work on the other hand is much easier to find – and you can get it regularly too.

The other advantage of online writing is that it covers a multitude of possibilities.  Just to give you an idea, here are some of the things you could be writing in the near future if you take this path:

* Website content
* Blog posts
* Articles
* Reviews
* Web pages
* Promotional sales pages
* Product descriptions

And there are many other versions of online writing available for you to tackle as well.  It all depends on what you like to do and what you are good at.

And while some of it is badly paid, you can get very good rates as well if you are prepared to work up to them.  The better your reputation and skills are as an online writer, the more money you will be able to command.  But you must work up to that stage and work at getting some experience and knowledge before you can expect to get those higher rates.

So for my money, online writing will always be better than magazine writing.  I make a good living from it, so it works for me.

My Online Freelance Writing Career - ... earning a living one word at a time