How to become a successful freelance writer – online

A Writer’s Life

In making money online as a freelance writer, my career has changed over the years due to the changes in my skills and changes in the Internet.

Earning Money

Although I can now make a living full time from writing, I use diversified marketing techniques to get enough work.

I have five main marketing techniques that I use to find work:

• Visit forums where marketers hang out and advertise my writing services in a signature file.
• Visit content mills like Demand Studio and pick up work from an open order pool.
• Visit job sites like Rentacoder, Elance, Guru, etc.
• Get clients by handing out my business card at business conventions.
• Create mini websites and write reviews about the latest merchant release. Here I get paid a commission when people buy the product.

I use the following marketing techniques.

• A blog that serves as a branding vehicle for my services.
• Social media followers on Facebook and Twitter.
• Video marketing. Putting free videos on high traffic websites like YouTube.
• Article marketing. Putting free articles on popular article directories.

The money I earn will vary considerably. On one end of the scale, if I were to write a 500 word article for a content mill, I would earn $7.00. On the other end of the scale, if I were to write a 500 word review for my own affiliate I earn an average of $300.

Challenges

The main challenge writing online is that there are a lot of people willing to write for a $1 to $4 an article. Of course, these articles are not very good, with lots of spelling and grammatical mistakes, and the content has usually been scraped from somewhere. However, many marketers and bloggers are not at all interested in quality, so long as the articles have the right keywords and get indexed by a major search engine.

This low pay can be found everywhere: forum, content mills, and even bidding sites. This competition is enough to discourage the most gifted writers. If you write like Hemingway, you will be paid as much as someone who averaged C+ in high school for English.

The way to overcome this challenge is to continue to improve skills and to find more lucrative markets and work with better clients.

Goals

As a writer, I have established 5 goals.

1. Find better paying clients. I want to get clients who are interested in creating quality content that gets traffic from search engine optimization and social media. Some marketers recognize that it’s important to write original and interesting content that adds value to a reader’s life. Over time, this creates more traffic and brands the marketer as someone who produces quality. In the long run, this will create a profitable business.

2. Improve my productivity. By increasing the speed with which I research and write articles, as the faster I am, the more work I can do per hour.

3. Write more for myself. It is much more profitable to write content that earns commission sales than to write for other marketers.

4. Upgrade the type of writing I do, from article writing to copywriting. Copywriting pays much more than article writing and it is the next step in my career growth.

5. Learn more about marketing. The better I understand marketing, the more I can sell my writing services or make money from affiliate commissions.

Louise Baker is a freelance writer and blogger who usually does auto insurance comparisons over at CarinsuranceComparison.Org. She recently wrote about finding cheap car insurance quotes.

Tagged as: Hidden job market, manage your online profile, work the room