Write for Money - You Can Do It

It’s amazing how the road to ‘making money’ for writers has opened. Maybe you’ve been thinking about it, or maybe you’ve even tried your hand at writing to earn an income or simply to supplement your income, but just haven’t seen the light at the end of the tunnel.

Well, take a step back, look around, and take a new stab at it, because now’s the time to write for money.

You might be wondering what it means to ‘write for money.’ The answer to that is simple: any form of writing that provides payment is writing for money. You may ghostwrite articles or books, maybe you write your own articles and books and submit them to publishers, or maybe you write white papers, e-books, newsletters, landing pages, greeting cards, or other content, if you get paid for writing it, it’s writing for money.

Write for Money – Create Content

But, it does go a bit beyond that simple answer. Along with actually being paid for the content you produce, you can also write a 300 - 400 word post for your monetized blogsite or website. While you’re not actually paid for the post content itself, the content will bring you traffic from which you have the potential to earn money. The relevancy of the content to the product you’re offering is an important factor for conversion, as is the quality of the content, so keep that in mind. Another important factor is to post your content on a regular basis.

Conversion is when a visitor to your site actually buys what you’re offering, so you will need to create a webpage that motivates visitors to click on the BUY button.

But, back to how you can write for money.

Write for Money – Create an eBook

One content format that is taking off is writing and self-publishing e-books. Due to the ease of creation and easy access to self-publishing services such as Amazon’s Kindle, and other sites such as Smashwords.com and Lulu.com, writers now have a platform to publish e-books with absolutely NO out-of-pocket costs.

No more endless submissions and rejections, now you can just write and self-publish in e-book format. And, most of the selling price goes to you - the self-publishing services do take a small percentage of your sales.

While being able to self-publish with ease and no cost is great for writers, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll make money. If your intent is to write to make money you will want to produce informational e-books. Information is the most effective type of content for earning money.

Informational content can be in the form of a simple three - five page report or a 100+ page e-book. Whatever the word or page count is you will need to make sure the information you provide is something online searchers are looking for, and it needs to be valuable and polished.

How do you determine what people are looking for?

To find what online searchers are looking for you will need to do keyword searches.

For example: I wrote an e-book on marketing books. I came up with a few titles and then did a keyword search using https://adwords.google.com. I found that adding “How to” at the beginning of one of my titles was within my target number of searches, so I titled it How to Attract Customers With Informational Marketing.

You should be cautioned though that marketing information is an ever-changing topic. What’s relevant and savvy today maybe useless six months from now – marketing technology is constantly evolving and therefore marketing strategies are often changing. While some basic marketing information is steadfast, it may be wiser to go with an evergreen topic, like writing, health and fitness, gardening, etc.

Whichever write for money strategy you use be sure your content is polished. This means self-editing and proofing your work before you publish it. Just because self-publishing is easy to do and no one is monitoring your writing, your content is still a reflection of your writing ability and your professionalism.