How To Monetize Your Writing Skills Online
We all struggle to find happiness in what we do for a living but instead why don’t we do something that really makes us happy? All of us have this thought that motivates us to turn our hobbies and passion into our professions.
Now if you are one of those who love writing and reading books or stories, be it fantasy, fiction or simple poetry then you might want to use your talent to make some money out of it.
It is not an easy task for everyone to earn profits from their passion and requires intense contemplation over the idea and in order to do so one must have all the necessary information that will guide them to make a decision and take a step towards a future they see themselves living.
I’ve tried my best to provide you with the resources that I found useful for beginners and thus here are some of the ways you can monetize your writing skills online:
1) Create a Blog
Blogging is one of the best ways to express yourself and gain some influence. You can start a blog where you can post your thoughts, stories, poems or analysis over some subjects and then monetize it in several ways as follows:
1. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s (or company’s) products on your blog and earn commission over each sale. If you are starting out you probably don’t have your own products to sell. Hence this is one favourable tactic of making money. Some of the well known affiliate marketing programs include — Amazon Associates, Reseller Club, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale and many more.
2. Advertisements
Advertising uses PPC (Pay-Per-Click) model where advertiser pays you for getting clicks on their ads. It is another great option but requires larger platform and a lot of traffic on your blog to make substantial amounts of profit. Google Adsense, Infolinks, Media.net are a few popular go to advertising platforms.
3. Selling Ebooks
Ebook is a way of making some passive income if you have a brilliant idea to support your blog although you can write an ebook irrespective of a blog. Make sure whatever you write provides something meaningful to the readers.
4. Selling courses
Just like ebooks you can have your talent wrapped in online digital courses. Be true to your audience and provide them with valuable content. There are tons of courses available, so ask yourself what unique you are going to offer and create something relatable. Here’s a more detailed guide on monetizing your blog with online courses:
And if you are a talented writer who also loves teaching you can create a course and share your writing techniques to help shape the future generations of writers.
2) Freelance writing:
A freelancer is a self-employed person who offers services to multiple clients and is not committed to a single employer. Freelancing is a vast domain to start with. There are numerous services one can offer to be a freelancer or even a freelance writer for that matter. Here are a few:
1. Be a guest contributor
If you are not looking for a full time job you can be a contributor and write articles for popular sites and online magazines or publications. This can turn out to be a lucrative gig. Publications like Forbes, Business Insider, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Spark The Magazine and many others are always looking for guest contributors.
This one is specifically for Indian magazines:
2. Ghostwriting
A ghostwriter is hired for works like writing blogposts, articles, books, journals, etc. and the credits are given to the client who hires the writer. Ghostwriters are in great demand by celebrities, public figures or busy businessmen for several reasons. A quick search on job boards like freelancer or upwork will yield numerous job results.
3. Content writing
A content writer writes articles, blogposts and other similar content for the web. This might include blogposts available on google like how to make coffee or things to do in quarantine. You can easily look for content writing jobs on linkedin, facebook pages or other job boards. If you need more help on getting started I suggest you check out this playlist:
4. Naming and Slogans
This might seem very simple but not every writer can express their thoughts in single word or a few lines. You might have to find names for companies or write slogans and mottoes for your clients that include newspapers and magazines, online publications, book writers, corporate companies and other businesses. You can search for work on the previously mentioned job boards.
3) Social media marketing
It is a type of digital marketing where social media is used to market a company’s products and services. This includes Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and other media. As a writer you’ll have to write content for graphic designs that are published on social media to attract a following for the brand and create a potential customer base. If you are good at spreading messages and writing attention grabbing content then this can be a lucrative job.
4) Copywriting
Copywriting is similar to what we saw in social media marketing but here our goal is to prompt the reader to take some action. So a copywriter has to write ads, sales letters, sales emails, etc. usually called a ‘copy’ in a persuasive manner to draw the reader’s attention to perform some action like visiting the company’s page, subscribing to a service, providing email address or making a purchase.
5) Editing and Proofreading
An editor’s job is to check for any mistakes, inconsistencies and repetitions in the book. An editor has to analyze and structure the manuscript and work his/her magic to enhance the story telling experience.
Proofreading comes after this wherein the proofreader has to check for quality before the book goes into mass production. The proofreader corrects any mistakes and compares the edited copy with the proof to check for any missing pages.
Conclusion
There you have it. Hopefully this list helped you push yourself to go beyond and make a change. As you dig deeper you’ll find tons of other ways to earn online but find your creative inspiration and go ahead with it. Doesn’t matter if you are talented enough or not just dare to tread the path today and everything will fall in place. Don’t wait for nothing, start today itself.
