Related Posts with Thumbnails

Friday, July 15, 2005

The online writing business requires constant and regular writing

Many writers do not understand that the online writing business is very different from the offline writing world. The economics are totally different and no amount of lobbying and noise will change that.

Sadly, because of this reason, many good writers have stayed away from the online writing business while others have priced themselves out of lucrative assignments from websites, simply because they want the offline world to be automatically transferred online.

In the bricks and mortar world of writing, top freelance writers are accustomed to single writing assignments paying them $300 at the very minimum. Rates for leading magazines can go up to $3,000 or even much higher.

Thinking that you can push a webmaster to pay you $3000 for your writing is just plain day dreaming. The realities online are very different. For starters, in the offline writing market there are a few thousand publications paying good rates to freelancer writers. In the online world there are millions of potential writing markets (and constantly growing even as you read this). The challenge in the old world is finding a way to beat other writers to assignments. In the new online writing business, the challenge is being able to handle enough clients and to do enough writing daily to make a good income.

Online writing business will tend to come in volumes and for you to make money you will need to be a fast writer. There are some techniques to speed up the writing process (which I deal with in my free short online writing business course available by sending an email to writertips at freeautobot.com) but these technique will only help to speed up a writer who already has a good speed.

Indications are that as the number of websites and blogs continue to grow at the current rate, the economics will swing in favor of the online writing business entrepreneur and rates should go up as the demand for good writers continues to far outstrip the supply. Still it is unlikely that a rate of $3000 per article will be common in the foreseeable future.

So the best thing to do is to find a way to make a good steady income from your online writing business with the current rates and the current state of affairs. Actually this is not too difficult. I know online writers who comfortably make $4,000 on a monthly basis, without too much effort and that is by getting paid less than $11 on average for their articles.

The online writing business will favor the kind of writer who leans more towards novel writing rather than the short story or article writer. This is because a novel writer thrives on writing every day and trying to increase their daily output. This is in contrast to the short story writer who waits for inspiration to write his brief piece at virtually one sitting. Or the professional freelance article writer who will tend to spend more time doing research and sending queries to publications rather than the actual writing work.

The huge advantage that the online writing business entrepreneur has is that they can use the power of the internet to guarantee a steady and constant flow of writing jobs which will leave them with lots of time to do what every writer should enjoy doing the most - writing.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

How to get lots of business writing online articles

There’s lots of writing business available online for any freelancer. Just think about it for a minute, every website and every blog needs good writing. Contrast this to the situation before when only a few thousand publications required the services of somebody in the business of writing or a freelancer for that matter. The competition for these writing outlets was so stiff that many of leading ones received thousands of enquiries and proposals from writers every month.

Currently there is a higher demand online for good writing than most of the current online writers can satisfy and what’s more, this demand is growing daily.

Let us look at a few of the techniques you can use to win some of this writing business.

Read ads at writing sites for business

This is exactly how I got my very first client. And let me make it clear that it was a FREE site. The pay wasn’t much, but he forced me to open a Paypal account because it was the only way he made payments. Then he had this software that forced you to write a keyword article in the right way otherwise the software would not be able to save your writing. Before I wrote those articles I was a very experienced offline freelance writer, and I had been online for about a decade but still I learnt a lot working for that client and I will be forever grateful. Bless his soul wherever he is now.

Use a search engine to find all the freelance writing sites that you can and then carefully read the advertisements there and write to a few requesting for work. It won’t be long before some business comes your way.

Remember that clients will always request for writing samples. It is useful to write something and post at sites that accept articles to be posted free. You will then have a link to refer your clients to.

Advertise for business at writing sites

Some freelance writing sites allow freelance writers to advertise for clients and business at their sites for free. This is how I won some of my big clients. Read the advertisements written by the other freelancers at these sites and try and write a better one for yourself.

It is interesting that some freelance writing sites are so effective that almost six months after I had posted my first ad I was still receiving email enquiries from clients that were referring to the ad.

I found these effective sites by trial and error and you can do the same.

Write directly to website owners or affiliates for business

Visit any website and you will see immediately see if they need a writer. Many webmasters may not even have a budget for these services. Send a polite brief email to them and see if you can start off by doing a few articles for a very low and affordable rate and then building up from there. For example if you got only 20 such sites and they paid you only $5 per article every week, that would be $100 a week. Not the sort of cash to get excited about, but a beginning. Remember just like in any other business online writing requires you to make a break and then everything falls in place.

Use the power of the blog to get lots of writing business

Blogs get read a lot. That’s why they are such a powerful marketing tool. You can read my article on how to get high traffic to your blog at the following link

http://big-online-story.blogspot.com/2005/04/write-single-article-and-get-loads-of_25.html

Use your writing skills to promote business at your own affiliate program

The main objective of this blog is to get as many writers as possible to that level where they are pulling in business worth $100,000 per year. One of the quickest ways of achieving this objective is by combining your writing income with income from a good affiliate scheme where instead of spending money buying ads, you use your writing skills to write and post articles all over the net that attract traffic to your affiliate site.

The advantage of this strategy is that you will write your articles once but it will continue to pull in traffic for you for years. And what’s more is the fact that good articles will tend go viral, meaning that they will be posted and re-posted all over the web. Read how my article posted in only a few sites rapidly got re-posted to 16,000 other sites all over the net.

http://big-online-story.blogspot.com/2005/06/how-i-submitted-my-internet-marketing.html


Join our e-course on how to make money from online writing. It’s
free to join, just send an email NOW to writertips at freeautobot.com

Understanding That Online Writing is Business Writing Will Make You a Fortune

Never before in the history of the business of writing have opportunities
opened up and presented themselves in such a large quantity and scale for
writers to easily win so much regular business and revenue.

If you know anything about writers of old you will know that they mostly
starved, some to death. Yes, they often had to pay such a high price
for their love of writing.

Today everything has changed so dramatically and so suddenly. Thanks
mainly to the internet and the huge hungry market it continues to
build at high every day, the business of writing has been changed
forever.

Sadly however, many writers are yet to fully wake up to the new
realties of the internet and the fresh and different business
and revenue opportunities that are suddenly within such easy
reach of any writer. Many offline writers are still
stuck saying that they will never write $3 or $5 articles (see my
article on this controversial subject at

http://100grandonlinewriters.blogspot.com/2005/06/lots-of-extra-money-waiting-to-be-made.html


Yet the same writers had no problem starting off their careers
writing 10-cents-per-word articles in the old days. Some even wrote
for publications that pay in copies and others that don’t even pay (just
to get clippings of their published work. And yet those clippings were
not anywhere near as effective as “online writing clippings” – that
is your articles posted free at article sites, can be today).

But for you to succeed as an online writer you must first understand
that all online writing is business writing. In the bricks and mortar
world business writing is writing about boring stocks and sometimes
boring companies and trying to explain why they are so successful
or why they have failed. Incidentally I personally find such
writing fascinating.

In online writing, the business writing is different. You can write
on any subject, giving a lot of useful details and advice but in
the end, you must find a way of getting readers to do what you want
them to do. Your objective could be to get them to visit your website
or blog for more information and this win higher traffic, which
gives you many possibilities. Or your objective could be to get
them to head straight to your affiliate website.

In other words your writing is always business writing because the
end objective is to sell something, even if it is just ideas. And
yet the moment your writing looks like it is selling, it will be
shunned and people will not want to come anywhere near your writing.
A good example is this article that you are reading so eagerly. It
is actually selling something. Get my point? The kind of writing
articles do online is very different.

Any writer who understands that all online writing is business
writing puts themselves in a very good position to make a fortune
from their online business writing.

For example it will become much easier to attract clients because
no website will assign you to write something that does not help them
sell something.

This business writing that is done online has become even more
interesting in recent times because a huge market has developed for writers
who can write content to attract specific Google adsense advertisements.
Let me explain in a little more detail for the sake of the uninitiated.
Most people who carry Google adsense advertisements quickly notice
that it is extremely important to attract higher paying ads. The way
to do this is by using certain keywords. Usually common keywords in
most subjects will attract low bids (because there are numerous sites
where these ads can be successfully posted) meaning that the revenue
Google shares with the site owner carrying their ads, for clicks will
tend to be low. More unique and rare keywords will tend to attract ads
that have much higher bids on them. There are actually certain Google
ads that pay as much as $100 per click.

The kind of business writing required here is where unique keywords
will be used without the content losing its’ original value and meaning.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of sites that carry Google
ads and many of them are not happy with their earnings and would like
to earn more. Business writing from online writers who understand
exactly what the client wants is in very high demand. By the way it
is very easy for an online writer to quickly become an expert in
this sort of business writing by simply setting up their own blog and
applying to post Google ads and then learning and practicing their
online business writing skills on their own site to start with. They
can even use the same site to attract clients and writing business.


Join our e-course on how to make money from online writing.
It’s free to join, just send an email NOW to;
writertips at freeautobot.com

Monday, July 04, 2005

Online business writing – how to cash in

Currently many online writers and online business writers, feel very much like folks in a ship that is out at sea somewhere but which has run out of drinking water. The fact is that although there is so much water everywhere, getting drinking water becomes a challenge because the water is salty and probably needs some sort of purification and processing to be made drinkable.

That is exactly what led the writer to pen those famous words, “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”

Tremendous demand for good business writing
The growth of the net has been phenomenal. Every day new websites are launched and new blogs started. All of them without exception require the services of a writer. In many cases the site owner does the writing for themselves but quite often, when the site becomes successful, they get too busy that they cannot keep up with the writing chores. Every writer should be busy writing for these businesses and making a success out of business writing.

In many other cases, the webmasters or blog owners cannot write and require somebody to write for them from the inception of the site. All this should be music in the business writer’s ears

The other factor is that articles posted at article directories and other sites have grown in importance as a tool to drive traffic to any website or blog. Not to mention as a tool in search engine optimization. Free articles posted on the net have become a very important part of business writing.

The result is that today, we have the largest and hungriest market for business writers and indeed other writers, in history. Still many writers are finding it extremely difficult to get any online business writing work. I know because these business writers write to me and visit my blog every day.

What hinders writers from making lots of cash from business writing?
One of the biggest hindrances or obstacles standing in the way of writers securing writing assignments, is the fact that the online rate of payment is ridiculously low, more so when compared with offline writing assignments. Many writers fail to realize that the net is different and this huge market for writers is also different from the offline media houses typically paying out a minimum of $500 for an article. Read my article on this subject at http://big-online-story.blogspot.com

But even business writers who are prepared to get busy writing the volumes of articles that are required online to make good money, are still having problems securing business-writing assignments. This should not be the case. All you need to do is set up a system for attracting clients who will gladly and regularly pay for your online writing.

My system for making money from business writing
I have a system in place myself that gives me loads of writing assignments from many different clients. There is no reason why you should not do the same. One of the key tools I use is a blog. You can read my article on how to do this at http://big-online-story.blogspot.com

Here are 5 key things you need to do to generate online writing assignments from clients.

a) Specialize in a certain area of business writing
The web is a colossal jungle where it is very easy for a general business writer specializing in everything and nothing, you get lost and forgotten. The most powerful thing you can do online today is to specialize in a specific area. The smaller the niche, the better. Do not feel that you will be limiting your market. Remember that one of the wonderful things about the net is that you can profit from a tiny niche because your market on the net includes the whole planet.

In fact specialization has always been a very powerful strategy for business success whose importance has been magnified by the net. Look at it this way, the powerful sun, because it spreads its’ powerful rays everywhere reaches the earth as a warm pleasant and mostly harmless source of heat and light. But when you concentrate the rays of a sun to one particular point, using a magnifying glass, you can create fire that can burn down acres of forest and bring damage worth billions, if not zillions of dollars.

How do you select your business writing specialization? It is useful to look for an area in which you have lots of interest in. Your hobby would be an ideal place to start because you are already an expert of sorts in that area.

b) Start a blog to showcase you business writing
As mentioned earlier I have found blogs to be extremely powerful tools in generating business writing assignments. The trick here is to specialize and narrow the target market your blog is targeting. Most huge niches in whatever area you can think of, are already very crowded.

For instance the area I target in my main blog is online marketing. If you do a google search with the words “online marketing” this will give you a good idea of what I am talking about. So I narrowed down the niche to deal in online marketing using articles. I am constantly reading up on the subject, testing and trying out new things to the extent where I know quite a lot about this subject of interest. And anybody reading my blog will quickly sense this.

The result is that people interested in using articles to market their sites and generate traffic will find my blog very useful. They will talk to others about it and they will also have no problem assigning me business writing assignments to help generate traffic to their sites.

You can earn an income from posting google adsense pay-per-click ads at your blog. Apart from earning you income, this will constantly put pressure on you to generate traffic to your blog. This will naturally also increase the chances of you landing online business writing assignments.

One of the most effective ways of generating traffic for your blog is by writing business articles and posting them at article directories and other relevant sites on the net. Usually writers feel very painful about writing something that they end up being underpaid for, let alone for free. But when you post your articles free at sites and use them to direct traffic to your blog, then at least you will end up getting paid when some of this traffic becomes clients for your writing services.

The amazing thing is that this business writing will virally expand on the net (if it is any good) and this way, a single article can end up being posted and re-posted all over the net resulting in thousands and ultimately hundreds of thousands of links pointing back to your blog. The income potential of this for you, is colossally huge.

c) Advertise your business writing services in free online classified sites.
The previous two methods of generating business writing assignments will tend to take a little time to start generating business and actually deliver business writing clients for you. So as you patiently wait for it to take effect, it is useful to utilize another shorter-term solution or tool. This tool classified advertising in high traffic online sites that provide this service for free.

The ones that will be most effective for you will depend on which area of business writing specialization that you have taken up. There are general sites like www.freelancewriting.com that I have personally found to be very effective. Go to the section “freelancers seeking work” and carefully read the other ads you find there and try and learn as much as you can to help you write your own.

d) Be careful how you handle your business writing enquiries
Be very careful how you handle inquiries from business writing prospects. Do not rush to tell them how wonderful a writer you are. Instead read their mail carefully and get a feeling of what their exact needs are. You should then clearly reflect this in your reply so that the prospective client feels immediately that you understand their business writing needs.

e) Be patient.
Once you have put everything in place, patiently continue working our plan for at least one month. There are very few strategies and plays in a football game that work immediately. Usually it needs to be worked on constantly during the game before it starts showing any signs of either success or failure. The same applies here except that this is a strategy that has already worked wonders for me and therefore with the proper implementation and patience should also be able to work very effectively for you and get you lots of business writing assignments.

---------------------------------
Join our e-course on how to make money from online writing. It’s free to join, just send an email NOW to writertips at freeautobot.com