Freelance Writing: Top Ten Ways to Make More Money

Looking for ways to make money from your writing? If you’re a beginning writer, you won’t be able to take advantage of some of these tips, but if you’re established, you can use all ten to boost your career.

Big tip: review the services you provide, and the fees you charge regularly, at least every six months. The world of writing changes fast.

Here we go:

1. Increase Your Rates

If you want to make more, charge more. Enough said.

2. Write More

Write more… If you’re writing 500 words a day, you won’t make as much as the writer who writes 3000 words a day.

3. Widen Your Reach — Dig Deeper Into What You Can Write About

If the web has brought us anything, it’s the ability to target the smallest and narrowest of niches. Dig more deeply into your favorite topics.

For example, instead of writing about weight loss, write about weight loss for teens… or in pregnancy… or for people with arthritis.

4. Widen Your Reach — Expand Into New Areas

You can also expand your reach by moving into new areas. This can be scary, if you’ve built up a reputation as a writer on women’s issues, or technology, and you decide to move into a completely different area.

Realize that it will take time to establish yourself in this new area, and create plans for doing so. Estimate it will take around six months to get great gigs in your new area.

5. Re-Purpose Material from Your Archives

You wrote it. You sell it. Right? Wrong. With a little creativity and ingenuity, you can re-purpose material from your writing inventory and archives in many ways.

(One proviso: if you sold ALL rights to a piece, it’s gone, you can’t use it again. This is a great argument for keeping all your rights.)

6. Sell More Rights (Electronic Rights, Second Serial Rights) from Your Archives

Keep track of the rights you sell to each published piece. Then sell additional rights.

7. Aim Higher: Claw Your Way Upwards

If you’re making $1 a word, look for publications which pay $2 a word, always climb the ladder of opportunity.

8. Aim Lower: Dig for Gold in Trade Publications and on Trade Websites

The obverse of aiming higher, is investing opportunities a little lower. Investigate trade publications and websites for opportunities.

9. Write a Book Proposal and Get a Chunk of Money up Front

Want to write a book? You can. Write your proposal, and shop it around. You’ll get paid to write the rest of your book.

10. Got a Blog? Create an Ebook (or Write a Proposal for Mainstream Publishers)

You can turn your blog into a book, or an ebook. Cast a calculating eye over what you’ve written, and think about re-purposing it.

Make money writing Web sites

If you can use a word processor, you can write Web sites.

Many writers shy away from creating Web sites… they imagine it’s too techy, too complex. It’s not. A small simple site can begin earning money for you very quickly. As a rule of thumb, if you’ve created a site in an area in which there are advertisers you can start earning five to ten dollars a day per site. Now $10 a day isn’t much. But what if you had ten sites all earning $10 day? That’s $100 a day, which is $36,500 a year, just from ten simple sites. What if you had 20 such sites, all earning you $10 a day – or even more – in fact, some sites will earn you $100 a day? “Super-Fast Money-Making Web Sites For Writers: Join The Web-Publishing Bonanza” shows you how.

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