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How to Build Your Successful Freelance Writing Career and Quit Your Day Job?

Internet has revolutionized business in every way. The business of freelance writing is no different. Today, freelancers can make a living through Internet, by creating content for various freelance websites and independent clients from anywhere in the world. Here we will see various ways writers are earning enough money from the Internet to quit their day jobs.

Part I: Freelance Writing Websites

Writers can start their business and build a portfolio through any of the several freelance writing sites out there. Some of them are reviewed here.

1. Constant-Content

Constant Content is obviously the leader in providing website content to thousands of clients worldwide. Here, writers with some experience can submit content on any topic of their choice and set a fixed price on these articles to sell them to prospective clients. The author earns sixty five per cent of the sale earnings.

If the customers don't find articles they are looking for, they can request for content to the whole writer community or to specific writers (as private requests). Top members of Constant Content earn more than a thousand dollars monthly simply by writing good content. Once an author starts to get private requests, her earnings will skyrocket.

Constant Content helps you build your freelancing career providing you an online profile in which your entire freelancing history is shown. With the strength of this, you can demand a rise of payment from your prospective clients. Also, CC is very strict in filtering out the best content and their standard is higher than almost all other content providers.

3. Helium.com

Helium is a freelancer's paradise online. Not only can you submit your well-written content here, but also get paid handsomely for it. Helium is a place where even some of the news media are looking for content. Helium has freelance writing opportunities, partnership programs, and writing contests. The writing contests will fetch you some great amounts of money and exposure if you are lucky enough.

Helium's marketplace for freelance writing is a place to find writing jobs. Websites that look for freelance content publish their projects here and if you write a good content, it will fetch you not only money, but also good exposure.

4. Contribution to Professional Websites

A number of professional websites out there call for contributions from individual users. These include magazines and newspapers as well. There are quite a lot of them in which you can build your freelancing career. More than the money you can make (which is quite a lot), it is the exposure that matters. The exposure a print media publication can give is enormous.

Most of the high-end print publications and online publications require you to query them with your article ideas. Unsolicited submissions usually end up in the slush pile. So, query and follow up their editors professionally. If you are lucky, you will land that job.

5. Freelancing Websites

There are a number of freelancing websites. Here, clients publish writing projects on various topics. Anyone can bid on a particular project and thus compete with other writers. Won projects will earn money for the writers. Collaboration will build a good business for writers as well as clients here, as this is a worldwide marketplace. Here is a list of the freelance websites:

Guru.com
Elance.com
Bizreef.com
Scriptlance.com
Academia-research.com
ResearchWritingCenter.com

6. Paid Review Blogs

You can have a number of blogging jobs as well. You can get paid to write professional reviews of various products and services on your blog. These reviews might require you to place DoFollow backlinks to the reviewed product's website. Such reviews will earn good amount of money for you. Sites that offer this service are these:

PayPerPost.com
ReviewMe.com
SponsoredReviews.com
Smorty.com
BuyBlogReviews.com
Matched.co.uk
Blogsvertise.com

7. Start a Blog and Promote It

If you need a higher chance for landing a freelance professional job, then you can get it easily by starting a blog, and offering to write for money through it. As your blog gets more and more popular, you can increase your price per word. This is a highly transparent way to get clients. Clients can check out your blog and estimate the writing standard before hiring you. And you can get the top clients without any big competition. Promote your writing blog well to land the best jobs.

8. Searching for Jobs

If you are not associated with any of these freelancing sites or don't have a blog, you can still land professional writing jobs. For this, you have to search for them. The best place to find professional writing jobs is Craiglist.org, the largest classifieds ads network in the world. Craiglist has a lot of freelance writing listings in them that offer the best price for your writing.

However, building a portfolio as a freelance writer is not possible by writing random projects like this. A number of websites out there post writing jobs, which are usually short term. Most of these jobs are for articles or article packages.

9. Professional Blogging Through Blog Networks

Another great way writers can earn is through professional writing within blog networks and other content writing networks. Here, you have to be proficient in your business before you can apply for a job as a content producer. There are a number of blog networks that offer you great amount of money for your writing. Also, this is the best way to build some online presence as a content producer.

A big advantage of the professional blog network is that these networks can give your blog enormous promotion with the help of professional Search Engine Marketing. Also, your particular blog will get links from other blogs on the network. Altogether even the new blogs on the network will start earning great amounts of money within a short span.

The expertise required by these sites falls in the elite category. A general newcomer is not obviously in demand here. The sites that offer this are the following:

About.com: About is the second largest content website in the world, after Wikipedia. It is the 81th most trafficked site in the world. Become a guide in About.com on any of the various topics out there, and you can get a minimum of 800 dollars a month. With your popularity and expertise rising, your earnings will rise. There are writers who make over 100,000 dollars a year from About.

451Press: This is a blog network, which concentrates on a number of topics. You can choose a topic and apply for the position of professional blogger. If chosen, you will be paid handsomely for your writing.

Suite101: Another blog network, like 451Press. It is also more popular and larger than 451Press.

B5Media: Started by professional blogger, Darren Rowse, this is a blog network that concentrates on a number of topics.

Today.com: Another blog network. Only US residents can apply to the blogging jobs here.

10. Ad Revenue Share Networks

There are a number of networks out there that share their advertisement revenues with you in exchange for your writing. In these networks, all you need to do is submit your content, optionally well researched for keywords. In the search engine marketing world, content is regarded as King! So, well-written content can drive huge amount of traffic to these articles. Such traffic will earn quite a lot of money. Since your individual advertisements are displayed on these articles, you will get a share of advertisement revenues from these networks. Example of this is Hubpages.

Top members of Hubpages every month get thousands of dollars from Adsense from well-written articles, known as Hubs.

Squidoo Lenses are another option to make money online through ad share.

11. Ebook Publishing and Selling

Publishing an ebook works the best and most profitable if you have an experience in your field of action. You can publish your ebook with several publication systems online. Clickbank is an online retailing company that can sell your electronic products for a minor fee, aside from the affiliate commissions. If your ebook is worthwhile, you sell several of them earning you handsome amounts of money.

Besides Clickbank, you should consider publishing with on-demand publishers like Lulu.com, which is the leader in self-publishing industry.

Part II: Building Online Profile

In order to successfully pull revenues from the Internet through a freelancing career, it is important for you to build an online portfolio. And for this, consistency is very important. Though almost everything you do on the Net is constantly recorded and archived to be made available any time, you should have a record of all this at your fingertips. This can be done only by tracking whatever you do with a personal website, blog, or social networking profile.

All freelancing websites help you build your freelancing career online. These profiles can be shown as a great experience certificate. Here are some tips on building an online portfolio

1. Start a chronology blog: In order to track every step of your progress, start a blog and track every step of your progress within it.

2. Social networking profile: For internet entrepreneurs as well as enthusiasts, a social networking profile is extremely important. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace are unavoidable social networks.

3. Stick with one freelancing site: Building your profile with multiple freelancing website is good. However, it is advised that you give preference to the top freelancing sites only. Having your full-blown profile on one place is easy to show off to your clients. However, when you don't have work on the primary site, you should of course build a profile in other sites.

4. Contributions to the community: You should be contributing well to the freelance writing community. There are a number of forums, social networks, social networking groups, etc., just for freelance writers. From these sites, not only you can land jobs, but also become famous as a trustable content provider.

5. Watch out for villains:
In some forums like the DP forums, there are scammers, who request articles and don't pay the promised amount of money to the writers. You should be well aware of such people and go for an escrow service if possible.

Conclusion

Professional freelancing is all about your writing prowess. If you have good professional writing skills, you will land more jobs than your competitors will. Also, build an online profile early on to showcase your best work. This is the way you will attract great number of clients.

Related Entries:

Why Should You Completely Avoid Associated Content?
Why Should You Completely Avoid Blogit, Scam?
Importance of Constant Content

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008

Comments

  1. I thought quitting a day job was a bad idea. Making your day job related to writing seems to work better. Frederik Pohl wrote advertising copy, he turned it into the famous science fiction novel The Space Merchants. Stephen King was an english teacher before he became famous. Make your day job related to writing and keep writing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Book Calendar, thanks for the comment. Indeed, having a job related to writing is the best for a writing enthusiast. However, we should not forget the fact that there are people who work in the night answering customer questions, plumbing, coaching middle school students, or assisting lawyers, while writing secretly in their spare time, just as a hobby.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'd love to make extra money writing for others blogs or websites. I write for several blogs of my own and have written content for my site and a few others. It's all been free so far. One day I am going to re-write the movie script I've finished (it needs retouched) Oh well. It's fun whether its free or not.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have submitted content to both Helium and Today.com--they are both good sources of freelance income.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Teasas, thanks for the comment.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thank you for this list. I've been using Getafreelancer for as long as I can remember, but now that you've pointed out these recommended avenues, I'm really interested to try them out. I'll post an update once I do.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi there.You have done an amazing job putting together an article with tons of linked resources to get your users' writing career started. Amazing job. I just posted a blog 100s of sites to find freelance writing projects as well as an article last week about social networking sites for freelancers and of figured that your users would find it useful.

    Thank you.
    Rachel
    AllFreelance.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm not against with freelance sites but as writers who give our work for our clients, let's just be resilient on who we are contacting at because there are a lot of fraud in the net.

    ReplyDelete
  9. researchwritingcenter.com is a fraudulant company, which hires the writers by sending requests and then steal away their salaries. If writers demand their salaries, the wicked team of researchwritingcenter.com deactivates their accounts. So beware of the nefarious designs of this wicked fraudulant company researchwritingcenter.com

    ReplyDelete
  10. .I have read your post! I would love to try some of your ideas in business marketing. Thank you so much for this wonderful blog.

    ReplyDelete

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