A Writer’s Life

In making money online as a freelance writer, my career has changed over the years due to the changes in my skills and changes in the Internet.

Earning Money

Although I can now make a living full time from writing, I use diversified marketing techniques to get enough work.

I have five main marketing techniques that I use to find work:

• Visit forums where marketers hang out and advertise my writing services in a signature file.
• Visit content mills like Demand Studio and pick up work from an open order pool.
• Visit job sites like Rentacoder, Elance, Guru, etc.
• Get clients by handing out my business card at business conventions.
• Create mini websites and write reviews about the latest merchant release. Here I get paid a commission when people buy the product.

I use the following marketing techniques.

• A blog that serves as a branding vehicle for my services.
• Social media followers on Facebook and Twitter.
• Video marketing. Putting free videos on high traffic websites like YouTube.
• Article marketing. Putting free articles on popular article directories.

The money I earn will vary considerably. On one end of the scale, if I were to write a 500 word article for a content mill, I would earn $7.00. On the other end of the scale, if I were to write a 500 word review for my own affiliate I earn an average of $300.

Challenges

The main challenge writing online is that there are a lot of people willing to write for a $1 to $4 an article. Of course, these articles are not very good, with lots of spelling and grammatical mistakes, and the content has usually been scraped from somewhere. However, many marketers and bloggers are not at all interested in quality, so long as the articles have the right keywords and get indexed by a major search engine.

This low pay can be found everywhere: forum, content mills, and even bidding sites. This competition is enough to discourage the most gifted writers. If you write like Hemingway, you will be paid as much as someone who averaged C+ in high school for English.

The way to overcome this challenge is to continue to improve skills and to find more lucrative markets and work with better clients.

Goals

As a writer, I have established 5 goals.

1. Find better paying clients. I want to get clients who are interested in creating quality content that gets traffic from search engine optimization and social media. Some marketers recognize that it’s important to write original and interesting content that adds value to a reader’s life. Over time, this creates more traffic and brands the marketer as someone who produces quality. In the long run, this will create a profitable business.

2. Improve my productivity. By increasing the speed with which I research and write articles, as the faster I am, the more work I can do per hour.

3. Write more for myself. It is much more profitable to write content that earns commission sales than to write for other marketers.

4. Upgrade the type of writing I do, from article writing to copywriting. Copywriting pays much more than article writing and it is the next step in my career growth.

5. Learn more about marketing. The better I understand marketing, the more I can sell my writing services or make money from affiliate commissions.

This article originally was published on the InterviewIQ website and is by Louise Baker, a freelance writer and blogger.

If you have ever thought about owning your own business, choosing your own working hours, and are able to provide your customers with the V.I.P. treatment, then a V.I.P. cleaning franchise could be for you, just like it was for Sally Shugg.

While quitting her employment position and starting her own business was a tough decision to make, Sally wanted control over her life and was sick of having to work set hours that didn’t allow her time with her kids. “My husband Neil and I were on a rotating roster at our respective jobs, meaning we had to work late nights and weekends, and were getting sick of it – we never got to see the kids.”

After investigating a few other businesses, Sally joined V.I.P. because the brand was well known, the franchise system had won numerous awards, the sales person was easy to talk to, and explained every concern they had in detail. Sally then went out for a day in the field with an experienced V.I.P. franchisee; this enabled her to experience what her life would be like as a V.I.P. home cleaning franchisee before actually buying the business. “It gave me reassurance that I would make it if I wanted to – all it took was my determination to succeed and training from V.I.P.

“A V.I.P. Home Cleaning franchise is perfect for a young mother who is looking to return to the work force because you get to choose the hours you work, earn a good income, and because you are the boss, you don’t have to worry about getting permission to take time off to attend special events like sports days” Sally said.

Sally’s positive approach, can do attitude and her eagerness to meet her customers needs has seen her double the number of homes she services on a weekly basis, while still working only 30 hours per week. This has enabled her to not only work less hours per week than in their previous career, but also earn more than she was before joining V.I.P.

The business has been so successful that Neil has joined her. Neil had previously worked as a panel beater, and Sally in retail, however, both decided to join V.I.P. because they could be their own boss, meaning they were in charge of their own working hours. Sally comments, “I also love the fact that we don’t pay V.I.P. a per lead fee or commission on jobs. Our franchise fees are fixed each month.”

Neil and Sally now choose to work only the times their children are at school – so that they can spend as much time with them as possible.

If this sounds like a career that you would be interested in, check out the website at www.vipfranchisesales.com.au, or call a V.I.P. Regional Franchise Manager on 13 26 13 to discuss how a V.I.P. franchise can help you achieve your goals, balance your life and work around your family.

Working from home is a delight. I love dealing with clients, controlling my destiny, knowing that the buck stops with me.

I can give myself credit for a job well done, and only have myself to blame if things are not going well.

When I think of working in an office, commuting on the train day after day and grimly hanging on for dear life while standing in the aisles, rocking from side to side as the carriage creaks its slow way to my destination, I shudder a little and smile. I feel quite smug at being able, should I wish to, work in my pyjamas while eating vegemite on toast.

There are so many things I do not miss: office politics, co-workers’ body odor, food smells in an open-plan office, bad bosses, dodgy air-conditioning, useless meetings, fire drills – I could go on.

But there are, of course, some things I do pine for quite regularly.

This morning, for example, after a very busy morning, I had myself a tea break. Off I wandered to my own kitchen, made my tea in my favourite Yummy Mummy mug (bless my partner for that one) which is always where I left it, never snaffled by a mystery thief. Bliss, I thought, as I gazed over my back garden (in reality a small, weedy, overgrown jungle I tend to avoid looking at as much as possible).

But I wanted to talk to someone.

I really wanted to vent, to get a bit of juicy gossip, to have a conversation beyond the polite, businesslike chatter I exchange with clients every day. My friends and family are inevitably at their own offices, or juggling children, or otherwise running around and unable to talk.

It was last month I started talking to my cat, Mia. Mia is a crazy female Bengal who thinks she is a dog. She is a quiet and attentive audience, willing to listen to any and every of my rants. She’s also very fond of sympathetic cuddles. However, she is, at the end of the day, a cat. After each conversation Mia and I have, I am a little more concerned for my own mental health. It’s just the beginning, I think to myself. It’ll be baggy cardigans next, then having quiet cries to myself as I nibble crackers for lunch.

Working from home offers so much in the way of work-life balance. But it can be tough when all you have for company from Monday to Friday is the cat.