March 31, 2009 By

Freelance Writing Guide and Tips

As some of you may know, I started off my online marketing career as a freelance writer. Although that was more than 3 years ago, my freelance writing gigs helped me quit my full time job and launch my Internet marketing business as well. I highly recommend everyone who can write, or want to write, to get a few writing gigs as a legitimate and sustainable way to improve your cash flow.

When it comes to freelance writing, you can basically do a few “jobs”:

  1. Become a ghostwriter for other people’s books and ebooks
  2. Write articles and web content for website / blog owners
  3. Become a regular columnist for offline / online media in various topics
  4. Become a paid blogger using paid blogging services like PayPerPost
  5. Become an editor / proofreader and help brush up someone else’s work
  6. Become a web copywriter and charge for every web copy written

Being an editor requires more of a critical eye and amazing grasp of grammar and writing styles. This is a skill not everyone, even world-class writers, possess. Copywriting is another highly paid skill that requires creative thinking and therefore it not really in the reach of most people. Every other type of writing however, is a great opportunity for anyone who can construct a proper sentence in English.

So lets talk about those other types – ghostwriting, paid blogging and content writing.

Ghost writing can potentially add between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars into your bank account every month, but the flip side to this is that no one will ever know who you are or appreciate the work you’ve done. In the Internet marketing world, lot of information marketers are constantly looking for someone who can help them write ebooks, instruction manuals and other types of documentation.

Writing articles and web content for blogs / websites is another great opportunity, plus in most cases you also get a “byline” for your work. If you’re writing for blogs, you have your author credits on each blog post. This helps other people know who you are, and get addicted to your style of writing, ideas, and personality. For the sake of your freelance writing career, writing on blogs is actually much better than ghostwriting.

The final type of freelance writing you can do is paid blogging or sponsored blogging. I’ve covered this in detail in my Blog Paycheck guide, but the basic idea is you set-up your own blogs and start accepting writing offers in networks like Pay Per Post, Review Me or Sponsored Reviews. Advertisers want to get the word out about their products, and they are willing to pay bloggers to write about them on their blogs. How much you can demand per article written depends a lot on the popularity and traffic of your blogs.

The plus side to this is that technically you own the content you have written, which means you can always monetize your growing blog with Google Adsense or even affiliate offers.

What Do You Need To Become a Freelance Writer?

Very quickly, this is what you need:

  1. Passion for writing and good grammar – If you want to write for a living, you must have a passion for it. Nothing puts me off more than a writer who writes purely for money.
  2. A good porfolio site that sells you – You’ll find that clients always want to take a look at your previous work before they decide to engage you. If you’re just starting off you can admit that you’re new and you’ll still be able to land jobs if you can give your potential employer a few good samples. However in the long run it’s your portfolio that gets you the high-paying writing gigs.
  3. Growing list of contacts – If you only have three potential clients, your potential income is severely limited. Not everyone needs a constant supply of writers so build up your contact list to the point that you can pick and choose which offers you want to take up.
  4. A greater plan for your life – Freelance writing is great to get you off the ground, but remember you’re still trading hours for dollars. Find a way to convert your sills into a book, an information product, or a coaching program. You could also aims to leave writing altogether and become a business owner in the particular niche market you’ve served.

However, being just another freelance writer and becoming a “superstar” writer that everyone wants to work with are two different things. Superstar freelancers get paid 5-20 times higher, enjoy more time freedom, get more recognition and ultimately lead a much better life.

The good news is that superstar writers are made, not born. At Freelance Superstar I’ve teamed up with full-time writer and writing coach Monika Mundell to create the ultimate starting guide for future freelance writing superstars.

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Register on the site to get free audio interviews and other tips on freelance writing. Remember to also fill-up the questionnaire and let us know your most burning questions about freelance writing. With your input, we hope to make this the most popular freelance writing guide on the Internet.

Filed Under: Writing and Copywriting Tagged With: ,
June 2, 2007 By

How to Write Articles Easily and Quickly

The best way to write high-quality articles is to steal them. Agreed?

It’s a poor artist who borrows – a good artist steals
- Picasso

“Steal” in this context is really to research and feed from other people’s content. Granted, once in a blue moon you may come up with something totally original, but mostly anything you want to say have already been said before.

Now if you copy from one person word for word, that is piracy. But you copy many people and paraphrase them, it’s called research. In fact that’s how most authors and credible publications write their books, journals and white papers. They simply research existing material, paraphrase and quote, and add their own content to make it new or more applicable to the subject matter.

Why re-invent the wheel?

Writing original article may be easy for subject matters in which your experience level is high, but can you write a good article on a topic you just discovered yesterday?

Yes, you can. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Research - Type in a few keywords in Google.com and see what results come up. Chances are, the search results will display a few shopping sites, some unrelated spam sites, and some really good sites.
    1. Collect about 10-20 URLs of the articles that you want to use, and write it down / save it into notepad.
    2. These existing content is probably of high caliber, and for you it’s simple “off the shelf” research that someone else did on your behalf.
  2. Paraphrase Sentences – Take one line from the first article that you like, and paraphrase it. This means that you change the actual words without changing the meaning of the sentence.
    1. The easiest way to do this is to change a sentence from active to passive.
    2. For example, if the original sentence is “The symptoms of heart disease are high blood pressure, stress and reduced vision”, they your sentence can be “High blood pressure, stress and reduced vision are the symptoms of heart disease..”
  3. Divide Content – Divide your content into logical paragraphs. If possible, talk about one idea / point in one paragraph, and try not to have more than 3 (three) content paragraphs. Dividing your content logically will establish a flow of ideas that keep the visitor reading for more.
  4. Quote The Source – It’s not wrong for you to tell your readers that you got a piece of that article from another person. It’s called “quoting” someone, and by doing this you can legally include a verbatim (exact) sentence from heir article or web page. There are different ways to do this for regulated works like journals and theses, but for the sake of writing a web page or blog post, you can just put the curly quotes (“) around the quoted text and link back to the original web page.
  5. Write an Introduction – How you write introductions really depend on the article itself. It it a serious, factual article? Is it meant to entertain or invoke thoughts on a certain topic? You introduction will decide whether someone will continue to read your article, or switch on their TV. Did the introduction of this article make you read till this point? I bet it did :)
  6. Write a Conclusion - Now, the traditional way of doing this is to do a “re-cap” of all the previous paragraphs, to make the entire article “whole”. But as a business owner, you’d probably want to use this opportunity to create an “incomplete conclusion” that will lead people to check out your website link at the bottom of your article, or click on your affiliate links anywhere else on your site. In other words, give them enough but not everything.

Now, I used to use the exact process above for years. My only complain is that it is very time consuming, and tedious. I found that I need to dedicate an entire day to find and sort articles. The writing part then becomes easier.

When I had more capital I started outsourcing some of the writing, but on some blogs (like this one) I still write the content. Even though I am knowledgeable on the topic of making money online, you just can’t write certain types of articles without doing your research first. The last thing you’d want is to get a universally known fact completely wrong in your writing, and look stupid.

instant article wizardOne of the tools I use now is Instant Article Wizard. This is a brilliant piece of software from Jonathan Leger that automates the entire article research process, and also helps you piece together a complete article from scratch.

It’s so easy that I can get an entire article done with just a few clicks.

You can click on the screenshot to get a better view of the interface.

You’ll notice a function on the top-left where you can enter your keyword, and search for relates articles.

For better results, enter your search terms like this:

  • heart disease is
  • heart disease is not
  • heart disease definition
  • says that heart disease

Then, Instant Article Wizard will display results of your search term, and the really cool part is that it also displays related search results. By clicking on each of those search terms, you can see the entire extracted sentence. You can mix and match, change words, and create your own sentences too.

Then, you can create your introduction and summary in Instant Article Wizard, and export your new article in text (.txt) format. Instant Article Wizard really helps me save time – loads of time – by automating my process for creating new articles. Plus, my articles are also more keyword-targeted so it stands a better chance to get good search engine rankings.

If you want to save time, I strongly recommend that you get your own copy of Instant Article Wizard. It will undoubtedly help you write better articles faster.

Filed Under: Writing and Copywriting