As my regular readers know, I am both an internet marketer and a freelance writer. I make money by writing professionally for clients as well as writing for my own niche websites. It has been my experience that the real money in writing is learning how to build your own websites that are created specifically to generate passive income for yourself.
The problem with freelance writing is that it can be difficult to obtain regular work that is both interesting and lucrative. You end up writing articles about topics that you really have no interest in whatsoever. You only get paid once for writing those articles and posts. There is a better way.
You need to start creating your own portfolio of passive income producing websites. These passive income producing websites will pay you again and again. You will do the work once. Then you keep collecting profits from them day in and day out (hopefully) for years. That is where the real money is.
You need to stop struggling to go from one freelance job to the next. You can fill the voids by working on your own sites that will slowly gain momentum. These sites aren’t going to make you rich and they certainly aren’t going to replace a day job right away. If you work at them for a year or two though, when you are done, you will have a nice little collection of sites that make a mortgage payment for you or possibly even more than that. You can even achieve that part time.
When I build a little niche site to add to my collection, I try to build a site that will earn me at least $100 per month. Some do and a lot don’t. The ones that do make up for the ones that don’t. Some of them earn a lot more than that.
I strongly encourage you to give it a shot yourself. It is going to take a while to learn how to do it. Once you learn what you are doing though, it is actually pretty easy work. You just write a bunch of material. You setup a semi-automatic process of building out the site. Then you launch it. You tweak a few things here and there. Before you know it, you’ve got another little source of discretionary income.
If you did your keyword research properly and researched your competition properly, then you stand to make some decent coin. If you screwed up on one or the other, you either have to adjust accordingly or abandon that site so you can move on. In the end though, the payoff is worth the effort.
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Hi Kathy.. It’s a great tactic to use in between paying jobs.. Just write articles and guest blog posts and have a link back to your niche site in the process. Simple but effective technique over time.
A lot of freelance writers never learn how to build niche sites. They throw up a generic blog and talk about daily life. Then they monetize it with Adsense. That business model does not work very well. If you are going to use Adsense, you had better learn a thing or two about maximizing CTR. Otherwise, your earnings will be pathetic.
All people need to do is to be persistent about learning how to build the sites properly. Once you learn how, the payoff is well worth the effort.
I was battling with this for a very long time. I definitely see the demand for writing for other people and other clients, but it’s writing articles that you’re not interested in that would kill me, but at least you would get money.
But sometimes you’ve got to pay the bills while you’re trying to build up your site, so I can understand people writing for Constant Content or Demand Media.
However, there is a freedom to blogging for yourself because you own the rights to all of your content. It feels cool to be in control of it. So that’s why I spend more time on my blog than on writing for others.
Exactly, writing for different clients can sometimes leave your mind blank all of a sudden. Being a writer is hard especially if you have no or little interest on the topic. One way to unwind is writing something fulfilling or something your heart desires like writing for yourself.
More power Kathy!
Kessen,
Yes, the secret is to find a way to make money while still writing about things that interest you. It is easy to find motivation to write for a brand new site because it is new and exciting. You hit a lull where it is less interesting when you are trying to build the site up enough so you start getting decent organic search engine rankings. This is the time when most people quit. It is a long boring time unless you know shortcuts. Shortcuts means building links. So, it takes a really long time unless you go promote the heck out of your material. By doing that you shorten the time frame considerably.
Once a domain has some authority and it is much easier to get some love for your pages, then it gets more fun again. It gets more fun because now you can actually earn a more steady income from monetized organic traffic. You can actually go after keywords effectively.
Hi Kathy,
I came over from BloggerLuv.com – congratulations on being selected “Blogger of the Day”!
Your low-key treatment of niche websites is refreshing. The perspective is different, as well: most “gurus” focus on the technology side and disregard the most important part, which is content creation. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a freelance writer give this advice to colleagues.
That’s the part that killed me when I was trying to do niche websites. It’s hard to produce consistently good content for a single topic! Since I am not a professional writer, I should not have been surprised when absolutely nothing happened.
On the other hand, I think what will stop a lot of freelancers is the technology. Or slow them down enough to the point where they’ll think it’s too much trouble. I do know a lot of tech-savvy freelancers, but I would think you folks would be in the minority.
What I haven’t seen – probably because they choose to remain hidden – are collaborations between professional writers and niche site builders. I’m not talking about extended client contracts – I’m thinking of partnerships. While there exists many cooperative efforts such as Squidoo, the writer is more like an independent contractor than an equitable partner.
At any rate, it’s great that you point out another revenue opportunity for skilled writers.
Cheers,
Mitch
Mitchell,
“What I haven’t seen – probably because they choose to remain hidden – are collaborations between professional writers and niche site builders. I’m not talking about extended client contracts – I’m thinking of partnerships.”
You are onto something there. There are a lot of freelancers who are really wannabe niche bloggers in training. It is easier to go write articles for sites like Demand Studios or Associated Content, Helium.com, Squidoo and Hubpages, etc. There is not much to learn in order to do that.
Your average freelance writer stumbles when they realize that there is a lot to learn on the technical side if you want to get outstanding results. Most hope to hit it big with a really popular article that earns a nice chunk of advertising revenue. When you are publishing for someone else, that sucks though. They own the content. They get all the traffic. They make more than you do. Had you been publishing for your own website, you would earn all immediate and all future royalties.
Using those other sites is a great way to build up authority for your own websites. They are very easy sources of links. If you link build for those articles you can do okay. But in the long run, you had better be working on building up some passive income for yourself. You do that through your own portfolio of niche websites or else by developing your own information products.
Kathy,
I was having a discussion about this with my son, who is a web applications developer. He pointed out that there really is no incentive for a developer to partner with a freelancer when the content can be purchsed outright! This is the flipside of your own proposition: that a freelancer writer should learn the skills to create niche websites.
While I agreed with him, I still maintain that this model could work if both parties are averse to dealing with the issues inherent in the other’s operations. For example, I only trust a few freelance professionals to deliver my content. If one of them were to express a desire to deliver niche content on an on-going basis for a variety of topics, I’d be happy to share :)
This is hypothetical, I suck at web development, LOL!
Cheers,
Mitch