I used to wonder how people make money on the internet through their writing skills.
My idea of making money through writing was having a world-famous blog that gets millions of requests per month. And I never believed that's something I could do.
So I never tried writing on the internet, well until recently.
I'm a side hustles guy. I always wanted to make money doing side projects. But nothing worked out for a long time. A year and a half ago I decided to build my online presence on Twitter. So I started putting out content and now I'm addicted to it.
Once I started putting out content on Twitter I started looking for ways to monetize my Twitter account and came across several ways to make money.
Having more than 40K followers on Twitter now I make money through various ways like affiliate marketing, paid tweets, threads, articles, etc.
In this article, I want to share my learnings on the different ways one can make money on the internet. Of course, I have not figured out all the ways. But here are the important ones you should know about and can get started with.
If you like writing, keep reading!
1. Freelance Writing
Writing paid articles is not an easy way to get started.
A lot of businesses and publications are continuously looking for good quality content to stay relevant. So they pay external writers to write guest articles for them in exchange for money.
Everyone is good at something. You always know about a certain topic better than others. One of the best ways to monetize this knowledge is by writing about it. There are companies in every niche that are looking for good quality content.
But the problem is it is difficult to find the right publications/websites that pay writers to write articles. Especially when you're a beginner, you simply don't know where to look.
Here are some good websites to find freelancing writing jobs:
- Make Living Writing
- Pro Blogger
- Upwork
- FlexJobs
- SolidGigs
- Working In Content
- Content Writing Jobs
- Behance
2. Writing eBooks
With the booming creator economy, more and more people are creating info products and making good money online. This practice has increased especially after COVID happened. People have a lot of spare time and are looking for ways to monetize their knowledge.
You don't need to be an expert in a field to write an eBook. You can do research on a topic & write about it in your own way. People love to pay for knowing what you already know. eBooks can be as small as 20 pages and as big as 500 pages. It really doesn't matter.
Once you have an eBook there are many ways to sell it. Having an online presence definitely makes it easy, but it's not mandatory to have one. You can even run ads on FB/IG and still make sales. If you don't know how to do it, you can hire someone whose an expert at this.
3. Medium Partner Program
Medium Partner Program is a great way to quickly start making money writing online. But you need to be very consistent and write a lot of articles to make any significant money. Some people who make over 5K USD post a couple of articles per week. Sometimes 1 article a day!
On Medium, getting into big publications is the way to get more views on your articles when you're still small. There are tens of thousands of publications on Medium across all topics. You will find many resources and videos on how to get into publications on Medium.
4. Monetise your blog
Having a blog in a niche is a great way to showcase your skills and be considered as the subject matter expert. It takes a lot of effort and time to start seeing good traffic on your blog. Writing articles is just one part of building a successful blog.
You need to optimize your blog for SEO and take care of getting backlinks. Once you have a blog that gets the traffic it's easy to monetize it by integrating ads, adding affiliate links, paid partnerships, etc. A good blog can help you make a lot of money in passive income!
5. Affiliate Marketing
This is one of the easiest ways to start making money online. You basically help others sell their products by redirecting your audience to partner websites. Affiliate marketing is easy because you're not creating a new product yourself.
You are promoting the already proven products which people love. You just need to take care of selling them. Almost all the companies offer Affiliate programs which you can signup for and start promoting their products.
But the caveat here is that you need to have a loyal audience to which you sell these products. And building an audience takes time, but it's totally worth it. You can build an audience on channels like Twitter/Instagram/ by providing valuable content for a long time.
6. Paid Promotions
Influencer marketing is becoming popular these days. Companies are looking to partner with small influencers to promote their products instead of using ads. As you build your online presence the opportunities to partner with companies are immense.
You can partner with companies to write product reviews, tutorials and sometimes simply write articles on the topic that they ask you to. Companies pay well depending on your writing skills and audience size.
Apart from these, you can even apply for full-time writing jobs if that's something you're interested in. I hope this thread has helped you understand some of the popular ways of making money online by writing.
Other Ways
The above-mentioned are only a handful ways of all the possible writing jobs. There are countless other ways through which you can make money from.
You can be a technical writer, technical editor, novelist, web content editor, screenwriter, travel writer, food blogger, etc. The opportunities are just endless if you hone the skill of writing.
Depending on what you are interested in you can get into different domains. If you like traveling, you can be a travel writer. If you are a developer, be a technical writer. If you like food, be a food blogger!
Conclusion
Content has always been important. It is essential for anyone to have good visibility on the internet.
More and more companies are focusing on improving their online presence now by providing valuable content regularly.
So they are hiring people with good storytelling and writing skills.
Hone this skill by writing regularly and start making bank!
The article was originally published on my blog here.
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