Whether you’re starting out in freelance writing or SEO copywriting. If you’re hoping to make money from your story writing, or even build a blog, I’ll share everything I’ve learned about developing a career so you can live your writerly lifestyle!
Are you tired of hearing people say that writers can’t make money? Were you told growing up that writing is a hobby, not a career? These ideas are everywhere in our society.
Writers are under-appreciated in our world today. There’s a belief that writers must be poor, isolated people who make just enough money to eat ramen noodles. But what if you have a family? What if you don’t want to live a destitute existence? Maybe you want to write so you can fund your traveling passions.
It’s not impossible to earn a living as a writer. You just have to be smart about the decisions you make.
We’re going to explore the supplemental and passive income streams available to writers, readers, and English majors so you can finally enjoy your writing while also making money.
The goals here are simple:
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Develop Your Craft
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Build Supplemental Revenue
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Maximize Passive Income Streams
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Grow Your Audience
Develop Your Craft
The first step on any writing venture is to develop your craft. Whatever type of writing you decide to take on, you’ll need to improve your skills.
As any writer knows, that comes with time. So spend the time to get better every day. As you’ll see from this list, the best way to improve is by putting yourself out there. So take a deep breath and dive in.
Think about your specific goals:
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If you’re a stay-at-home parent with no need for supplemental income, you may want to focus on the steps to build your audience.
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If you’re a self-published author looking for more time to write and more money to support your work, you might be better off diving into passive income streams that might overlap with building an audience.
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Maybe you’re an English major who wants to make money while living a flexible lifestyle, then focus on passive income and supplemental revenue.
That’s why the diagram above works. You can decide where you want to focus your time to meet your goals!
Build Supplemental Revenue
If you write fiction, can you also be a freelance editor, copywriter, and/or content writer? Heck yes! There are so many options for places to build a writing income in whatever niche you’re looking for.
The key here is to be intentional. Build a client list. Then, eventually move away from pitching on websites and toward pitching bigger projects. Don’t worry, we’ll get there together.
Here are just a few of the options available to new and seasoned writers:
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Copywriting
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Editing
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Content writing
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Ghostwriting
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Social media post
If you’re new to writing, there are definitions for some of these topics on the glossary page.
Maximize Passive Income Streams
Passive income streams are essentially money you make based on work you put in weeks, months, or years before. Unlike getting paid a specific rate by a website for an article, passive income is more like the royalties you receive for publishing a book. You put the work in to write the book, now that work can get you paid in the future.
But maybe you don’t have a book yet. That’s fine! There are other ways to build passive income.
Writers and authors dabble in passive income but the authors who focus their efforts on building and developing passive income can make money for years on work they put in today. That’s the real way to build a career with the lifestyle flexibility to live where you want, work on you passion projects, and have the lifestyle you dream about.
For example, Medium.com helps writers get paid for articles they write. You write the articles, publish them, promote them, and Medium shells out money for the views those articles receive.
Some writers make thousands of dollars per month on Medium. Maybe you write one that keeps getting passed around, for weeks or months, that’s fine too. You continue to make money either way! So write and promote your work.
If you’re new to Medium.com, I suggest signing up for this FREE 5-day Medium Writing Challenge.
Grow your audience
Growing your audience will vastly improve your chances at becoming a career writer. Whether you want to be traditionally published or self-published, your ability to reach readers will correlate directly with your financial writing success.
I have, and will continue, to make the case for Twitter as the best platform for writers.
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RT @LynnDiavol: 🩸THE SUN’S SHADOW🩸Beauty is an affront to an exceptionally ugly world- One she must fight to save for fear of his… https://t.co/a2nm4JIYdr
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RT @akabrendalyne: Hey #WritingCommunity! Wanna swap 📌 pinned tweet RTs? Easy #writerslift! 🤩 #ShamelessSelfpromoWednesday
When querying agents, many will ask for your social media information. If you have a robust following on Twitter with links to your writing and lots of interactions, an agent will see this as a positive sign that you have an audience for your work.
Remember, agents are business people. They need to make sure they and their agency make money. If you seem like a consistent writer who has a following and interested readers, you’ll make a positive impression on the agent.
If you’d rather be self-published, building a list of followers who support you is an absolute must. When you’re self-published, you become the promoter for your book. You’ll need to market it on your own. This becomes a lot easier if you already have hundreds or thousands of followers on social media.
You can also guest post on a blog. This is great if you follow a particular blogger closely. Pitch an idea to the website. What do you have to lose?
If you want to write for us, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter and stay tuned because Writerly Lifestyle will be requesting guest post topics soon.
As a relatively new website, you have a great chance of being first in line for a place on our website. If your article is selected, you can use our platform to reach a larger audience of readers.
Conclusion
It’s the combination of these four categories that will change your career and your life. If you’re dying to quit your day job or you want to introduce yourself at parties as a writer, you can! The tenets covered here will help you feel financially free so you can write what you want, when you want, wherever you want.
If you’re new here, I suggest checking out the two articles below to get you started!
