Freelance writers often don’t think this way; their idea of making money writing is to send out queries, wait forever, hope an editor bites and eventually pays them.  They think like contractors, freelancers, self employed people perpetually trying to find clients, but not as business owners building income properties. For example, I’ve read books about how to make six figures freelancing, but often the books are about how to churn out article after article, query after query, and sell to someone else, but not how to start publishing and build your own income stream for yourself.

So how do you get started making money online as a writer, where you control the product and publish for your own profit?

There is a website called The Keyword Academy, which offers basic starting advice about how you can make money with online writing. Yes, you have to also build very basic websites – usually using sites that provide tools for you, like blog sites or other online services. And you need to learn the basics of how to market your site or sites, but again, you can use writing skills for this effort too. As a freelance writer, anything you can learn to market yourself online can only help your career.

And what if you don’t want to do this kind of writing? That you really want to make a living writing sci-fi novels, or murder mysteries? If you’re not making it yet with your preferred income stream, and are picking up side jobs and freelance jobs to pay the bills, why not also build some of these side projects bringing you passive income, once they are built, which comes in again and again, which you own, as opposed to a single sale of an article which you have to resell again and again to have it make you money?

And, if you’re someone looking for a way to earn money with a blog because you have been laid off, or are looking for a second income, I can tell you, you don’t have to be a professional or even highly skilled writer to do this kind of writing. You need to be clear, understandable, and know basic English, but you don’t have to be a PhD in Creative Writing to earn money writing online.

This is just one small way you can make money writing online, writing for yourself, building your own portfolio of income properties, which can support you with additional income, or even primary income eventually, if you want to find more ways to make money writing.

I posted late last year about how to make money in a down economy – and those ideas are more important now than ever. But there is more you can do to add additional income streams from your work.

The purpose of Six Figure Writing is to show writers how to find life beyond the freelance jobs listings. Constantly trying to find new ways to find new clients can be exhausting, and is not passive income – while as a writer, your potential to create an entire publishing empire of your own, that makes money while you sleep, is huge! If you look at the jobs you’re competing for across all the freelance job posting web sites, so many of them are for WEB PUBLISHERS who are creating sites that make THEM money passively! Why not do the same thing they are doing?

A quick side note: For those of you who have not read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad series, get thee to Amazon and or your local library are read any of the books in the series. As a freelancer, we think that working for ourselves is the way out. It’s not. You are still stuck in the “S” quadrant – self-employed – and that can be an even more difficult way to make a living than working for someone else.

Passive income is income that comes to you over and over, regardless whether you show up or not. Kiyosaki talks a lot about real estate as a way to earn passive rental income. But he also mentions – drumroll – ROYALTIES from INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. Now, we writers all know what royalties are! And the fun part about being a freelance writer on the Internet is, you don’t need to run the obstacle course that is the publishing industry today to start making money with writing. You can make money in a down economy by building your little writing empire.

Example: I have two short e-books I’ve written that each make me a few hundred dollars a month. One is about making money by rewriting articles for webmasters – a huge need out there by the way. The other is an ebook about how to search the deep web – which is great for any writer, publisher, or anyone looking for new ideas from authoritative sources.

These books don’t cost much, and what they deliver in results to buyers is much higher than the price. But I can choose my topics, and choose my price, and outsource jobs like marketing and web design – I don’t have to do it all. I can create these and sell them for $7, or sell them for $97, but the point is, there is room on the Internet to research what people want, and give it to them, directly. And create a passive income stream in the process.

Every writer reading this should be figuring out what they can write that they can also sell on the Internet. The fact is, I wrote those ebooks once, yet they regularly continue to bring in income. Passively. Meaning, I don’t have to go out and find one gig after another after another to get paid. As an example, if you like to write articles for parenting magazines, use your same research to create a short book based on the topics you find are timely, and sell directly to parents. That’s what editors do, but with the Web, anyone can now do it.

For non-writers who are considering writing as a way to make money, you have options to get started writing for money. One I already mentioned: my ebook about rewriting articles, Secret Speed Rewriting Techniques, is a good way to get started practicing making your writing better. If you can retell a story, you can rewrite an article. But you can do the same thing – rewriting – for yourself, and build your own products and sites (the ebook tells you how).

You can also buy articles and book that are sold with “private label rights”, meaning you can use these written works any way you please. In my opinion, as a professional writer, most if not nearly all are crap – they aren’t well written and/or are pretty shallow takes on any given subject. But so what? Your job is to take them and rewrite them (you should always rewrite these before using anyway), and add your own information, to make them your own. PLR as its known, can be used as search engine optimization info to use on a website to help attract traffic, or as finished products which you resell. A word of caution: Do not be tempted to take these and just publish them “as is” simply because you can. If you waste time trying to sell crap, you will get nowhere. That’s not the goal here!

(And for those “real” writers who frown on private label rights – it’s all in what you do with it. What freelance writer hasn’t resold articles with a different “slant” based on a previous article and research? Same thing.)

So OK, assuming you’re on board with the option of writing your own goods, how to make money in a down economy knowing this? You start cranking out written products that you can sell directly to your audience. Start learning to look for what sells and will sell in today’s environment. A good place to begin is Google Trends, where you can see what people are searching for right now, or compare search trend lines for different topics.

Researching trends and topical info is the writer’s trade. Writers who send out constant queries to magazines are always on the lookout for the next big topic, the hot topic, the article idea the editor hasn’t seen before, or a new twist on one they have. For writers who focus on certain niches, or topics, why not start a blog and post them there? If your article is topical and brings readers to your site, you can offer them more by displaying advertisers who are related to the topic, or offer them even more information as reports and ebooks they can purchase.

This is being done every day by huge Internet “virtual real estate” tycoons who have sites on every topic under the sun from parenting to military history, and they sell ads and reports and ebooks to their visitors, just like a magazine does. They hire freelance writers to do the writing, and then make thousands of dollars per day.

All of this can also be done by the freelance writer – or non-writers too for that matter. You can learn to research profitable niche topics, find out what else is selling right now, and improve on that. Creating a site and marketing it takes some learning but it’s not rocket science. There are plenty of basic how to manuals available on the Web, at the bottom of this post I’ve added a zip file you can download for free with some examples.

I’ll post more about making money in a down economy with your writing. You have to work hard, be creative, and think about new alternatives available to you with the Internet – don’t keep thinking query letters and freelance jobs. Instead, figure out ways to you get your readers to come directly to you, instead of a magazine. You can do it, millions already are doing it, and making a profit too.

For now, if this is kind of new to you, you may need some help learning how to build a website or blog at zero cost, and choose a profitable niche topic to write about, I’ve put together a zip file with two free chapters of ebooks by Tiffany Dow, which have basic ideas to help you get started. Download it for free right here.

Ebooks.zip – Right click and save to your desktop.

How?  By doing what we do as freelancers: Get creative.

My projects right now include some writing for other folks – blogs, articles – but also writing a lot of web content for my own web sites and publications.  In other words, I don’t just think of myself as a writer, but as the owner of publishing business.  Blogs, websites, ebooks, and also providing writing “services” for clients; these and many other products are my company’s business. (If you haven’t seen the interviews and resoruces on my Freebies page, check out the Tiffany Dow interview to see how someone can take action to build a business as a writer.)

Writers who think of themselves only as “writers”, who look for freelance “jobs” and “clients” all day, and work primarily on stuff other people will own, could be missing out big opportunities.  As a publisher, I write all I want, on anything I want, whenever I want – but I also hire other writers and designers, to build my own assets including Web “real estate” and other intellectual property.  Writers who work as publishers controlling their own content stand to weather the storm over the next few years, by opening up their options to sell not just to clients, but also directly to readers and consumers.

To light your creative fire, here are posts with ideas you can use to leverage your biggest asset – your creativity – in a financially-tightening marketplace.  One of my favorites is Pamela Slim’s post in June about what to do if the economy’s got your down.

Here’s another post from Seth Godin’s blog, about how to maintain your competitive advantage.  If you don’t read his blog on a regular basis, start now, if you want to not only keep your head above water, but thrive, no matter the economy.

What are you doing now to grow and build your business?

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• Where Have All the Freelance Writing Jobs Gone?

Click Here To Download The
Mega List Of Online Freelance Jobs

This is a free PDF download. I’d be interested to hear from readers about additional sites, other resources they find useful that are not included here. I didn’t include any subscription services for example, these are all free resources for finding work.

Happy hunting!

The best way to use this list is to not only look for places where you can send a submission or bid on a job posting.  Instead, when you read these postings, consider what the buyer is doing with the writing you produce:  Are they running a topical website in a niche you are passionate about? Are they hiring a bunch of writers to handle bulk tasks (like writing dozens of articles)? Are the looking for someone to ghostwrite an eBook – what do you imagine they would do with that?  Buyers aren’t hiring writers unless there is a market to resell the work at a nice profit, you can assume they are paying you a fraction of what they will make selling your work to their customers!  How can you cut out the middleman, and reachthose customers directly with your own product?

The sites I list are good places to find jobs, but also good places to research.  which bring me to my next offering – The Hidden Web – Exposed!  I’m also going to be posting a new eBook listing dozens of deep-web research sources, places you can find ideas, products, public domain materials, web partners, newsletters and email lists farbeyond what is accessible just through Google (think “500 TIMES” more material!)  If you are serious about creating content – and to reach six figures, you should be – you’ll want to get your hands on this ebook.

Look for more tomorrow and Thursday about these great offerings, plus some goodies too…