How To Make Money In A Down Economy
Freelance writers are uniquely positioned to make money in a down economy. Working for ourselves, being creative types, having the freedom to pick and choose clients – all can make us money, right? There are tools you can add to your toolbox though that go beyond finding more and better-paying clients and competing for more freelance jobs. You can write for yourself and sell directly to your readers. Even if you are not a freelance writer, you can use these ideas.
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.