What do online creative writing courses have to do with your freelance writing career? One of the great things about writing is that there is always more to learn, new techniques that you can apply within your pieces, and more styles that you can emulate.

Some of the biggest steps I have taken as a writer have come from reading particularly well written books; there is something within the pages that my brain recognizes as a key writing style and I will tend to incorporate that into my own writing without even really thinking about it.

Creative Writing: your biggest goal?

Creative writing is probably the number one goal for almost any writer, even those with well established reputations in other fields. I once read an editorial, for example, in which the writer confessed that although she had been in the newspaper business for twenty years, her computer and her desk were full of short stories, unfinished novels, and even poetry. That inner artist is still around, even for those who have made a living doing what I call “practical writing”.

Losing the creative juice

Although writing for websites and newspapers and so on will definitely help you pay the bills and make a little extra as well, it can suck the creative juices right out of you.

When I first started my business, my goal was to use the money I made to get the family through while I started my destined-to-be-best-selling novel about opportunities missed in life and the importance of being able to rebuild.

The problem was that as soon as I started to make money writing what other people wanted me to, I realized that it could turn into a real career (as far as problems go, not a big one to have). I soon started to concentrate my efforts on finding more jobs instead of coming up with ideas and plots.

A year and a half later, I realized that my ability to reach people on a gut level with my writing no longer came as naturally. Where I had once been able to turn a phrase that could start someone roaring with laughter, make them think, or put them on the edge of tears, now all I could think about was the maximum number of words that should be put into a sentence meant for an Internet audience.

In fact it has become so bad that I am starting to write more and more like the typical Internet writer; I even get my “there” and “their” confused from time to time.

Reawaken the right brain

Because I don’t want to lose the ability to write creatively, I decided that I would look around to see what I could do to reawaken that part of my brain. I happened to run into a local author I knew from university at a social event, and she suggested that I try taking a course on creative writing.

The university is in my city, so I went ahead and enrolled. I definitely learned some things that helped me to hone my writing skills, but I think that more importantly I was exposed to authors who were using their writing skills to create again, not just to sell.

Nothing local? Go online

Many writers don’t have the time or proximity to attend a university course on creative writing, but there are plenty of opportunities to do so on the Internet.

You can take an ongoing course, to stay in the flow with it. Thomson Education offers 18 month online creative writing courses. Or you can go for 6 weeks online creative writing courses with Gotham’s Writers Workshop.

Taking an online creative writing course is a great way to keep the interesting parts of your writing career alive without having to take too much time away from your practical writing. You may not ever write that novel you want to, but getting the creative juices flowing again is a great way to rejuvenate your commitment to your freelance writing career.

“Learn to write” might seem like kind of a superfluous section. After all, if you want to start a freelance writing career, then obviously you already know at least a bit about how to write. Still, all of us can use tips that can help us to learn to write in order to further our careers that much more.

Different writing styles are required for different writing markets, something that making a living writing for the Internet has demonstrated very clearly to me.

Writing for the Internet is not like writing for newspapers or magazines, and it is certainly not like the creative writing that most of us, as writers, hope that we will one day be able to earn money doing.

Tricks and Tips

There are different tricks and tips that need to be remembered whenever you attempt to get on your keyboard and create content that will be of interest to web surfers and therefore web developers, and the whole process can get even more involved when you throw in different web building strategies such as search engine optimization.

There are also the pitfalls such as writer’s block. I get stuck with it and appreciate any input on how you overcome writers block.

Helpful Information

In this section, we will look at different places where you can find helpful information when it comes to creating content that does well on the Internet. I am hoping that this site will become your main reference point. I have learned a lot about my own Internet writing style through the example of other writers, and I think that the broader your knowledge base and sources on this subject are, the better.

Online Creative Writing Courses

I think we will also use this section to dig up information about online creative writing courses. I have mentioned in other articles that a lot of writers seem to think that education in writing is somehow counter productive, but I strongly disagree.

There is a lot to be said for a continued desire to learn to write in a more effective manner, and there are plenty of materials out there to help you do so. In fact there are probably more online creative writing courses out there than there are practical web related ones, which is absolutely acceptable to me because I am more interested in the practical side of things.

Synthesis Through Ongoing Learning

Of course you might be gifted enough to create a synthesis between your creative writing abilities and the things you learn about writing for the Internet. In that case, you stand to gain an awful lot as long as you know where to look for opportunities and how to go about landing clients!

At the very foundation of an Internet writing business lies an understanding of keyword writing. It is one of the very first terms that I ever came across in relation to writing for the Internet; in fact I heard the word keyword long before I had heard of SEO.

Of course, just because I heard something doesn’t mean that I understood it. I did understand that it was important and that obviously these were words that were to be used in the articles I was to write, but beyond that I didn’t really have a clue as to what keyword writing was. Thanks to a couple years in the business and with the help of resource materials such as my trusty SEO for Dummies book and websites such as www.selfseo.com, I have come a long way in my understanding of keyword writing and how to go about using it effectively. While those references I mentioned will prove helpful, like many of the resources I have consulted while growing my business I found them lacking in some areas, areas that I ended up filling in myself.

Besides the obvious, what are keywords?

If you have ever gone to a search engine to look for information, you will have typed a phrase or a keyword into the query box and then received a couple thousand pages which contain those keywords. Those results are the pages that are indexed by the search engines as being relevant to the keyword or phrase. They are ranked according to secret algorithms that try to show the most relevant and useful sites first.

Here’s a pretty relevant example. Let’s say you want to make money writing online, or you are interested in starting a freelance writing career. Well, you will probably type those exact phrases into the query section of a search engine (or just click the links), and hopefully this site will appear somewhere within the top results. The reason is, my partner Alexander Kohl has carefully researched several dozen keywords that people use most often when it comes to freelance writing, and has told me I have to use them if we want to get visitors.

In fact, if you look closely at the articles on this site, you will probably notice an awful lot of keyword writing taking place. Placing the right key words or phrases within pages is very important for attracting traffic.

The trick with keywords

One of the temptations with keywords is to overuse them within an article in order to get a high ranking. This trick has been tried before, and in various forms, and it appears as though search engines have caught on. Keyword stuffing is considered black hat SEO technique, and placing keywords all over a site may even result that site being banned from the search engine index.

Of course, every time word of something like that gets out, there tends to be an overreaction. When I first started writing for a living on the Internet, many clients were calling for keyword densities of 15-20%. In other words, for every 100 words I used in a piece, the key phrase had to be used between 15 and 20 times. Obviously, this made for some ridiculously written pieces, and I hated writing them. Thankfully, when Google and the other search engines changed their algorithms, they had obviously caught on. While this kind of “stuffing” wasn’t considered to be as bad as other forms, it was bad enough to get sites ranked lower after a query was performed.

The upshot of this is that keyword writing is now much less focused on the keyword and more on the end user, the human web surfer. Web site developers are looking for writers who can fit keywords naturally into an article, press release, and so on without making it look forced, and with a reasonable density (2-5%). Again, this reinforces my golden rule of SEO and writing for the Internet: don’t write for the engines, write for people!

Keyword writing today

If you want to know the honest truth, I hate keyword writing. I don’t like having to fit a word into any article at all, particularly when I feel as though the word itself shouldn’t matter, it’s the idea of the piece that counts. If you need to use the word a certain amount of times, then you should be able to do so, and if you don’t, then you shouldn’t force it.

Still, a writing career on the Internet means that you have to be able to walk that fine line between human consumption and what the spiders can read and understand. Keyword writing will probably always be around in one form or another, and I do feel glad that it has at least progressed beyond the crazy stuffing frenzies of two years ago. Until search engines begin using human editors again (which Yahoo! still does, incidentally) it’s likely that Internet writers will have to perform at least minor word gymnastics from time to time in order to make sure clients remain satisfied.

With this site, we are trying to fill the gap I have found in different online writing resources, namely how to go about making a living writing online.

The Internet offers thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of different ways for freelance writers to make money, most of them neglected by print materials and even online freelance writing resources.

How does online writing differ from writing offline?

One huge area where a lot of work can be found is in article writing for Internet sites. If you want to get a piece of this big pie, it’s important to understand how online writing differs from writing offline for newspapers and magazines.

In this section, we will deal with the technicalities of writing online. The tips in these pages will help you to evaluate where your writing skill is at in the context of the online market, and we can help you to hone your writing skill where it might lack the sharp edge you’ll need if you want to do well.

As you start your online writing business, you’ll find that website writing differs in almost every area from writing for a magazine or a newspaper. We will highlight the differences in areas from basic writing principles such as paragraph writing (yes, you will need to know how to write a paragraph all over again!) to more technically involved concepts, such as SEO copy writing and using keyword writing to create great website content.

Various ways to make money writing online

Freelance writing on the Internet means that you will have the opportunity to write a very wide range of materials you can make money with blog writing, earn it through website content writing or newsletter article writing, and in some cases you might even find that you can use your creative online writing skills to make a buck or two.

It’s all part of the vast arena of printed material that is on the Internet, and a good understanding of how to bring words together to make up what website developers are looking for will take you a long way, financially speaking.

Traps and Tips

Our plan in this section is twofold. First, as we mention above we want to take your through the basic foundation on which you can build your success, through tips such as how to write an article that developers, audiences, and search engines will love.

When you are engaged in website content writing, though, there are also traps that you need to avoid. We are going to cover some common mistakes in the articles on these pages, including bad SEO copy writing, bad keyword writing, and above all, the importance of avoiding plagiarism.

Lots of people assume that since it’s the Internet, it doesn’t really matter, but using bad practices can cost you a lot of money, particularly if the word gets out!

It is my goal that having read the online writing tips found in this section, you can apply them in your business and have a lot more success when it comes to landing jobs both on bidding sites and beyond. Remember that one of the keys to success is not being afraid to show what you know, so once you synthesize the information in these pages don’t be afraid to throw the terms around!

Many people have at one time or another considered writing for a living. Especially anyone who has received praise for their written work.

Unfortunately for most of us, writing for a living does not necessarily mean that we will get to be as creative or prosaic as we would like to be, and this is very clear once you start looking for jobs on the Internet. In this article, we will take a look at why it is important to differentiate your writing career from your writing hobby, and how to do so.

I will starve for my art!

This is the rally cry for many a writer; they refuse to compromise their work or “demean” themselves by agreeing to write pieces which fail to meet their standards of what writing should be. In other words, they are more the type to sit down and write a poem than a 500 word piece on Condominiums in Toronto.

The good news for those types of writers is that they can indeed expect to starve for their art. For every success story in the writing world who slaved away for years before getting noticed, there are a thousand who continue to starve because they were or are just too stubborn to treat a writing career as a business instead of a hobby.

Either that, or they were stuck at non-career jobs for most of their lives, receiving manuscript after manuscript back from publishers who just are not interested in their work.

If you want to make writing your career, you are going to have to work

For most of us, writing for a living means divorcing ourselves from what we would like to write and writing what other people want us to.

My big desire is to write about sports; I love sports and I can write very good biographies on athletes, summaries of games and events, even books on rules and regulations. The problem is the sports writing market is competitive and there are many writers with better connections than myself.

I could just say I am willing to serve at restaurants until that golden opportunity comes by, but having done so I know that it is much more preferable to focus on the writing part of my career and take jobs that I have a little less interest in.

That way I make money and hone my skills, and there is always the potential to have that dream job come floating in.

Get rid of the dreamy ideal

It’s fine to love your work and to want to be successful writing for a living, but you don’t have to overdo it. Many writers, whether in their profiles on bidding sites or on their own pages, will include phrases such as “writing is my life, and nothing is more important to me” in order to show how committed they are.

Unfortunately this approach just will not work for the practical writer.

The big reason is that this kind of statement really turns off potential employers. Again, you have to remember that this is business, not a hobby any longer. A web site developer who wants content written about the best diet plans does not care if you can use hundred dollar words and thousand dollar phrases in your article; she wants to see easy to read, informative content on her subject which Internet readers will grab on to.

In order to find jobs writing on the Internet and really anywhere else, it’s important to assume that editors and web developers are already aware that inside of every writer there are hundreds of stories waiting to come out. Leave that out of your pitch, and instead focus on what you will do for them.

They have practical jobs that they need filled and are willing to pay for, and they are looking for a practical writer to do them. Writing for a living is much different than writing as a hobby, and you will find that success will come once you develop a much more hard-nosed approach to the whole business.

The legal side

You might think that writing jobs freelance is somewhat akin to your dream of becoming a famous writer; that is, someone pays you to write what you want in the way that you want it, and everyone in the world loves to read it and then you win the J.K. Rowling award for getting everyone to read.

The reality of writing jobs freelance is far different from what most of us imagine before we really get started, and this can lead to some very common temptations for shortcuts when you are writing a piece, particularly if it is for use online. Let’s take a look at some of the temptations that arise for a lot of freelancers; hopefully forewarned is forearmed and you will be able to avoid some very common mistakes.

Plagiarizing other people’s work

This is by far the most common complaint I have had from clients who have already hired writers to create content for their sites. It seems that ripping off other people’s work by copying and pasting it into your own article is very, very common among web writers.

I can understand the temptation; sometimes it is very hard to write article number ten on the big advantages of a car that runs on hydrocarbons. Still, you have to buckle down and do your own work. First of all, copy and paste is cheating another writer out of their due. Second, there are plenty of copyright watching software programs that are employed by clients, and they seem to do a fairly good job. (Copyscape is probably the most widely used application)

Now on the other side of the copyright coin is the concern that you will accidentally “plagiarize” material. You might scoff at the notion, but it is a very real possibility; with so much content on the web it’s hard to think of an original way to say something like “Britney Spears needs to take better care of her children”.

Still, the idea of copyright violation is that large portions of a piece have been copied; it seems to be okay to have a few similar lines or even paragraphs, but you need to be sure that you are writing in your own words. Here are a few pointers I have picked up:

• If something appears in more than three other articles, it’s considered common knowledge. This is more to do with academic writing which focuses on research, but it applies to everyday Internet copy writing as well.
• When in doubt, credit the source. If you find a piece that you really like, don’t be scared to say “I got this from so and so”. The idea behind copyright and plagiarism is that credit is given where it is due, to the furthering of the career of the original author.
• Copyright does not apply to pieces over a certain age. This is great if you want to write about Ye Olde Wagonne, but might not be so helpful when it comes to hybrid cars. Still, you might be able to find some really good material.

Disappearing on a Client

Some writers will find that they are very tempted to just disappear on a client. I admit this is a problem that I have had when writing jobs freelance. One way I overcome it is by asking for a deposit; I find it’s much easier to complete what I say I will if I know someone has already paid me, because it becomes more of a question of integrity than anything else.

When the temptation to jam out on a contract starts to make itself felt, you might also want to remind yourself that it is far easier to retain a client than to find a new one. In fact, I would say that is how you will gain success when writing jobs freelance.

If it wasn’t for several repeat clients I would not be making a steady and reliable income month after month. They are also almost always the clients that are willing to pay realistic prices for pieces.

Contracts for writing jobs freelance

You can also avoid these common temptations by making sure that they are in any contracts that you and your client work out. Most of the time your client, if he or she has been in web development for a while, will know to make it very clear that work found to violate copyright will not be paid for.

It’s also a good idea to set up a contract which includes some milestones, so that you have good guidelines as to where you should be from date to date. That way the job is broken down into smaller chunks. And if you fall behind you won’t be quite as tempted to just drop the whole thing.

Freelance Employment? Let’s start out this section with a frank statement: I don’t believe that the terms freelance and employment are really compatible. After all, as a freelancer I (and hopefully you as well) am not under any sort of ongoing obligation with my clients, apart from fulfilling the contracts.

I don’t depend on them for eight hours a day of work, and the other side of the coin is that they don’t have to worry about me and my pay as soon as our agreed to work is concluded. That said, Freelance Employment seemed to be the popular search term, so we will just stick with the oxymoron for now.

Freelance Writing Rates

So what is it that you can expect to find in this ill named section? Well, I will be putting up various articles about the “nuts and bolts” writing jobs freelance. It’s the place where I talk about setting your freelance writing rates, using some real numbers that I found worked as I was growing my business. I have stressed it before on this site but I think it’s worth saying again; freelance writing resources are notoriously vague when it comes to real numbers in terms of pay.

There aren’t any secrets here – I will disclose exactly the rates I started with and what I make now. Maybe you will be able to charge higher prices, and that is great, because I am all about raising the bar and making sure people understand what our work is worth!

Contracts and Copyrights

Some other important aspects of the freelance writing business that we are going over in this section are issues having to do with contracts and copyrights, probably two of the most intimidating words for a person seeking freelance writing employment; and no more so than on the Internet.

Whenever you have a freelance job writing for the Internet, you are probably going to base a lot of your research on what you find on other sites. They key is in understanding that almost everything has already been said, and the key is to say it in a different way. We will look into that a little bit deeper in the article on writing jobs freelance; understanding some of the legalities such as copyright.

And that, of course, leaves us with contracts. Whenever you find a freelance employment, it is more than likely that you will have a contract, whether it is an official contract such as the templates used by magazines and newspapers or the more informal contracts that are the typical backbone of online bidding sites.

You need to know what to include in those contracts, what certain terms mean, and most importantly what to do if something should go wrong.

Approach to Success

Finally, we are going to put a touch of the cold hard reality of freelance employment into this section. In another section we looked at what it takes to make a living as a freelance writer, and in this section we will talk about the approach you need to take if you want to be successful in your freelance writing business.

They say as soon as you have to do something it stops being fun; this isn’t true all the time when it comes to your freelance writing career, but you will definitely find that there are some days when it feels much more like a regular job than something you love to do. If you really plan on writing for a living, you will have to leave some of your pretensions at the door.

by Karen Putz
(Chicago)

My first foray into a steady freelance job happened in the spring of 2007. I was casually browsing through the writing jobs listed at Craigslist. I responded to a job ad, sent in my resume and didn’t give it another thought.

A few days later, I signed a contract with a company that produces web content. I churn out several articles a month for this company.

I responded to more job ads on Craigslist and snagged another job, this time writing copy for a real estate company. That quickly fizzled as I handed in my first copy while running out the door to pick up a kid. I submitted copy with a mistake on it. Poof! The job was gone.

Then I received another freelance opportunity via email–a new website was forming and they liked my personal blog. Would I come and write for them? I said sure. The blogging job turned into another opportunity with bigger articles for the website. Bigger articles translated into bigger pay.

I’m still slowly trying my hand at other freelance opportunities, but I’m not at the point where I can consider this a full-time job just yet. The pay is not quite there.

I’m just happy that I have my foot in the freelancing door.

You might wonder why I am devoting a few articles to freelance editing jobs and proofreading jobs on a site about building a freelance WRITING career. Actually you might assume that editors are somehow not true writers, or that they are even in opposition to a writer’s success.

Well, we’re talking about becoming a successful freelance writer in this section, with a specific focus on keeping your eyes open for any writing opportunities that may come your way (particularly on the Internet).

If you have read some of the other articles I have written, you already know that I am totally against any line of thought that suggests exclusivity when it comes to your writing business. You won’t always get the chances you want, and that means having a diverse range of skill sets that you can get by on while you wait for your perfect opportunity to come up.

Editing: The securest freelance position of all

Offline and on, there are a lot of starving freelance writers. What you will never find is a starving freelance editor, because in essence no one considers editing an art form.

A lot of freelance writers I have read or talked to seem to degrade editors, which I find kind of humorous because for the most part, there are far more gainfully employed editors than there are writers. In fact, I would go so far as to say that were we to take the average pay per year of the two occupations (and yes you “writing writers” also get to use the combined salaries of Stephen King, J.K. Rowland and other seven or eight figure earners) the editor side would come out on top. Why? Because everyone, EVERYONE, uses the services of an editor or three.

What this means for your freelance writing business

For you, this means that editing jobs can be a very important part of your freelance writing career. Opportunities abound, and moreover you will probably find that editing jobs end up paying more per hour than writing jobs, with much easier work to boot. I expand on that a little bit more in another article, along with some specifics about editing jobs.

The point that you need to take from this is that when it comes to building a true career in freelance writing, you have to get away from many of the pretensions, snobberies, and mistaken beliefs that can be seen in so many writers.

Freelance editing jobs can be a great boost to the bottom line of any freelance business that is just starting out, and they may also lead to work in the form of writing. In fact if you look at the careers of many offline writers, you may find that some of the most successful landed their first deals after working as an editor in some capacity.

So never turn up your nose at freelance editing jobs. Not only will they serve to line your pocket, but they can also be a great step towards the writing work that you really want to do!

Time to face an important truth: in order to continue doing what you love, you need to earn money from freelance writing. When I first started out in this field, I was hoping that I would be writing a lot of articles on political events, humorous stories about my kids, opinion pieces, the really fun and interesting stuff. At this point in my career, I have realized that having opportunities to write about these things are few and far between. In order to earn money from freelance writing, I have to (often!) write on topics that don’t exactly stimulate my brain or bring joy to my heart.

Don’t give up your dream - and don’t work for slave wages

There are a couple of things that freelance writers, especially those in the beginning stages of their careers, are prone to. The first is to hang on to their pretension, believing that their art is far more important than making a living. What they don’t realize is that they can retain the parts of writing that they love without writing off, so to speak, the mundane tasks that put food on the table for the kids. You don’t have to give up your dream, you just have to realize that if you ever are going to “make it” in the way that you want, you are going to have to pay your dues.

The second mistake that freelance writers make is to devalue their services, to the point where they are basically working for slave wages. This is a chronic problem for writers both online and off, but I think that it is really exacerbated when someone starts a career by writing online. The amount of competition can make it very difficult to compete, and the temptation to earn money from freelance writing by being the lowest bid on the board can be hard to overcome.

How I started out

Before I go much further, I would like to say that in the beginning stages of my career, I took the lowball approach. I did this for a couple of reasons.

1. I knew I could still make a decent wage, comparatively speaking. I type fast, I process fast, and three 400 word, $5 pieces an hour meant $15 an hour, not a bad wage particularly from home.
2. I wanted to bulk up my feedback. In order to get the higher paying jobs, I needed to get some street cred, and in order to do that I needed some feedback. At the same time I could earn money from freelance writing.

I am not ashamed of taking this approach because it worked very well, but sometimes I wonder if I might have been able to bid at the prices I do now even though I was just starting out. If any of you are gutsy enough to try it, let me know because I would love to write about that.

Higher prices lead to more work

Even with this lowball approach, though, I found that I was able to raise my prices without too much time passing by. It was at that point that I made the conscious decision to make my proposals and bids based on quality, rather than the knowledge that if pressed I could pump out three to six articles in an hour. To my surprise and relief, business didn’t fall off at all; in fact, it increased! Not only was I making more money per article, but I was landing more jobs than I had previously.

The best example I can equate this to is in the world of real estate. Years ago, the parents of my best friend were trying to sell their house within a certain price bracket, and getting very few visits. Their natural reaction was to lower the asking price, but a friend suggested raising it instead. They took the advice somewhat skeptically, and put their house in the next price bracket up. To their surprise, the house had serious offers within a week and had sold within two. The buyers had been out there all the time, but obviously there was the perception that a low price meant low quality.

I get the impression from a few of the clients that I have talked to that it is much the same way in the world of freelance writing. Some pass over cheap bids because of the belief that a low price is hiding poor quality.

That’s good news for anyone who wants to earn money from freelance writing, because it means that if you deliver a quality product, people are willing to compensate you well for it.

Higher prices bring better clients

In addition, I have found that the clients who are willing to pay more for better quality work also tend to send more work my way. A year or so ago, I decided to try raising my prices yet again, just to see if I could make $20 for an article.

I was delighted when selected. And even more so when he sent me 10 more articles to do.

Since that time, I handle ten articles each week for that buyer; he is not interested in looking for someone who offers a lower price, he wants to stay with the writer who charges fairly and offers quality work in return.

If you want to earn money from freelance writing, you can’t be timid when it comes to charging what you are worth. The mentality of buyers and your own work will both support your decision to charge fairly, and you will probably find that your yearly earnings are equal to that of the average magazine and newspaper freelance writer in no time.