Do you want to progress from writing to building a writing career? The purpose of this site is to help you to leave the every day grind of an office job and exercise your writing skills.

I want to guide you through the process of setting up your freelance business to make sure you succeed. Of course, one of the most important parts of making a writing career work is in finding jobs.

There are a lot of jobs for freelance writers out there, in fact with the Internet there are probably more freelance writing opportunities out there than ever before.

Using Bidding Sites

In this section, we are going to narrow the search for online freelance writing jobs right down to the area where I have had the most success, financially speaking: Internet sites where you bid to land certain jobs.

Most of the time the freelance writing job opportunities that you will find on these sites will involve writing for different web developers, and that actually takes an entirely different skill set than a traditional freelance writing job opportunity would call for (we cover a lot of the specifics in another section of the site).

It took me a while to really get the hang of Internet bidding sites; in order to land jobs and have a viable career with online freelance writing jobs you really have to know the ins and outs of the various bidding sites.

Some of the bidding sites attract online writing jobs that are much higher paying, with much better clients, than others. Even smaller sites (such as ifreelance.com or getafreelancer.com) can offer a surprising wealth of online freelance writing jobs, though, so I am going to try to use and review the best sites for you.

Which one to choose?

What I have found is that no site where you can find freelance writing job opportunities is perfect. In fact the two biggest sites that I have come across, Elance.com (see my Elance review) and Guru.com (see my Guru review), have some glaring weaknesses, particularly when it comes to mediation and the protection of the people who pay to bid on jobs. You’ll see what I mean when we get into the specifics about these sites a little bit more.

In the meantime, you should start out this section by reading the article entitled “Find Freelance Writing Jobs Online”. It gives a good overview of what you will need to do to start bringing in clients on bidding sites and what most of these sites have in common.

Once you know where to find these sites and what to look for, you will find that the money you have always wanted to make writing comes in fairly quickly. And if you know what you are doing, you will be making enough money to consider online writing a viable career in no time.

by Jenn Hollowell
(Richmond, Maine, USA)

My freelance writing career began November of 1999, with this article:
M.C. Escher: Artist or Artisan?

I found the opportunity on inscriptionsmagazine.com (which, I believe, is now defunct).

The Decision

I decided to become a writer when I learned I was pregnant with my first child. It was one month, to the day, before he was born that I got my start.

I had researched the fiction market extensively, but it didn’t take me long to realize non-fiction would be the career builder for me. I found many fiction markets that accepted new writers, mind you, but I couldn’t find the pay scale or “regular gig” type of work I craved.

Contribution to Content Sites

It wasn’t long after that when I fell into the habit of contributing to content sites:

• epinions.com
• themestream.com
• thevines.com
• sagebase.com
• webseedpublishing.com

While these sites brought in exactly the kind of income and consistency I needed and wanted, they didn’t last as companies and, one by one, vanished from the Internet pool of opportunity . . . with writer’s earnings still in the hopper.

Out of all of them, epinions.com still exists but for a painfully low stipend in comparison to “back in the day.”

Newsletter Writing

Following that little experience, I found myself writing for a lot of newsletters both in print and online. This seemed so much more credible than writing for the sites I mentioned above and the clips seemed to hold more weight.

I was able to break into better sites that were seeking content and dabble in copywriting (which, as it turns out, doesn’t hold my interest at all).

Trying on Different Hats

Between 2002 and 2004, I found myself going through a whole new set of experiences:

• I did manuscript editing, mostly for self published and print-on-demand authors.
• I was (and still am) book reviewing for a variety of authors, small pubs and large publication houses.
• I wrote a lot of content for a lot of different sites: Google searching my name will produce evidence of this fact.
• I was a magazine copy editor (Pulse Magazine, Las Vegas).
• I was a newspaper editor (The Maine Construction News).
• I wrote for The Writer Magazine and Do! Magazine.
• I was a ghostwriter for an educational company in California (course modules about the CAHSEE).

As you can see, I wore a lot of different hats. I had to “try” out all of these roles, though, in order to see what I really wanted out of my career. I wanted no “what if” questions, otherwise I’d be too distracted by wondering if I was missing out on an opportunity.

Finding My Writing Niche

Through these experiences, I was able to find my niches: providing content (article writing) for the web, newsletters and magazines. Out of all of it, that’s what the “writer” in me was driven to do and was most passionate about.

The Crash

It all came to a crashing halt, though, when I had to go through a couple of heart surgeries (one in September of 2004 and one in October of 2005).

This depleted my energy and ability to focus considerably. Followed-up by a couple of cancer cell treatments in October of 2006, I found myself wondering if I was ever going to be able to get back on track again. Several efforts were made during these years of treatments and recoveries, but it was exhausting.

Rebuilding My Writing Career

This year, 2007, was dedicated to rebuilding my career and getting my self back in the game. This challenge (Just Hit Send) got me on my way:

• October (the first month I started)
• November (the effort continues)

What if I Could Write a Book?

There was still one what if question I needed to answer, however. What if I could write a book?

This question has been on my mind for years, so I decided to take the plunge and get it out of my system. So, that’s what I’m doing now. I’m writing my first book: The Complete Guide to Building Your Own Home and Saving Thousands on Your New House, for Atlantic Publishing (will be finishing the project January 2008).

I have three other proposed books for three other publishers in the works, as well, so stay tuned!

Active Learner

This little story glosses over quite a bit of details, the number one being the fact that all of these accomplishments required A LOT of daily effort.

I’ve armed myself with lots of resources (books,websites, magazines, newsletters) and have remained an active learner.

Without dedicating myself to the task of actively seeking work on a daily basis (and ignoring my inner critic), I wouldn’t have been able to experiment with and find where my home in the writing world is.

Jenn Hollowell on MySpace.com

How did you get the first freelance writing job? When was it? Who was your first client?
Chip in and help me motivate new writers. I remember when I started out, I lapped up any success story. It motivated me to keep going.

This is for all new freelance writers, motivational success stories of how you started. Maybe you also want to share where your career took you from the first writing assignment and why you decided to go for a writing career.

I share a little bit on our home page about my jobs before I started to write for a living. While they were not always bad, I did find that I found the time away from my family, the loss of control over my life, and the necessity of listening to someone else (often in a position due more to seniority or friendship than any inherent capabilities) a real drag. I had always dreamed of a career where I could work from home doing something I loved; most of all I wanted to write for a living!

I decided to take this dream and turn it into reality a couple of years ago. I started to read a lot of books on how to make money writing for a living, but didn’t find very much useful advice. One piece of advice that I did find in every book, though, and that I found to be very true, was that if you have bills to pay and mouths to feed you need to come up with a solid plan when you decide to write for a living.

For a lot of people, this means following the old cliché “Don’t quit your day job”. Instead of the pejorative way in which this phrase is used, think of it as a positive: don’t quit your day job yet, but once you build up a solid client base and learn the ropes of your writing career, you will be able to go to part time and eventually leave the 9 to 5 scene (or whichever shift you happen to work on) for good.

Once you get your writing career started a little bit, you will quickly find out whether or not you are cut out for it. Believe it or not, once you make the decision to write for a living it is not all bliss. You have to worry about dry periods where you don’t quite make what you were hoping to, and you have to be able to work fast while still turning in quality pieces (that’s for writing on the Internet, writing for land based publications is a little bit different; I came across a good article on writing recently, and I really think it highlights the difference in the mediums very well. Almost everything that works for land based publications will prove detrimental on the web!).

Writing quickly enough to make the job worthwhile, in particular, can be what makes or breaks a career freelance writing for the Internet. I knew that I could research and write quality pieces very quickly, largely due to my university career. In fact, I knew that I worked best when I was up against a tight deadline and had no choice but to write quickly! Many writers don’t go to university (in fact some may tell you that this can be detrimental, although I haven’t found that to be the case at all), so the only way to tell if writing for a living is viable option for you is through a few assignments.

I’ve said it in another article, and I will say it again here: if you can’t make as much per hour writing as you could with a typical job, then it might not be worth it to write as a career. There is more to it than that, of course, but in the end whether or not you really can write for a living will come down to money.

When it comes to writing careers, there are really a lot of different choices that a person can make. For most people the key lies in understanding what types of writing you like to do, how you view the writing process, and what kind of “sacrifices” you are willing to make for your writing career. In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the many different careers for writers you might consider embarking upon.

Internet writer!

Of course, this is going to make it at the top of my list, because it happens to be my own writing career. Writing for the Internet means that there are a vast number of opportunities open to you, from humor writing to advice to any one of hundreds of different niches and information areas.

There are also several different sub categories when it comes to Internet writing careers. You can make a good living ghost writing for the hundreds of sites in existence and the hundreds that are being developed, you can create your own blog, or you can get a job with a well read, established site which is almost the same as writing for a land based publications.

There are a few ways that you can get started in this area. I started by doing Google searches on the topic and then found a few sites where I could actually apply for jobs. Some people find out about different bidding sites and then use them to establish their Internet writing careers. Still others just take the bull by the horns and apply directly to different sites in order to make their careers work.

Of course, there are some serious downsides to writing for the Internet, and you will have to decide if you can put up with them if this is the writing career you want to follow. Let’s take a brief bullet list.

• Competition is stiff!
• You may have to put up with low pay before working your way up
• Clients may not always be reliable!
• You might not get a lot of respect from other people, particularly other writers!

Journalist

When most people talk about freelance writing careers, they are talking about a career as a freelance journalist. These, of course, are the women and men who write for newspapers and magazines. Like Internet writers, there are diverse opportunities when it comes to journalism, and most writers prefer to find themselves a “niche”.

One great example here is a buddy of mine, Dave Jawol. If you talk to Dave about international politics or even national politics, you will quickly realize that he doesn’t have a lot of information. When I first heard Dave was attending journalism school I was skeptical, but it turns out I was dead wrong. Why? Because Dave has an enduring passion, and that is for hockey, more specifically for hockey on the local level.

Dave has turned this passion into a career, in part by receiving a degree in journalism but also because of his incredible knowledge in this area. His success points to two very important parts of establishing a writing career as a journalist:

Most of the time you may have to start small! You can’t expect to be hired as the number one writer for a major newspaper in a major city. Writers and editors are both jealous and even if you are talented, you will have to wait until they feel you have “paid your dues”. A great example of this is Dave Barry; he has always been funny, but it wasn’t until his thirties that a newspaper gave him a chance. Now he is internationally recognized and has won at least two Pulitzer prizes.

You will probably have to get a degree. Although most editors today don’t have a journalism degree themselves, it seems as though they think they are a part of a very special writing breed, one that has passed. It’s pretty hard to get a job even as a freelancer for a newspaper, at least, without a journalism degree. It’s the only way that some editors can tell if you can write or not (and that’s not a reflection on you!).

Copywriter

Here is one example of a writing career that can really be lucrative! Copywriters may work for advertising agencies or within a media outlet such as a radio station, working to develop promotions for people, places, products, ideas, and so on. It’s a fairly involved job that sometimes requires brilliance “on demand”; you have to be able to make a convincing argument with relatively few words.

If this is your are of interest, have a look at copywriting jobs. In it I interview a copywriter who has recently just started a new job as a copywriter.

Author

Last but not least, on this list anyway, you can follow the dream of every writer (yes, admit it!) and make a writing career out of being an author. This is what I wanted to do when I first started writing, and the great thing is it is a dream that never really dies; some authors may not see their stories published until they have been trying to get them off the ground for some time.

Herein, of course, lies the disadvantage of deciding that you want to be an author “for a living”. You won’t really have a living until you get published, and that can be very hard! It can also be fairly painful. Don’t decide you are going to be an author unless

• you already have a proven ability to write pieces that people enjoy reading (your family and friends don’t count)
• you have incredible powers of perseverance
• you can take rejection fairly well
• and you have a certain amount of luck!

If you are one of the people who have dreamed about carving out a career in the world of freelance writing, you are certainly not alone.
In February 2005 I found myself at a bit of a cross roads in my life; my wife had a great job as a Registered Nurse and we had two children. I had just wrapped up a temporary job with a government agency, and had no idea what to do next.

I wanted to be my own boss

What I knew I certainly did not want to do was return to a five day a week job. I had had some very bad experiences at mills, restaurants, and so on, and was coming to a conclusion about myself that many people had told me before: it was very unlikely that I would ever be happy working under the direction of someone else (I prefer to think that is because I am brilliant and could do better and tell people so, but my wife says it has more to do with me being difficult).

My interest: writing

I did know that I was interested in writing for a living. Writing is something that I have always been skilled at, right from my days in elementary school. I had won a few cash prizes with some stories, and I definitely entertained thoughts of becoming a writer.

Feeling that it really was now or never, I began searching the Internet for writing opportunities and buying up any book I could find about how to start a freelance writing career.

The first month: figuring out how to start

Within the first month, I found out two things very quickly. The most important, and the reason why I feel that this site is important, is that those books did very little in the way of helping me understand how to start a freelance writer’s career.

Worse, there is an incredible dearth of information out there on how to make a career of freelance writing on the Internet. Imagine, millions and millions of web pages all over the world, and the only books to be found want to talk about breaking into the magazine and newspaper markets!

In addition, these books were pretty vague when it came to where to find jobs, or what one could expect to make. I assume this is because many writers are jealous of their revenue sources (and rightly so) and maybe even a little shy about disclosing what they actually make.

Getting the first writing jobs

The second thing I found out was that once you get on the right trail on the Internet, making money through freelance writing is a lot easier than any of those authors made it sound.

I entered my first bidding site very cautiously (and without telling my wife) because I did have to pay a fee for the rights to bid on jobs. I figured that if I at least broke even, then it would be justified. Well, I did more than break even, I actually made ten times what the initial fee was for the right to bid!

Being realistic

Now, before you go rushing off to reap the benefits of Internet writing, let me combine my two discoveries and my solution to them in order to put everything into perspective.
Writers, and particularly those who write for the Internet, don’t always make huge sums of money. I did make a lot more than I invested, but in the first month of my business on that particular site, that only amounted to $800 US. I made an additional $200 off another site I had found, but $1000 is hardly enough to feed a family and pay the mortgage for a month (fortunately my wife had a great job, did I mention that already?).

If you are looking for a site that promises you a surefire way to make millions, I should point out that today, a year and a half later, I am making a respectable $50,000 a year, with less than two years in business.

The key was in knowing where to look for jobs, how to pitch myself as the right choice for a writer, and retaining my good clients. I was also able to learn how to bid much more effectively in a competitive market place, and how to avoid jobs that ended up costing me money.

Honest sharing

The upshot is that I would like to share this information with other writers who are looking to start their own freelance writing careers. The pages on this site will be diverse, but my main strength and source of knowledge is in making money by writing for Internet sites, as well as proof reading for those sites and so on.

This site is not about hiding my secrets because I am scared of competition; there is more than enough work for every competent writer out there, and I am of the belief that if we all hold the same standards, it can only benefit us as a group.

Of course, you are probably wondering why this guy would share these secrets for free. Well, once you start writing for the Internet successfully, you will see the kind of revenue that can be made without having to charge site visitors a dime for reading.

This part remains a mystery for me, my partner Alexander (he’s the guy whose picture you don’t see, which is too bad because he is an Aussie and is no doubt much better looking than I am) handles that side of it.

You can succeed in your own writing career

What I am here to do is provide you with information on starting your own freelance writing career, right from your mindset and where to look for jobs to an outline of what most Internet clients are looking for.

In these pages you will find stories of what I’ve done wrong and what I’ve done right, and hopefully you will be able to avoid some of the mistakes I made and benefit from the times I’ve hit the target. You’ll find out where to look for work, how to come across in such a way that potential clients can’t say no, and how to protect yourself.

If you have always dreamed of becoming a freelance writer, the Internet Age beckons. There’s money to be made all from the comfort of your own home, and I would like to help you to succeed with your dream.