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!

Is an online writing contest the Internet writer’s answer to the writing contests that you can find in trade magazines and in other places in the offline freelance world?

This type of contest, when based on a well known publication, can be of great benefit to the aspiring writer, but the same might not hold true online. In this article I will  outline some of my experiences with online writing contests (all two of them).

First, though, I will make some points about what I think the pros of entering a writing contest online COULD be.

Online writing contest pros

Basically, I think that entering a writing contest online has the same potential benefits as entering a contest for a print trade magazine such as Reader’s Digest. That is to say, if you win, you are probably in not only for some big bucks but you also receive a lot of exposure, and for the freelancer good exposure is everything.

The other advantage (and probably even more so) is to have your piece critiqued by other writers. Now granted, as writers we are all harsh and – let’s face it – competitive people, but every so often there are some good truths to be gleaned from the comments other people make about your stories.

Potential online writing contest cons

Of course, as writers we are also protective when it comes to our work, and this can be a big problem when it comes to publishing our pieces, or handing them to someone else to publish, online.

As I stated above I have entered two different online writing contests. I didn’t go in with many expectations, so I wasn’t exactly disappointed, but they didn’t really help me get anywhere either.

In both, I sent in my pieces and then never heard from the sites again (and I also forgot the URLs for the sites too, and I would caution everyone else to write that down somewhere, in retrospect). Were they good pieces? Well I think one in particular was very good.

On the Internet, content equals success

If you’ve done any kind of writing for the Internet, you have probably heard that content is king (and if you haven’t heard that, you’re in luck, because I have written an article all about that great news for aspiring freelance writers).

Briefly, what this means is that the more pieces a site can put up, the more likely it is to garner attention from the search engines. Better rankings from the search engines means more visitors, more visitors means more appeal, and more appeal means more advertising potential. The more potential, the higher the dollar amounts advertisers are likely to pay a specific site.

So what does this mean for the writer who enters a contest? Well, you might be submitting a piece that will work very well for the site in question, but won’t provide you with any sort of benefit in return. Your work will be generating income for someone else, but you will still be eating Mac and Cheese in your parents’ kitchen.

Really, that is just the paranoid writer in me coming out, and I am sure most of us who write for a living have this inner demon screaming out.

Online Writing Contests - Are they useful?

On the other hand, there are probably a few of you reading this who have had some success when it comes to entering online writing contests. If so, we would really like to hear about it.

Or do you think writing contests are a waste of time?