A Guide to Paying Online Writing Gigs

From the get-go, let me say this: I can't offer first-hand experience from these gigs. Between my Associated Content writing and the websites I run, I'm hard pressed to find the will-power to squeeze creative writing into each day.

What I'm offering here is a guide to what is out there; if you're interested in a particular company, I can't stress enough the importance of doing some background research. Run their name through the Better Business Bureau, try to find contact addresses of members that are willing to share their experience with you, and run a general search on the site through a search engine.

While doing your research, keep in mind an important fact: you'll hear just as much good as bad about a company. It's the importance of what you hear - repeatedly - that will affect your decision. Everyone has a bad experience, but there are often twenty others who rave about their own.

Before You Start: Some Things to Consider

When you're ready to start earning money from your writing, you're ready to start NOW. You don't want to wait.

So, please, take a deep breath and get ready to do a little bit of thinking, first. I promise, it will save you from one of those bad experiences in the long run.

1. Your Time - Jot down a realistic schedule for yourself. If you have a "regular" job, don't push it out of the way until you're earning a constant, steady income from writing that you can realistically live off of.

This means that your schedule should work around whatever responsibilities you already have. Family, friends, the 9-5 ... your writing has a home in there somewhere, but don't expect the rest of your life to fit your writing. You have to make your writing fit into the rest of your life, or you'll never get any writing done.

What you should end up with is not just a schedule, but an average of how many hours per week you can devote to writing time. Even one hour a day is sufficient to make a difference.

Keep this in mind when you're looking at writing gigs. Not only do you have a certain amount of time that you can spend writing, but life has this funny way of throwing curve balls at you when you'd least expect it. When I was diagnosed with cervical cancer and went through a series of nasty treatments, I disappeared from both of the places I wrote for. AC editors were concerned about my disappearance and contacted me, while the other company simply replaced me. So, who do you think I stuck to writing with? Right. And no - I won't say who they were, and no, they're not in my list.

2. Your Expertise - Your next little "jot down" exercise is to brainstorm your areas of expertise. If you have a certification or degree in something, awesome! You've got a head start.

You don't have to have a degree in an area in order to be an "expert", though. I have a friend that I used to work with who is just now getting into the field of online writing, and she was considering her options for topic. She doesn't have any degrees in anything, but she does have something of serious use: she's a dog breeder. The number of topics that can be imagined under that single heading are astounding. Even better is the fact that she's got lots of experience, so she's speaking with her own wisdom and not having to do more research than writing in order to be effective.

That's the key. Stick with things that you know and love. It will save you time, build readers' confidence in you because you obviously know what you're talking about, and be enjoyable. I've often found that it also stretches your other interests in new ways. You'll be writing about something and then hit something totally new while doing some back-up research that you'd never considered before. This new thing then filters into the "other" stuff that you do and makes the quality of everything you do go up.

Now, when you're looking at the companies you're interested in writing for, keep your two lists handy. You need to know that they are able to work with your time limits, and that they have a need for the topic(s) you're an expert in. If they don't meet both of these needs, move on down the list. Seriously.

Online Writing Gigs: The List

This list is huge. It wouldn't look so large if I hadn't put details in for each company, but I didn't feel right about just plopping a bunch of URL's at you and saying "Go for it!". So ... take your time, look through the list carefully, and work your way through the research before you actually apply or start writing for anyone.

Experts Gigs

*ExpertBee - This is like Yahoo! Answers ... except that you get paid for your answers to people's questions.
*Experts - Unlike most freelance sites, this one doesn't charge fees from you or the hiring party.
*Helium - Write, rate, learn, and earn. Helium is like a massive blog spot that pays by views, but does have a marketplace where you can attempt to earn the cash of a publisher.
*JustAnswer - Another get-paid-to-answer-questions site, but this one works a little bit different. The question asker sets a price, usually prepays, and then when you log in you can choose what you want to answer.
*Kasamba - Just like the above, except that it's all done live via chat or email.

Community Gigs

*Gather - A news community, you earn gather points for publishing that can be redeemed for gift cards. The more active you are, the closer you work your way to cold, hard cash.
*Xomba - Write about absolutely anything you want to, sign up for an Adsense account, and you earn half of the advertising revenue your writing generates.
*Associated Content - If you found this article and aren't yet an author with AC, what are you waiting for? You get paid per article, plus can work your way into some great incentive pay based on page views.

Blogging and Pay per Post Gigs

*BloggerJobs - This site itself doesn't hire bloggers, but what it does is post your info as a writer looking for a blogging job, and offers up some of the latest paying blogger help wanted posts.
*BlogCharm - This site is still in beta, but has a neat concept. For your posts, you have 3 ways of earning money: 50% of the ad revenue, a portion of sponsor revenue, plus you can include your own Adsense code and keep 100% of that money.
*BlogEvolve - You earn a portion of adsense revenue on your posts and those of people you refer.
*BlogForProfits - I've heard rave reviews about this company ... but wasn't able to research them. When I hit their site, they'd been vandalized by a hacker. (Seriously - thousands of lines of RhCp092192 0wned j00!!!). So I'm leaving this in the list with a warning: if their security is compromised, you might want to consider writing elsewhere.
*BloggingAds - If you have your own blog, this might be something to consider on those off days when you can't find anything to post. This site pays you to use one of their posts. Pure and simple.
*InBlogAds - Works the same way as above. Advertisers pay you for posts about their products or services.