How to Make $100,000 a Year by Writing Online

It sounds like an Internet come on. Ordinarily, when it is claimed one can make that amount of money online it precedes a pitch whereby they ask you to send $24.99 for their book which will explain how. Not this time. This is not to say it can be done easily. As with any (legal) route to a six figure income, it requires a degree of hard work and discipline. However, writing from the comfort from one's own home can hardly be termed as oppressively difficult in any scenario. Many are now working quite hard writing but are essentially just spinning their wheels. They fail to understand the following key points.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Many write analytical and deeply insightful pieces only to become upset and bewildered when they are only offered a paltry sum for their masterpieces. Pride must go out the window. Online, you are not writing for people who are flipping back and forth between your writing and their copy of the Economist. A clever piece illustrating the necessity of the Kyoto Protocal might be good typing exercise for your fingers, but it will not make you money. Conversely, a piece on how to make eco friendly Father's Day gifts out of discarded toilet paper rolls can prove to be quite lucrative. If you desire to be Thomas Friedman, then you should apply to the New York Times or Washington Post for a columnist position.

Profitable online writing will not add to your portfolio. Oftentimes, you will feel compelled to deny you even wrote the piece about alternative uses for cat litter if ever confronted. If you desire to pontificate and elucidate upon the deep issues of the day, then a blog is best suited for you. There is a decent shot you can recover your hosting costs from advertising. Significant earnings above that equate to hitting the lottery when one takes into consideration how many competing blogs you face. Many of those competing blogs actually are written by renowned columnists and pundits. If it makes you feel better, they don't make much from their blogs either.

BE THE EXCEPTION

The world of online writers is populated by dilettantes and one week washouts. Clients seeking product are often left holding the bag with writers claiming a bad headache as the deadline approaches. It is incumbent upon you to be the exception. $100,000 is a compensation level which requires diligence and professionalism. You can not expect to make it by missing deadlines or turning in shoddy work. Each project, no matter how much you feel it might be beneath you, needs to receive your absolute best. Instructions, especially for SEO pieces, can be arbitrary and sometimes complex. Ensure you follow them exactly with no deviations.

Following common sense rules of customer service like meeting deadlines, not taking shortcuts, and providing quality work on a consistent basis will make you a real standout among your peers in relatively short order. The result will be order flow greater than you can handle with limited marketing efforts on your behalf. A few e-mails to potential clients seeking writers on the myriad online writing job web sites once a week will do the trick. Your diligence and work product will sell itself once the door is opened. Let your dependability and attention to detail be your marketing department.

The extra effort you put in negates the necessity of spending vital time pursuing work. You do not actually have to be a fantastic writer to greatly impress a customer in this space. Incorporating keywords in SEO pieces so they are coherent is an art writers of any level can master. Clients who receive even moderately well written pieces containing keywords inserted without sacrifice of grammar or syntax will be highly pleased. They will be ecstatic if they additionally see that all assignments will consistently be submitted ahead of deadline.

IT IS ALL IN THE YIELD

Most online writers are exclusively focused on the gross rate offered for a given piece. In the end, that is a meaningless number. Let's look at our stated $100,000 annual goal. That translates to $1923 per week requisite earnings. The next variable is how many hours per week you will be devoting to writing. $100,000 annually can not be attained by working part time or even just 9 to 5. The beauty of online writing to most is that they can work when they please. Write for a few hours then stop. Do some in the morning or late at night depending upon your mood. Some lifestyles are very conducive to this. Others are not. To make $100K you must be willing to devote 65 hours per week to writing. The headline of this piece didn't read "Make $100,000 Easily".

A "normal" 9 to 5 job usually entails a commute and other ancillary time consuming activities. Once these are factored in, most will see their 40 hour a week job is really 47-52 hours. The additional hours needed to get to 65 a week is viewed by many as a small sacrifice to achieve the freedom associated with working from home. So, assuming you are willing to work the 65 hours a week, that translates to a needed $29.58 per hour to achieve the $1923 a week as outlined above. $29.58 per hour while working 65 hours a week gets you to a hundred grand a year.

The $29.58 number becomes your baseline analysis. All work you embark upon must yield you $29.58 per hour worked. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter if it is short one paragraph pieces paying $2 which you can do one every 4 minutes or one 1500 word piece paying $30 which takes you a full hour. All time must go into the calculation including any research time needed or time expended to review your piece for errors before submission. One soon deciphers that the more mindless $3-$5 pieces can be written contemporaneously off the top of one's head in an expeditious fashion. Yield often is much better on those as opposed to more weighty assignments which require a modicum of research. Yield is the only thing that matters to you. Subject matter, price per piece and who the client is are all irrelevant.

HOOK THEM WITH CHEAP BAIT

Many online writers make a critical mistake of not pursuing work they feel comes with too low of an offer. Let's say you see an ad requesting 350 word articles for $2 a piece. You do your yield calculation and see that translates to $11.50 per hour. Instead of skipping over the offer you should accept an initial assignment of a small batch. Provide rapid turnaround and high quality as always. Many times the client offers $2 because that is the worth of most of the garbage they receive back from many online writers. When they see a professional and dependable writer their valuations may change dramatically. That piece could be worth $12 to them in intrinsic value.

The $2 public offer could relate to the fact that more than half of what they receive back is not useable. If they determine 100% of your product fits their criteria, then $6 to you could equate to $2 paid to the general writing public. The value of your pieces could even prove higher seeing you eliminate their costs associated with soliciting and reading all the rejected articles.

Impress them then break the news that your ongoing price is $5.50 per piece which gets you above your yield target. The worst they can say is no, and your risk is an hour of two or additional work needed to make up for the deficient yield on the initial low priced order you accepted. You do not know the price a potential client is truly willing to pay until you provide them with quality work and subsequently negotiate.

BUILD A RECURRING STREAM

Most freelance assignments are clear cut. They give you an assignment, and you write it with full license conveying to the customer. They pay you. End of story. However, many avenues provide for a recurring revenue stream. Associated Content does it by paying $1.50 for each 1000 page views on top of any up front payment offered. This makes your yield calculation a bit more difficult seeing you do not have a crystal ball showing what the eventual end page view count will be for a given article.

Proactively writing on your own as opposed to accepting defined assignments changes the equation in several ways. Firstly, you can stick to subjects within your expertise thus limiting requisite research time. However, it also adds the variable of needing to pick the right subject matter which will prove attractive to the site for up front payment as well as generate sufficient page views to get you to your yield requirements. To use a round number, it appears on this site a reasonable total goal per piece is $8. Marketing your piece can add to this amount. However, all time spent marketing must be assessed in your yield calculation. $29.58 per hour required and $1.50 for each 1000 page views. This means each hour spent marketing must produce approximately 20,000 page views during the lifetime of the article. This is a tall order.

With Associated Content, $5 up front payment average along with 2000 average lifetime page views per article appears to be enough of a stretch goal as is. At $8 per piece (keeping it simple and not including NPV calculations into the performance piece) that equates to the necessity of writing each Associated Content piece in no longer than 16 minutes and 12 seconds on average.

For sake of disclosure, this piece will take longer than that and will not hit my yield target unless page views exceed approximately 13,500. Highly doubtful. The deficiency is chalked up to being a charitable venture hoping it helps some other writer who might one day return the favor. It appears very few pieces which I have submitted to this site will hit my yield target, although many will come close. However, it does provide for a nice break while in the midst of 50 pieces relating to the benefits of blowing your nose. Sites like Associated Content also provide for a good testing ground to gauge the level of page views a given type piece might receive. Such information could prove useful in the future should you seek to move up the SEO food chain.

Other avenues exist for more substantial performance based pay. However, these require you to delve into arenas outside of writing. Domain name registration, web hosting, and figuring out which SEO pixie dust to throw in your articles become necessary skills if you try to step up to the next level thus replacing your clients. Most customers of SEO pieces use them in what is called VRE (virtual real estate). You create a page then put the articles on there hoping for enough traffic which can be monetized though Adsense or other programs. The $8 per 1000 page view figure seems to be commonly quoted in reference to Adsense. Consequently, going the Adsense route you would need to achieve approximately 3750 page views per each hour worked during the resultant article(s) lifetime. Time spent marketing the article becomes much more critical in this arena and must be added to the calculation as well. Affiliate marketing can transition the monetization from page views to actual sales of a product and can be highly lucrative. However, at this stage you are pretty much leaving the domain of online writing and entering online marketing.

NEVER STOP SELLING

Even if you have more work than you can handle you should continue sending inquiries for new work. Your goal is to constantly improve yield which can either eventually get you above $100K a year or alternatively reduce the 65 hour weekly requirement. Always know the lowest yield of your current client base. Let's say that number is $28.75. Constantly look for new paths to convert that piece of work to another with a higher yield. Always be looking to upgrade your lowest yield work. Many times, when you go to break the bad news to the low yield customer they will raise your rates to keep you. Although it increases your workload above 65 hours, it is also a good idea to keep a small stable of lower yield clients in order to quickly fill in for a high yield client who could disappear.

$100K definitely is possible. If you are diligent and willing to consistently work 65 hours a week it actually becomes probable. You don't have to be a Pulitzer level writer. Often, if you are, it will work against you with your pride getting in the way of inserting atrociously written keywords into pieces about the best way to clip one's toenails. Hopefully these thoughts take at least one struggling online writer off the treadmill and onto a more lucrative path.