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Posted by John Lockwood on March 10th, 2008

Those of you who read Selling Your Writing (Part I: The Wrong Way) were no doubt waiting for me to get to Part II, where I show you the right way, preferably in 600 words or less, because naturally you’re busy. 

OK, I can do that.  Here it is in four words, that I’ve borrowed from David Taylor’s The Freelance Success Book:  Write it.  Sell it.

That’s pretty simple, right?  Those of you who wanted the short answer are already done.

The Longer Answer

So if that’s so simple, why isn’t everyone online writing and making money?  

In part one, we talked about five ways to fail, and only one of those ways was about failing to write.  All four of the other ways to fail were different ways to fail at selling.  So it stands to reason that the much of the rest of our journey, in this article, on this blog, in our careers as people making money by writing online, is going to be about selling, not about writing.

Getting better at selling our writing will involve us in two fundamental tasks:  exploring markets for our writing and exploiting them.  The exploration phase is first — we need to know approximately where the gold is before we start digging.  But even before we go out exploring, it helps to have a basic sort of map of the territory.  We can draw a better map as we get more information, but for now let’s divide the world of making money by writing online into six major continents.  (We’ll leave off a seventh in case we discover Antarctica later).

Six Ways To Make Money Writing Online

1. Write to Support Sales in Another Business
   This was the first online writing business model that I learned how to do.  In fact, when I first did this, I didn’t know I was a professional writer yet.  I thought I was a former software developer who had become a real estate agent.  About four years, ten web sites, and eight hundred blog posts later, it dawned on me that my real business was not home sales, but professional writing.  Home sales was just a niche and a revenue vehicle. 

   One way of looking at this business model is that you’re a freelance writer with a single client, where the single client is you, and you get paid strictly on contingency.

2. Writer For Hire — The Traditional Freelance Model
   Another time honored way to make money writing online is also a time honored way of making money offline, by being a freelance writer.  This is someone who gets paid largely on a per-project basis, either on a fee or fee plus royalty basis.  This probably comes closest to capturing what most people think of when they think of professional writers.

   Most people probably think of novelists first, but in reality most freelancers make their living selling non-fiction of one form or another.  David Taylor’s book, quoted above, is largely about magazine feature publishing.   Online variations include web site writer, blog ghostwriter, and the like.  Another popular niche in this business model is copy writing, such as writing for direct mail, or the online equivalent, direct response web sites and landing pages.

3. Write An Information Product that Sells Advertising
   If you can write well enough and often enough and promote yourself well enough to get a significant online readership, you can make a living exclusively from the sale of advertising space on your web site or blog.  This can take any number of different forms.  AdSense is probably the most popular and well known, but other options include banner ads in a variety of different horizontal and vertical formats.  One new format that’s becoming ubiquitous on many blogs is the 125×125 pixel ad. 

   Many of the Internet’s most popular blogs use this approach to good effect.  The limitation of this business model is that unless your readership is large enough to support it, the revenue you make from hosting ads on your site is likely to be a trickle of pennies per day at best.

4. Write An Information Product that You Sell Directly
   In my opinion the single coolest thing about online writing is the extent to which it allows you to be both author and publisher.  Do you have a series of blog articles on a topic that could be turned into a book?  How about packaging them into an e-book?  Yes, there’s the issue of why people would buy material that’s otherwise available free — part of the exploration we’ll go into on this blog will be how to overcome that.  In addition to e-books, there are many other possibilities, such as paid subscription e-newsletters or Internet e-learning.   Public Label Rights articles also fall into this category.
    
5. Write An Information Product that Someone Else Sells For You
   Many of the information products you can sell directly can also be sold by someone else.  A $29.95 e-book on my blog may make me $29.95, but if it makes me $9.95 on your blog, that’s fine, too!  The main benefit of this approach are that you can get more traffic (and hence — more sales) than you could if you limit yourself to only selling your material only on your own site.  I would be cautious however about using this approach as your sole approach to getting paid online.  Sites like Helium and others where you submit your articles and have to participate forever and might get paid someday might be a good low-carb meal for occasional consumption, but if you make them a diet staple I would not be surprised (though I would be saddened) to see you starve.
    
6. Some Combination of the Above
   I believe the best approach to success as an online writer is to cultivate a masterful combination of the techniques listed above.  In my own case, for example, item 1 ("Write to support sales in another business") is the model that is my main source of revenue now, so I’m continuing my work on that area.   I am in the process of setting up an online store so I can really work on doing variations on "Write an Information Product That You Sell Directly", and I can see how a lot of those products might support each other internally as well as serve as promotional pieces leading to freelance work (Item 2).  Ad sales are an area I would like to explore further, but I would very much like to learn what’s beyond AdSense and how to create mutually profitable affiliate relationships — since I think that’s the key to both quality sites and better revenue in the long term.  Having said that, however, I am resolved to revisit AdSense for some of my blogs in the short term to see what I can learn.