"...2% of the skilled manpower resources in your country..." So, there are only 1900 writers in your country? Please provide us with a link to this statistic." Yes - there are only a limited number of proficient writers, at least to my standards, in my country since only 20% of the people here in my country have PhDs, MBAs, MAs, and specialized training outside the boundaries of a BS, an AB, or a BA - not even 35% of this volume would consider web content writing and sales copywriting since they're busy teaching and running the country! Check out the Philippine NSO website for the stats - I believe you'd end up with figures that don't even match the population of my country back in the 1980s! If the general population stats wouldn't make sense, would the literacy rates provided by this website possibly contain outdated information? Live here, read the local papers, listen to the radio, watch the news on TV, speak with university presidents, doctorate professors, academic book authors, etc., and don't probably believe anything you see about my country on the Internet each and every day within a span of a full month, and you'd possibly end up with the same figures. " If we're discussing article writers writing for themselves on their own blogs, why would you even chime in with advice about hiring other writers?" My suggestion was directed towards this inquiry - "Wouldn't running your own blog make you more money (espcially in the long run) than writing an article for some for $2? Am I missing something here?", and my suggestions directly answered the initial as well as the secondary inquiry. Here's a bit of an elaboration for you - primary inquiry - it can and it can't if you don't know how to do it, and I handed out my thoughts about the matter; and for the secondary inquiry - it can make you more money and it can't - the main difference being your business model together with elements such as cost of living standards and ongoing professional wage rates. "Based on information in your forum posts, you're only paying your writers around $.02/word. Ultimately, the advice you're trying to give only solidifies the original poster's point - in the long run, writing for yourself is more profitable than writing for an article miller like yourself." Wrong - I don't pay them $0.02/word - that would kick me out of business! We split it by 60% and 40%, which you would accurately know if you had perfectly understood my post. Another elaboration for you: $10 would buy food for a family of 3 that would last a day and a half here in my country. An original 500+-word article would reap in $10, and my writers get $6 from this. Since I assign them the task of creating 2000+ words worth of original quality content well within 10 hours at max every day, 5 days per week, this would help them earn $24/day - now this rate would be generous enough to decently face the daily cost of living standards here in my country - yes: even for a family of 5. My most fundamental point about the post is this: in the long run, you would have starved your family in the span of the "long run" before you would've started earning that elusive $xxxx/month - read between the lines, and if you properly analyze what I accurately mean by this, you'd stick with someone who assures you regular work and high enough wages to decently sustain your family rather than gamble your time, your family's well being, and ultimately some of your money on blogging for yourself in order to earn a decent profit from your efforts. Gamble? Yes - since earning that elusive $xxxx from your blog is limited to various factors that make up its utmost uncertainty! Most people in my country can't afford to be entrepreneurs - if they could, or even at least 40% of the entire adult populace, we'd probably end up a tad richer than other industrialized countries. Why? We can create networks like South American drug lords on speed, educate most of the populace and eventually end up smarter than ever, undercut rates here and there whilst providing the same if not above average quality services and products, create pseudo-needs like wildfire, perfectly tap our environmental resources without destroying it, and ultimately be a bit better than the competition. Again, you seem to have lost another thousand calories there . But anyway - thanks for the opinionated approach - I'd keep your suggestions in mind so that I could prevent that from ever happening to my business model. Anyway, I'm an employer here - I provide jobs to the people of my country that pay even at least 300% more than the minimum wage rates. I take jobs here at DP and assign the projects I get as special projects" for my writers since I have long-term contracts with various clients/companies around the globe - yes, even with the top producers of software and hardware products.
Well, I too had the same opinion before. But I am interested in earning fast and steady bucks. Hence I go for article riting then giving an importance to a blog of my own.
Writing for clients is much faster revenue than building your own sites or blogs. Others have said it before me, but to build an effective revenue stream from a blog or site, you have to dedicate the time and energy required to get it set up, monetized and promoted. All this in addition to writing to pay the bills. That being said, most writers in my network run their own websites or blogs (or both.) Some are already making quite a bit with them and others, like me, are still building our own little empires. Incidentally, writing for others has given me plenty of contacts and friends in the webmaster world. I wouldn't know nearly as much as I do without them, so writing for others pays off in other ways than just dollars and cents. Oh, and I charge considerably more than $2 per article.
Being a freelance writer for web content can be difficult because the pay is not too high. But I get by, by writing articles for 3-6 cents a word for quality content. It is true that I have been lingering on having a website with a blog of my own......I used to blog earlier, but though my blog was very popular it did not earn me many $$$......
I'm a writer. That's what I'm the best at. I'm slowly learning about blogs, and monetized websites, and all of that stuff. But I'm definately most comfortable writing. So maintaining a blog, marketing websites and so-on just isn't where my strength lies. I'm much more comofortable writing something, selling it to someone for a profit, then moving on to the next writing project. However, I'm trying to change my mindset, and get comfortable with the idea of doing long-term things like blogs. All that being said, I'd never write for $2 an article. No, I'll amend that. If I were in desperate need of money, and that was the only way to make it, I might write for $2 an article. But it would have to be a pretty extreme situation.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of long-term income opportunities for writers beyond just things like blogging or running a website. All would obviously involve marketing, but there are some great books out there on the subject (even just for writers - I'd suggest reading book publicity books for example and tailoring book marketing tactics to other types of writing). That would be a good way to pick up the basics of marketing your writing. But here's a small list of projects that involve you "writing for yourself" for longer-term income potential than simply selling articles (and all things you can start off part-time while doing client work): Blogs Websites (quite a few writers have excellent websites on writing itself) Reports (short niche pieces you can resell unlimited quantities of - unless you limit them as PLR reports) e-Books (these can be full-book-length or short, and can also be sold to an unlimited number of people unless you choose to limit it) PLR articles (set the total rate you want to earn per article, and then figure out a price and quantity to sell to reach that... you can sell them individually or in sets) Self-Published Books (If you have the time to work on a full-length book, but don't want to be bothered with agents and hunting for a publisher, consider the self-publishing route. You can do it with very little up front cost. You'll need to treat it as seriously as if you were shopping it around to publishers to be taken seriously - hire an editor, don't be afraid to make changes as you go, etc., but once finished it could have long-term income potential.)
Right! And don't think you have to choose just one of these as your money-making strategy. A lot of the writers I know have several projects spanning these categories at any given time. They're running blogs, websites, publishing ebooks, and selling PLR. Most successful businesses offer several different products or services. Freelance writing should be no different.
Forget the blogs for now. Start off by writing a report. Pick something you know go from there. For instance, let's say you like gardening in your spare time. Think up some helpful tips and how-to info and write a report. You can sell that report directly, sell rights to it, build an affiliate program around it and so forth. There's one site type I didn't see here (sorry if I missed it)--membership sites. They are a great way to get paid. But, if you find all of this too challenging, you might be better off just writing for others, investing your money wisely, and enjoying your life.
My blogs that earn very little are with Adsense for now until I have time to come up with new strategies. I have only one I'd consider "successful" financially, at around 1.5-2k / month (your measure of "success" will obviously be different depending on how many you have, whether it's full-time or part-time, etc.). With that blog, I sell private ad space predominantly. I don't use any 3rd party systems to do it, because I consider it pointless when it's incredibly easy to do it myself with my niche (business, so there are a lot of potential advertisers out there). I also sell sponsored posts / review, and push my own e-book through the site. I have other monetization plans for this one as well, including additional e-books and reports, and a series of some free / some paid business forms and templates. You have to be willing to diversify your earnings.