Hi gang, Just thought I'd throw this out there for fun. there are a lot of writers here who earn their money from many sources, i.e. freelance websites, direct clients, selling content, etc. So I was wondering what you felt was your most profitable type of witing and what was your least. In addition to being otentially amusing, it may help others here to guide them toward or away from certain areas for my part, I'd have to say that some of my best areas would be sales material, website content specifically geared toward conversion, whitepapers and perhaps press releases. The worst areas always seem to me to be blog posting, article writing and bundles of small things like product descriptions. Additionally, I haven't found many good paying eBook jobs myself. I have written several, including my own writer's course, and I know what goes into it. But it seems that these people who want eBooks want to pay $2 or $3 per page. Sorry, not interested lol. As mentioned, anything sales-oriented seems to pay well - duh - because I think the client has a strong perception of an immediate or at least nearly immediate return on their investment. What are your thoughts?
Whitepapers, ebooks (they require good investment in promotion), corporations' legal documents. All kinds of blog posts and lower-end articles are worst. There's also a hard-to-get segment of IT business analytics writing, which is payed for quite well. One more thing I'm not familiar with is political text writing. I know couple guys from this industry, they get extremely well-payed, especially at times of elections.
Honestly, it all depends on my mood. I usually have several tasks lined up at a time, so I can pick and chose what I'm in the mood for, and by doing that I've found that I can do most types of writing. However, that said, I don't like writing exceptionally long pieces of text (whitepapers, ebooks, etc.). My ideal word limit range is 450-4000 words. This is where I "shine". Anything longer than that and I start to lose focus and interest. Unless it's due tomorrow and I've had 6 coffees. Then I ace that stuff! I also fancy writing tweets and headlines/titles for blog posts.
I love writing about business and economics. That's a kind of theme where it's hard to know everything and interesting to find that. To learn that. I don't like to choose just one niche for writing. Because the taste of this work for me is learning something new.
Strangely, pets have been a huge niche for me. Product reviews are also very popular. Worst niche? I wouldn't know
Referring to niches best is marketing and business. The worst is travel and finance. Work type wise I would say the best is press releases and website content. The worst is editing and articles. I accept a variety of different work though. You never know when a regular will drop off the planet. Therefore, I would rather have to much work than not enough work and/or no work at all.
I have written in a lot of different niches for various clients. Articles, blog posts, social media content the worse for me. Not that they suck, I just didn't like writing them. Email copywriting, sales letters (DM), and my favorite space ads. Those are the ones I like to write. Contextual copy is a second favorite. I like the long and short of it.
When you cut through it all, it can be said that the most profitable writing is done to sell something. When a client needs you to sell a product, service or themselves, your skills come at a premium. if you can show that what you do makes someone else money, you have value.