The Ultimate Guide to Making Money through Freelance Writing Online

December 8, 2007 By

When it comes to the internet, there’s a motto that says “content is king.” There are a lot of places on the internet that would like to make money through advertising, but they need some content to draw readers there, which has created an opportunity for anyone with half-way decent writing skills to make some extra money on the side by writing articles of all kinds. Here are some of the many ways that you can make extra money through freelance writing on the internet.

Associated Content – This is a company that has been around for just under a year now and has become very popular with the freelance writing community. Writers can submit unsolicited articles on a topic of their choosing and get paid for them about 98% of the time. Writers can make anywhere from $3.00 to $50.00 per article, with an average of about $8.00 an article. The minimum length for an article has to be 400 words, and you have an option to give them exclusive rights to your article, or non-exclusive rights. Usually articles that are submitted with exclusive rights make about $2.00 more than those submitted with non-exclusive rights. Associated Content then publishes your article on their site, and sometimes resells them to other content websites and hopes to make advertising revenue off of them.

Helium – Helium is a sort of cousin to Wikipedia. Users can submit articles on given topics, and then whoever writes the best article on that topic will have theirs displayed first. Helium shares a portion of their advertising revenue with its writers, however the money is really not that great unless you are sure that the article you plan on writing is very popular. The good thing is that you get a portion of the ad revenue earned from your pages for life, so if you had a huge set of articles on Helium, you could make a lot of money over time from that website.

Day Tipper – Day Tipper is a website which pays its writers $3.00 for short tips. This site has seen a lot of controversy because it may accept a tip for payment, and then choose to not “publish” it for quite some time making it so that it takes weeks or months for the tip to actually be paid. This isn’t so bad, however you can see all of the accepted and “unpublished” tips on their website, so your tip could be accepted but not “published” yet, but still be on the website for readers to digest. This means that your tip could be out there, and you would not be paid for it. Since the site only publishes 6 tips a day, many people have cried foul of this website and labeled it a scam.

About.com – If you can manage to land a job as an About.com guide, you’ve found one of the best freelance writing jobs on the internet. Usually About.com guarantees its section managers a minimum of $500.00 or so each and every month, and if you happen to find a way to increase the readership of the section, you can get paid a lot more. The sign-up process is very competitive and these spots are not easy to come by.

Blogging – Creating your own blog and writing can be a very successful and profitable venture, but it takes a lot of time for your blog to become popular so that you make any sort of decent money. My blog, Getting Green, has been up since December, and I’ve easily been putting 10 hours a week into it easy, and in about 3 months, I’ve made a total of around $200.00. It starts out slow, but if you put a lot of effort and dedication into it, you can make a lot of money. There are some people who blog as their full-time job because they have gotten so successful.

Contract Basis – There are a bunch of freelance work listing sites where people can post and apply for contract based work. Some person with a website might want 10 articles on a particular subject and be willing to pay a certain price. If someone would be willing to write those articles for that price, they could meet up on one of the many freelance listing sites and make a deal. Writers for Associated Content and other sites are often contacted by private groups wanting their services as well. So if you start out one of those sites, you could potentially make more in the future doing contract work.

There are a very great number of opportunities in writing to be had on the internet, you can gain valuable experience in journalism and make some money on the side. The amount of money that you can make depends on your writing talent and how many articles you write. It probably won’t be a full time job for more than a few people here and there, however it can be a very rewarding and lucrative part-time job for many people.

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