Explore your passion through freelance writing

Watch the Hartiverse writing video here: https://youtu.be/_C1MPaVMdHQ
Do you have a hobby or other interest that gets you excited, along with an aptitude for writing, then you should try freelance writing. As promised in the video, here are some additional Amazon affiliate link resources:
On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue)) <– I’ve personally read this one. It’s by Stephen King. Highly recommended!
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer
How to Make a Living with Your Writing: Turn Your Words into Multiple Streams Of Income (Books for Writers Book 3)
On Writers and Writing (Margaret Atwood!)

Do you have a passion in life and an aptitude for writing? Then freelance writing is an area you should consider pursuing. As a professional pursuit, it’s a crowded field, but as a personal outlet, it can be greatly rewarding.

Once you’ve been writing for awhile, you can gain the confidence to pursue clients, if you’d like. There are platforms like Upwork and Fiverr where you can post gigs you’d feel comfortable writing for clients, such as promo pieces for companies, writing the copy for their websites, or deep-linked articles that appear on their websites, including frequently asked questions or catalog pages. These are all markets you can tap into as soon as you’ve developed a rhythm to your writing avocation and you feel ready to make it a vocation or side hustle, depending on how much you want to work. As you acquire clients and get good reviews, you can level up and get additional exposure and access to more and better paying gigs.

In all these ways, you can make some pocket money. Once you’ve started making some money from your writing, you’ll have the confidence to raise your rates and work for bigger companies with bigger budgets. As a freelance writer, you have the freedom of working from home or on the road as a digital nomad. Take your work with you!

Websites for companies such as real estate offices, hotels, restaurants and travel destinations all need good commercial writers. Your writing should be original, informative, and tuned to the reader’s interest and can pass a Copyscape test, which is an online plagiarism checker. Clients are very sensitive about duplicate content, even if you’re just reusing your own work, also called self-plagiarism. The reasoning behind this is that if your writing was made-for-hire, it’s not really yours anymore, and belongs to the client. This can make it difficult to maintain a portfolio of online work, but companies who hire ghostwriters for their product descriptions, catalog pages, deep-linked articles, or answers to frequently asked questions are accustomed to this and will usually test your skills with requested writing samples to see how good you really are.

This is why it’s important to keep writing every week on your own blog or website to maintain your skill level. Once you start to build an audience on your website, you can even start including advertising, such as Amazon’s affiliate network, and link to products and get paid a small commission when your reader buys something on the site through your link. Look at the links in the description below this video for an example of Amazon affiliate links in action.

While you pursue commercial writing, remember to keep up your blog or website with fresh content. It’s your best sales tool when it comes to bylined articles, since all the content is original. If you do use quoted content, be sure to give proper attribution and don’t overdo it. There is the Fair Use doctrine that protects writers when using brief passages of content for editorials, education, criticism and similar allowed uses, but there are limits, and those can be hazy, so it’s best to steer clear of them unless you are trained in journalism and know what you’re doing. There are books written on how to write properly and keep it legal, and some of those resources are in the description below.

Once you’ve become comfortable with your writing, especially in a niche area that you have a passion for writing about, you can create coursework for sites like Skillshare and Udemy and get paid every time someone buys your course. This also helps you to bring your writing to new audiences and even prepare you to write your own book, either on your experience with writing, or within your particular niche.

There are also “Software as a Service” companies, also called SaaS sites, that periodically open their ranks to new members to write for major corporations such as Best Buy, Instacart, Chewy, Overstock and others. Some SaaS companies include OneSpace, Metro and Crowd Content. To get gigs with these companies you have to keep an eye out for the openings, because these sites fill their quotas of writers quickly and you could get left behind. I have accounts with all of these companies so I speak from experience writing and editing product descriptions, articles and so on. I also link to my own website from my About page here on YouTube, so you can see how I put into practice every day what I talk about in this video.

If you have an ear for language, there are also transcription services such as Influence, formerly known as Voxpopme, that hire freelancers to write and edit transcriptions of the video reviews created by the influencers that are signed up to their service. This is a particular field where you can work both sides of it. You can join Influence as a reviewer or opinion provider and send them video reviews you’ve created, and then join a company that services the back end of the business, transcribing or reviewing the transcriptions of those videos.

There are also microtask sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) where you can do transcription work, fill out paid surveys, or do data-entry quality-control tasks. All of these companies have a constant need for new freelancers. Some writers burn out and leave, some discover it’s not their cup of tea and leave, and so on, so the churn is pretty high. Consider these as side hustles, because they aren’t going to produce enough money to make your career. The magic number of tasks to hit on AMT is 500, after which you’ll be granted access to better paying gigs. That might seem like a lot, but it can be done in a couple months of effort, depending on how many hours you spend completing tasks.

Meanwhile, keep adding fresh content to your own blog or website. Notice how I’ve mentioned that a few times in this presentation? It’s because it’s so important to have an online portfolio of polished work to show clients in lieu of or in addition to writing tests you may need to pass before getting hired to write for them.

Hopefully you found some inspiration and some new ideas on how to spark up your passion for writing. If so, please click like on the video and subscribe to the channel for more content like this. It really makes a difference. Thank you and happy writing!

jamiehart

Content creator and Chewbacca cosplayer.

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