I worked for a friend of mine recently who needed me to jump in on a writing project. It was a really quick assignment that unfortunately required a judgment call on my part as the helper.
The issue in question was that the content really needed to be improved in a big way. However, the client was only paying for proofreading and was also confined to very little space.
So I took a chance because I wasn’t clear on all that, and I gave my writer buddy an edited version. When she said she couldn’t use it, I said I understood, and I gave her a proofread version like she asked for. But she may have just gone ahead and proofread it herself, and if she did, I get it. I’d do the same if I felt pressured to deliver to the client on time and my friend had given me something other than what was asked for.
By the way… all this happened over the course of an hour or two.
So it wasn’t a whole big waste of everyone’s time. It was just a short proofing job. Anyway, when it came time to discuss payment, my friend asked me how much time I spent. I told her not to worry about it, that she could send me a tip if she really wanted, because of the nature of what had transpired and I wasn’t even sure if I had helped her at all.
She said she felt badly about this, but I didn’t at all. Why? Because even though the draft that I worked up as an experiment wasn’t used, now I have content that I had do something with.
Content = Potential Income. NO draft is a wasted draft.
If the client is not under some contractual obligation to use any writing that you create on their behalf, then the scrapped draft can be filed in your Someday Projects folder. Now, if someone in the future asks me for web content on the same topic, I can whip out my draft and tinker around with it, making changes that reflect their needs.
How Can Content Become Dollars? How Do You Get Paid to Write Web Content?
- You can write and sell ebooks.
- You can promote other writers’ ebooks as an affiliate of theirs.
- You can run a niche blog and write articles for it, then link those to your ebooks that you’re selling and promoting.
- You can run a niche blog, write post and the link those posts to Amazon products and Etsy products, etc. that you’re an affiliate of.
- You can run a niche blog and add Google Adsense ads or another form of pay-per-click advertising.
- You can write content for copywriting clients you find you via your copywriting website.
- You can sell how-to digital products to new writers who want to know what you know about writing and freelancing.
- You can work as a writing coach and host writing classes, workshops and courses.
- You can sell online business courses to teach other writers how to do what you do.
- You can write for freelance job sites like Fiverr.
- You can work as a virtual assistant and update coach’s and other web experts’ blogs, email newsletters and social media pages.
And guess what? When you put all of those together and start running different blogs to support your different streams of income, that’s really when you’ll begin to see your sales numbers increase.