The dream of being a freelance writer can seem too good to actually be your reality. Imagine long days pounding away on your laptop in your comfy clothes and never having to deal with an overbearing boss again. For more than 59 million Americans, freelance writing pays the bills. Each one of these individuals took the leap to turn their dream into their reality. Do you have what it takes?
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Learning how to become a freelance writer can dramatically improve your quality of life. Doing gigs from home allows you to:
- Set your own work hours
- Control who you work for
- Decide which writing jobs to do
- Eliminate your commute
- Spend more time with your family
What It Takes to Be a Freelance Writer
The most obvious skill needed to be a freelance writer is writing. If you aren’t the best writer, though, you can still learn to be a good freelance writer. Many beginner jobs are available that don’t require you to write a Pulitzer out of the gate. However, you’ll make more money writing at home with skills. How can you improve your writing skills?
- Read
- Take a few courses
- Use a grammar and spelling checker
- Practice writing on Medium or a personal blog
- Read some more
Writing Jobs at Home
There are many opportunities to make money writing, including both active and passive income opportunities. Before you start looking for jobs that put your skills to use, let’s look at these active income streams and passive income streams.
Passive Writing Income
Wouldn’t we all like to set up passive revenue streams with our writing skills? This is the ability to wake up in the morning and see that you’ve earned income overnight while sleeping. Passive income is money that you need to work for upfront and that continues to pay off over the years with minimal or no effort. That’s the long game.
There are several ways to earn passive income writing. However, unless you’re one of those lucky few who strike gold on your first go-round, you’ll need to build up your passive income streams over time. Remember, this is the long game. You’ll find excellent resources here to develop and grow your passive income from various streams.
What are some of the notable ways to set up passive streams of income?:
- Book royalties
- Medium story views
- Affiliate marketing
- Digital courses
- Digital downloads
Active Income
If you’re not fortunate enough to be independently wealthy or have a two-income household, you’re going to need writing income coming in right away and steadily. This is where your active writing income factors in. This is writing that typically pays off immediately and just once. Think about Creating a ghost blog for a client. You write the post, and you get paid once for it. That’s the end of it.
There are many ways to actively earn money as a writer. Accessing these opportunities, however, can be challenging without the right strategies. These are some of the many ways writers pay their bills:
- Regular writing clients
- Writing gigs – bid sites, writing mills
- Blogging
- Affiliate marketing
Your Freelancer Writer Career
For most aspiring full-time freelance writers, the immediate goal is to transition from your current job to writing for money full-time. This in itself is a process. Most likely, you’ll do various one-off projects. The goal here, though, is to find regular clients who send you recurring work. Often, writers don’t get one client who needs their services for 40 hours a week. Instead, one client may need three blog posts a week. Another may only need your services once every other week. When you get enough regular writing jobs from your clients, you can confidently make the transition.
Will you be working two jobs at this point? Yes, most likely. After all, you need to pay your bills with your old job while you ramp up your writing income. Nobody said this would be easy. However, if you put in the work, you can make it happen.
I don’t suggest you work on developing passive writing income streams until you’ve established recurring clients and have completely transitioned to freelance writing as a full-time job. Then, your second job, so to speak, becomes developing passive income streams.
The Bottom Line
Be prepared to work hard and put in long hours. Be prepared to get frustrated. Getting your first one-time gigs and clients isn’t easy. It’s going to be a grind, but you can definitely do it.