Freelance Writing Opportunities Online

It used to be that freelance writing opportunities were relatively rare. There were only so many magazines that would pay for freelance work, and a lot of writers to compete against. Then the internet came along. The bad news is that the pay is generally much lower online, but the good news is that there are more ways to get aid than ever before, and you don’t have to be a professional writer.

Freelance Writing Opportunities - Two Examples

One way to get paid for your writing is to sell what I call "top of your head articles." These are articles that are no more than six to ten paragraphs (500 to 800 words), and can be written without research. All of us have knowledge in various areas of life, and can say something useful in such short articles. If you know how to travel cheap, for example, you might do a "list article" with six ways to save money when going overseas. This page is an example of an article written in twenty-five minutes (and is less than 600 words), which - had I not written it myself - I would have paid $10 to $20 for.

Articles like these are purchased for anywhere from $8 to $40, to be used either as pages on a website or for distribution to promote a website. Your name will not be on the article, because you generally sell the rights. Obviously, given the low pay ($15 per article is common), you’ll want to learn to crank out these articles in less than an hour, and preferably less than thirty minutes if you want to make any decent money for your efforts.

You sell articles like these on freelance sites (search and you’ll find many good ones). Ideally, once you have some practice and feel comfortable writing on many different topics, you can contract to write a dozen articles or more at a time. That way you can be efficient enough to make a decent paycheck for a day’s work (and yes, with practice, you can write a dozen articles in a day).

Another freelance writing opportunity is in simply selling your writing online to blogs and sites that want quality content. In this kind of situation you should be paid a bit more, and your name will remain on the article. Many site owners will even buy articles that you intend to publish in print magazines, since they do not directly compete with these.

This is a tougher way to get started, so you may want to wait until you have some practice with the short articles mentioned above. Also, to make decent money, you’ll want to freelance for at least several different blogs and websites.

This is a good option if you have some specialized knowledge. For example, if you know a lot about how to make money in stock market investing, you might work for two or three sites in that niche. But even if you do not have any particular expertise you can research almost anything online and write about it.

Those are just two freelance writing opportunities available online. For more, go sign up for the free online writing course, or click the banner below to buy the e-book You Can Make Money Writing (also available as an Amazon Kindle book).