Portable Careers: writing – overview

By Kay McMahon, 22 October 2010

There are lots of ways to earn money from writing. Let’s first look at an overview, and then we can look in more depth at each way.

As I see it, there are two main routes to take, and there’s nothing stopping you doing both at once. Either you can be paid to write for other people or you can do your own thing and monetise your work by some other means.

The former might include being paid as a freelancer to writing articles for someone else or even finding a telecommute writing job. It’s also possible to make money for writing blog comments and forum postings but a lot of that is done so badly that this ‘industry’ is somewhat discredited these days.

The latter includes activities such as writing a book and receiving royalties, building your own content-based website, and blogging. When it comes to making money, blogging is more like slogging, but it can be done and we’ll cover all that when we look at making money from blogging specifically.

The main difference with the two methods is that for the former you don’t need much more than a computer and an internet connection. For the latter you’ll need some kind of website, even if it is only a freebie blog on someone else’s blogging platform. If you plan to have a website then there are some things you’ll need to learn about prior to embarking on your new portable career as a writer. But don’t worry, we’ll cover all these bases too in this series.

We’ll start off by looking at writing for other people and where and how to find work.