Success Without The Content Mills: 3 Tips For Success Writing Online

I’ve previously written about how content mills can help writers improve their skills and about how content mills aren’t real jobs, so I obviously have a love-hate relationship with these low-paying, usually low-quality content producers. I’ve written for them, but I didn’t start out with content mills, and I don’t write for any of them at the moment.

Being a writer means different things to different people. If you want to see you name in print or online, you have to create your own book, blog or other vehicle through which you can get your words in front of readers. If you’re like me and no longer care if your real name or any name at all appears on your work, you have many more options.

If you have good writing skills and are willing to do some work, you can find success as a writer by exploring one or more of several different avenues. If you have a day job, however, there’s no reason to quit right now.

Here are three tips related to starting a successful writing career that doesn’t necessarily involve writing for any content mills.

1. Start a blog on a topic about which you’re passionate.

Starting your own blog is the simplest way to get involved in writing online. It was one of the first things I did to help reestablish my writing career after a detour through another career. Having your own blog allows you to experiment with writing styles, improve your writing speed and begin to establish an audience of people who follow your name and your work.

Be sure to offer email subscriptions to your blog and give your audience fresh content at least once a week. Don’t be afraid to put Google Adsense ads or other advertising blocks into your blog either. They don’t offend readers nearly as much you might think.

In addition to perhaps generating some revenue from ads if you can get some traffic, your blog can connect you with people who will hire you as a writer and also serve as a sample of your work when you’re answering writer ads on job boards.

2. Get involved in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online because you can make a good chunk of money from each sale if you choose the products you promote wisely. Getting started can be a simple as signing up for an Amazon affiliate account or joining Commission Junction or ClickBank and browsing for a product you want to promote.

When you also do some keyword research and optimize your writing for underserved keywords, you can rise to the top of the search engine rankings for your chosen phrases in a matter of hours.

The simplest guide for getting starting in affiliate marketing that I’ve found is One Week Marketing by Jennifer Ledbetter. This guide shows you how to get a mini-site promoting a product of your choice up in only a week. That means you could have 52 sites up and running by this time next year if you devote yourself to this type of writing.

Jennifer’s One Week Marketing guide relies heavily on Squidoo lenses for backlinking, but you can substitute HubPages hubs if you prefer. They work just as well.

3. Don’t be too quick to abandon or reject other income streams.

Once you get a couple of steady writing clients or make a few dollars from ads or affiliate sales, it’s tempting to start closing down or rejecting other money-making opportunities that don’t relate to writing. Doing that may free up more time for writing, but it also increases your likelihood of being left with too little income if a client drops off the face of the earth or an ad program kicks you out.

There’s no reason to quit a job if it isn’t too oppressive, and there’s no reason to shutter your eBay business or whatever other little things you were using to bring in money before your writing started to take off.

Multiple streams of online and offline income are a smart idea, even if one of them is an overwhelming success. If something happens in a year or two that crashes your writing career , you’ll be able to replace that income quicker if you still have irons in several different fires.

A Final Word

Online writing offers the potential for a stable, full-time income if you maintain strong relationships with several clients and also establish your own income streams from blogs and affiliate marketing.

Still, no job market is more fickle than the online content writing market, so something beyond your control could happen at any time to derail your writing success. That’s why maintaining old income sources for as long as possible and constantly scanning the horizon for new ones is essential to stability as a freelance writer.

Variety is the spice of life, and it’s also one of the keys to a successful career as an online writer.