Having launched several businesses producing and selling information products – ebooks, reports, webinars, guides, membership sites, etc… we get asked frequently by freelance writes how they can take their earning potential to the next level.
For many freelance writers, even though they enjoy what they do, “work for hire” writing can be frustrating, exhausting and stressful so it’s not surprising that many look for ways to make more money and gain more control over their writing income.
Specifically, finding a way to write about what you want (at least pick your own markets and demand) and control more of your content and profit derived from that content is ultimately the desired route.
Fortunately, over the years we have worked with many freelance writers through Infomarketer’sZone providing direction and training around how to take their content writing and really “tune-in” to the big profit potential…
For many we have worked with, they have given up contract work entirely and now focus solely on their own content because the income potential is so much greater.
Here are 5 ways you can use to immediately put your freelance content writing to better use and begin to build your own direct income streams.
More Money From Your Freelance Writing
1. Your Own Blogs
Start a blog or two around a topic you are interested in and that others are interested in – then research topics and put your personality into your blog posts.
Your blog will instantly begin to attract traffic and over time you will build a loyal following around your content that YOU control.
That means you can begin to build an email list, affiliate product offers, advertising and/or your own products all as methods of monetizing your own content efforts.
Within weeks of launching content you can see solid results around this model and over time you can build a very substantial income around blogging.
For example, blogging today brings us nearly 75% of our traffic and about half of our sales across our various web businesses. As a freelance writer, blogging will be simple and offers you a terrific way to launch your own platform to capture visitors, leads and customers.
2. PLR content
With Private Label Rights content, the objective is that you write content packages that you, in turn, sell to website owners, marketers and business owners to use on their websites.
Imagine your area of interest was around health and wellness, so you produce a series of 20 articles, blog posts or pieces of content around that market.
At the same time there are millions of marketers, business owners, product developers and website owners in this space that seek out content that will help them bring more traffic to their websites.
By focusing on large markets, you can easily sell 1000 PLR packages (for this example, let’s say each package is $19), producing a cool $19,000 in sales.
Do one of these package a month and your income earning potential moves well past that available to most freelance writers.
3. Content Writing Contracts
Depending on your topic, you can sign contracts with businesses and/or marketers who want to have you write in their general topic area (Ex 10 articles a month) and give you some leeway on what the exact topics will be.
While this still is sort of in the freelance writing vein, the difference is that you gain more leeway in the actual article content and timeline versus pure freelance writing projects that tend to be more directed, one-time opportunities.
4. Produce Your Own Products
Another option is to move right to developing your own products (reports, slides for videos or webinars, ebooks, guides, etc…) – here you have to pay extra attention to write for the highest demand topics and demand.
The difference here from freelance writing is that YOU call the shots and YOU own your content when you are finished as well as all of the profits generated from that content now through months (even years) from now.
We encourage freelance writers to produce their own products mainly because of the leverage gained…when you maintain ownership of your content that gives you lifelong earning potential whether through traffic generation, licensing or otherwise.
For example, when we started out, we not only made significant profit from one of our early websites through articles, but that content continued (even to this day – 10+ years later it still generates income even though I haven’t touched it in years) to earn sales.
Then, nearly two years after we produced this content, I signed a $10K licensing deal with a marketer who owned a private membership site to syndicate that content to his private site.
I couldn’t believe he wanted content that was openly available AND he was willing to pay me a premium for it up-front
5. Re-Purpose Your Content
One of the most common techniques today for content producers is to re-purpose their content to generate more traffic, higher brand value and higher profit.
For example, let’s say you started a blog around Quick Recipe Cooking…over 1-month you produce 30 blog posts.
Next, you take 5 of those posts that all deal with one-dish dinners and turn that into a video script that you either turn into a video yourself or hire a freelance video creator to do (that may cost you ~ $100)
Then, you take those 5 posts and you turn them into a report that you offer to your readers as a download in exchange for their email address.
Finally, you package the entire first month’s post into an ebook that you sell for $17 – an ebook that provides everyone who comes to your site next month, and the months following a simple way to get 30 of the best tips on quick recipes.
With all of that done based on the same effort of writing a blog post each day you now have 1) Blog content to attract traffic and brand yourself 2) A video that you can upload to YouTube and draw traffic from your YouTube channel as well as social networks surrounding Youtube 3) A great report that incents visitors to sign up to your mailing list and 4) An awesome new product that you can sell for $17 which can bring you $1K-$2K each month for several months to come.
As you can see, this concept of re-purposing content can be extremely powerful as leverage for your effort…this is the ultimate advantage for freelance writers and explains how you can turn a few hours of effort into massive profits in the coming weeks.
