As a blogger, budding writer, and creative person I can honestly say that writing, as Terry Pratchett once wrote, is the most fun you can have by yourself. I totally agree with his words. You can get lost in writing so easily when you are enjoying what you are writing.
Unfortunately, most writers don’t have the luxury of writing what they want, how they want. Most writers write for other people and as such are required to conform to that client’s requirements, which can sometimes stifle that creative flair.
How can you get paid to write about what you love? By writing for yourself. You can start a blog where you can choose your subject and the topics to write about or you can write an ebook. Many new authors have found themselves with a good income after self-publishing an ebook. Publishing through Amazon or Kindle can be quite lucrative and can get you earning money as soon as you publish your book.
There are upsides and downsides to either starting a blog or self-publishing an ebook. So let’s look at each of these options in turn.
Starting a blog
When you start a blog you begin with a blank canvas. This sounds like a great way to begin and it is. If you pick a great topic you love then you can earn a pretty good salary from a blog. Some of the most successful bloggers make more than $100,000 per year, doing what they love, but in all fairness, these are not typical earnings. The bloggers who earn this are workaholics and pump thousands of dollars into their blogs every year.
The great news is that there is nothing stopping you from doing exactly the same thing. Want even better news? There is a secret thing that successful bloggers do that others don’t and the ones that don’t often have blogs that don’t make a single penny. The secret? Not giving up! Yes, that’s all there is to it. Don’t give up and you will be way ahead of the rest who dabble, create a few articles, see they are not pulling in ten grand a month for 20 hours of work, and then quit.
How do you get paid as a blogger?
After you have set up and begun your blog then you will need to write articles about the things you love. You will need to do some research on those topics to see how competitive those articles and search phrases may be. If they are not too competitive and the searches yield low-quality articles then you can write something awesome and will beat them in the search rankings. When this happens your website will be visited by more people and this is where it gets interesting.
When you get enough visitors to your blog then you can add advertising to your blog and look at promoting a product as well. If your blog is talking about gardening, for example, you may want to write about tools you feel are beneficial to your readers, you write an article about those tools, put a link to where your readers can buy them, and if they do you can earn a small commission. You could even write a mini ebook here such as a how-to guide.
With money from advertising and product promotion and possibly your own product you have 3 different ways you can make money. With a blog that has 30,000 page views per month, you could expect to get around $400 from advertising, around $300 from product promotion, and if you have a guide on your site then another $300 from those sales. This will give you an income of around $1,000.
It can take 6 – 8 months for some of your articles to rank well, some may do really well and others less so but on average you could see an income like this after you have written around 40 – 50 articles of between 1,500 and 3,000 words. The other great thing about doing this is that this is what’s called passive income, meaning it will be making you money while you do other things, like work or sleep.
There are a few downsides to being a blogger but in my opinion, these are only hurdles for you to overcome and not deal-breakers. So what are these hurdles?
Setting up your blog, it’s not free. There are some costs involved such as buying a domain name and paying a company for hosting so you can place your blog there. Setting up your blog too, finding a theme for how it will look, choosing fonts, colors, etc. There are a lot of things to do but once they are done it’s done. It’s not an ongoing process.
Another problem you will face at the beginning is that you are a relative unknown and as such the search engines will not rank you quickly until you have built up some credibility about your topic. This is where you simply have to wait for the search engines to do their thing, but if you have written the best article for that search you will get the top spot in time.
You would most likely need to do some initial outreach too by promoting your blog through social media. Pinterest and Youtube are the go-to sites for this at the moment but cross-platform promotion will really help get your name out there and will give your site a boost.
The other main downside is that you won’t see how successful you are for many months but if you do your homework well then this risk can be minimized.
Publishing an ebook
The other main writing method is by writing an ebook. There are also pros and cons to this method as well. So let’s have a look at them too.
If you have a story you feel is going to be read by many people then going down the ebook route is a good way to start. There are a few companies that you can publish to sell your book but for now, I will just talk about Amazon and Kindle as the other companies will follow a similar business model.
If you have a full-length novel of 80,000 words or more then you can choose from 2 options with Amazon. You can publish your book in the bookstore and hope it does well. You can influence this a bit by offering free chapters or even offering the book free for a limited time to get people interested and more importantly writing positive reviews.
If you are not sure how this could work then you could publish through Amazon’s shared book service called Kindle Unlimited. This allows anyone with a Kindle device or app to download and read your book. It’s like a massive lending library where people pay a monthly subscription to read as much as they like and you get a share of this.
Currently, it works out to around $0.003 per page. This may not sound like a lot but if 5,000 people read your 400-page book in one month then you will be looking at earning $0.003 x 400 x 5,000 = $6,000.
This does sound good but if someone skims through the pages you don’t get credited, if someone does not read enough then you may not get full credits, but it certainly can be very rewarding.
This choice for writing also carries the same time risk element of the blogger as you don’t know how successful you will be until after the work has been done.
If you have written less than 80,000 and/or have written a guide or advice book then it may be financially better for you to publish through the bookstore and not through Kindle Unlimited as your page views may be lower.
If your ebook is a helpful resource then you can still make a good income from this as it will have a different value depending on the type of help you are providing. In general, a helpful resource can command a much higher price than a written novel and should be thought of as such. You will get fewer sales than that of a successful novel so you should price your ebook accordingly.
If you are interested in making some good money from a blog then check out these articles which may inspire you:
How Can I Get Paid To Have A Blog – A Helpful Guide
Do Blogs Actually Make Money? Spoiler – Yes And It’s A Lot!
How To Make Money With A Blog For Beginners – Easy Guide
How Do You Choose A Profitable Niche And How To Avoid A Dud
Conclusion
You can make good money by writing about what you love but the trick to getting that income is by finding those like-minded people who will be willing to invest in what you have written. If it’s a story you are looking to publish then going to a large seller such as Amazon will be a good way of getting seen but you will have to pay fees, learn how they operate and will have to try a few different promotional methods.
If you are passionate about a particular topic and want to talk about many aspects of that topic then a blog will be a better way to reach a wide, like-minded audience. Unlike using a large seller you will need to do your own promotion and outreach which if not done correctly can cost you sales and time. This can be more lucrative as you can branch out into many sub-topics which can generate a substantial return.
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