Our GSDdaily this week will focus on internet marketing, of course, digital marketing, internet marketing, that whole thing, but we’re going to go on a slightly different trajectory for this next probably two or three or four weeks. Basically what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to start deconstructing different ways of making money online, building a business, doing the small foundational things that are important for your growth online, and moving a business online. Here is why that matters. As it comes to internet business, online businesses, and stuff, everything boils down to some very simple activities that you just have to do over and over and over again; you have to master; you have to show up and actually partake in, or you need to find somebody to do it on your behalf.
One of those things is writing. We have talked so much about writing copy, about creating products. We’ve talked about eBooks, video courses, membership sites, sales funnels, webinars, email copy, all of it. Also, we’ve talked about so much stuff, but at the end of the day, it comes down to writing.
Get Paid To Write
This week, we’re going to talk about how to get paid to write. We’re going to talk about a lot of different ways to get paid to write and to make money writing an article. Let’s face it, the people who know how to write online are the ones who can build an audience. It doesn’t necessarily have to belong to blog posts. Some can be short-form, social media posts. Also, it can be Instagram, captions. It can be sales videos, sales letters. There are so many different ways to grow your audience and to generate revenue when you know how to get paid to write, or when you employ writers, or you have a writer on your team and you know how to guide them.
But if you don’t write, then it’s very difficult to get traction. If you don’t write, when really you’re not able to get your message out. You’re looking at the only medium that you have to convey your message in is video, which is fine. Video is great, but video employs lots of other things like body language and all the nonverbal communication that you pick up through it. So you’re factoring in a whole lot of other things rather than just the message that you’re trying to convey. So writing: fundamental skill.
1. Single-Stream Writing
Now this week, as I said, we’re going to talk about different ways to write. What is on the docket for this week? We’re going to talk about blogging. Let’s see. We got blogging, freelancing, copywriting, getting paper articles, that kind of stuff. So every day we’re going to kind of unveil one of these gets paid to write strategies. Today, though, I want to introduce this idea of single-stream revenue from writing or multi-stream revenue from writing, single-stream versus multi-stream. Single-stream is basically where you are paid for the act of writing, meaning you get paid for writing an article. Maybe get paid $100, or $50, or $300, or whatever. You are being paid to ghostwrite a 20,000-word ebook or to be a freelance writer. You’re actually getting paid to write.
The single-stream is you’re looking for a writing job; you’re looking to ghostwrite a book; you’re looking to write articles and have somebody pay you, which is great. You can absolutely make a great living as a writer. If you’re an SEO content writer, you can make $200, $300 per article. You can make excellent money writing. We’ve built sales funnels where people ghostwrite books for $25,000. So if your target revenue is $250,000, you don’t need to ghostwrite that many books. You can find Filipino writers, and that’s what she did. She found Filipino writers to write, and then she was basically an editor. So there are lots of different scenarios for earning through writing.
2. Multiple Stream Writing
This idea of multiple stream income from writing is where you don’t necessarily get paid for the writing itself. You will be paid because of writing. So it’s not like the act. It’s not like a job where you write something, you get paid. But in this idea of multi-stream, you get paid to write, but it’s not directly through writing. You get paid to write because you’re selling something because of the writing because you’re linking to something because of the writing because you’re bonding with an audience because of the writing. Now, it’s just a different idea. It’s a different thought process behind this single-stream and multi-stream.
This multiple stream idea though, you’re writing a blog post to then link it to a product, or link to an affiliate product, or link to a software offer. That software offers is how you end up getting paid. Maybe you get paid 100% of the revenue because it’s your offer. You may get paid 50% of the revenue because it’s an affiliate offer, but regardless you were still writing. It still takes writing in order to pull that off.
Ways To Get Paid For Writing
There are lots of different ways to get paid for writing and we’re going to talk about single-stream writing for a little bit, just to just flesh out some of these ideas.
1. Become an Author
The first is, and it’s the most obvious one, getting paid to write books, getting paid as an author. Getting paid for paperbacks, writing paperback, writing hardcover books, writing reports, writing guides, writing whatever. Whether that is a guide or a book, or report that you want to write and then put out into the world and you want to sell it on your website, or you want to sell it on Kindle, or you want to sell it on ClickBank, or whatever, there are lots of different mediums, lots of different marketplaces that you can sell your book, your ebook.
You just need to be a master of something. So if you are a paleo cooking expert, you might write a paleo cookbook. And then of course that begs the question, how do you get followers? How do you build an audience? And that’s where more writing comes into play.
What you will find when you’re trying to sell your own thing is you’re never done writing. You’re always going to be writing. You’re always going to be producing content. And eventually, you get to a point where you’re like 10 years into it, and you’re just kind of reworking the content that you’ve already made, which is what I find myself doing a lot because we have content from years, 14 years worth of content.
You’re always going to be writing…
One of the big things when people create courses and stuff is they think that once the course is done, once the book is done, once it’s published, once it’s life, that they’ve done. And that is not true. Oftentimes they’re just getting started. They’re just getting started with the writing because they have another a hundred blog posts they need to write in order to promote that thing, or a bunch of videos that they need to create that all need to be captioned or whatever.
In the simplest form, writing is how you get your material out there. Kindle books, reports, guides, all good stuff. You know, so of course a guide, or a report, or short two, three, four, six-page lead magnets, that’s going to be the thing that you’re going to create for an email address. The 20, 30, 5,000, 200-page book, that’s going to be the thing you sell for $37, or if it’s on Kindle is going to be $14.95, or $19.95, or whatever the number is. Paperback is going to be $14. So none of those are going to get you rich. The upsell offers after that book are what is going to make you a lot of money.
2. Ghostwriting
Another way to make money writing is ghostwriting, offering your services up to another person to write their book, or their report, or their whatever. Ghostwriting, again, hugely, hugely profitable. As I said, we’ve worked with clients who have ghostwritten books. They turn it into multimillion-dollar businesses where that’s the offer, ghostwriting books. At the end of the day, everybody hates to write. There are very few people who like to write. I remember back when we were doing a lot of SEO stuff. The number one challenge that we heard or the number one problem that people had was they were like, “I don’t like to write.”
There are some people that like to write. I enjoy writing. I just don’t have time for it anymore, which is why we do video and transcription and stuff, but you still need a written word in order to promote your stuff, in order to get ranked in Google, in order to get the results really that you’re looking for online.
As a writer, you have an unfair advantage because most people don’t like to write. And just understanding that and knowing that there are lots of ways to actually make money writing is a good deal. So ghostwriting, you put an offer together where you’re going get paid to write the report, their book, whatever, and maybe it’s $5,000, or $10,000, or $25,000 to ghostwrite their book. You’re going to dig into their information, maybe listen to some of their videos or their audios or whatever and find out how they write, learn about their stories, interview them, and put together a book that they would have written themselves. That is what effective ghostwriting is. That’s what’s going to make you a lot of money as a ghostwriting author, I guess.
Finding the right Ghostwriter
Finding that person, you might be able to find them on social media. You can definitely find them on a freelance service like Upwork, family, and friends. You might have somebody who was looking to ghostwrite a book, and there might be a deal that you can work out with them. But the freelancing side is kind of the next step. How do you become a freelance writer? We have, it was a product that I put together a long, long time ago, and it was basically how to start a freelancing career. Now, freelancing as a writer is pretty easy anymore. You just set up an account on upwork.com, and you start posting bids for projects. It really is that simple. Upwork is a publicly-traded company now. E-Lance and oDesk came together to create Upwork; maybe one of them bought another or whatever, and then it became publicly traded.
It is a publicly-traded company at the moment. Their stock’s doing okay, especially in this pandemic. Everybody needs outsourced work, or maybe they don’t need outsourced work, but there is going to be a growing demand for remote labor in time. So Upwork, you just create an account on Upwork; you let them know where they need to send your money, then you start posting on the job. And you can write anything. We’ve hired lots and lots and lots of writers off of Upwork. And there are expensive writers, and cheap writers, and overseas writers, and stateside writers, and every type of writer you can think of. The most important thing is making sure that your feedback is good; you have a good five-star rating; you finished up on time. And don’t be expensive, but don’t be cheap, in the number though, the price that you put.
Ghostwriting is a perfect way of getting paid for writing.
If you don’t have your own site, don’t have your own products and you don’t have really your own thing or your own presence, ghostwriting is a perfect way to get paid. If you feel like writing, just go ahead and freelance it, and eventually, you’ll probably be able to pull some of those clients off of Upwork so you don’t have to pay their percentage commissions, so you have a more intimate relationship with the client, so you can become more one on one with their team. Do you know what I mean?
3. Copywriting
The next way to make money writing is copywriting. So copywriting is sales copy, email copy, webinar copy, all of the stuff that we talk about. Now, I never really liked writing a whole lot, was never really good at it. Well, I can’t say that. I was pretty good at it. Didn’t really like it until I was in college and I had this exposition writing level one or something. Expository writing I think was the name of the class. And I wrote papers like I did in high school, very research-oriented, very everything.
Basically, this class was to get you to open up your writing. I had a great teacher, professor, and the professor basically said, “Anything goes. You can write whatever you want. Use your imagination. Write whatever you want.” And by the end of this class, I was able to start opening up in terms of how I wrote.
Gaining more confidence…
I was gaining a lot more confidence in how I wrote. And then, I think I was in school for three years or four years, and I started writing a blog. My first blog was jdsblog.com. I earn for writing when I started blogging. Then I was posting ads all over the place and whatever. And I started writing just whatever I thought. I started writing and putting essays together and stuff the way that I thought that they should go together, and I started getting much better grades in that class.
My confidence started going up as a writer. I made the transition online, I started blogging, started trying to find traffic, realized that I wasn’t getting any traffic. Started keyword bloating blog posts, and then learning how to write sales copy and everything else. And I really fell in love with the persuasiveness of writing, to the point now where, you should watch me write an email. It’s ridiculous. I overthink every word.
In terms of getting paid to write, copywriting is a very, very high dollar skill, running webinars, writing sales copy, writing, email copy. When you are a copywriter and you’re good at what you do, you can command money, because, from a direct response standpoint, you are 100% in control of the revenue that is produced by that sales copy. The highest-paid copywriters in the world will charge 25- $50,000 for one sales letter because they know that that sales letter is going to make the company a million dollars, or $2 million or $5 million, and it’s just one sales letter. That is how really high-end copy works.
How to be a great copywriter?
- practice copy
- write a lot of copying
- rewrite
- test
- tweak
- rewrite
- continue seeing what works best.
What are some of the tricks? How do you use headlines and sub-headlines? Also, how do you tie emotion and logic into sales copy, and where should you do that? Furthermore, how do you do price drops? All kinds of other stuff, as it relates to just writing persuasive copy. That is where copywriting gets a lot of its value. If you like psychology, if you like persuasion, if you are a good sales guy, and you also like to write, copywriting is probably going to be right up your alley. Again, you can be a freelance copywriter. You can post jobs on Upwork, or not post jobs, but you can take jobs. Upwork posts all kinds of sales copy projects. It’s a very in-demand skill. It always will be. You’re not going to be at work.
Challenge is, there isn’t a lot of really great copywriting courses because it’s very difficult to teach. It’s very difficult to teach copy because, at the end of the day, the people who write a lot of copy are not usually the best teachers. I’ve listened to a lot of audio programs on copy and how to sequence things. The only way for it to work really well is when you listen to the courses and the programs and then you write. In writing, you have to write; you have to write. In any of these things you have to write, but for copywriting, you have to write a lot.
Websites That Pay Per Article
We’re going to cover this and during the week, but there are sites that you just get paid per article, $50 an article. Years ago, years and years and years ago, there was a site called FreelanceSwitch, which the makers of Envato, the creators of Envato were running. Basically, they were paying people $50 per blog post that they wrote and published. The site had a stack of 2,000 blog posts that people submitted. The website picks the best articles and the writer will be paid $50 bucks. The chosen articles were published on their website. Then they ended up taking that model to their PSD tutees, which was all their tutees series. They started paying like $100 and $150 per tutorial that somebody sent in and then they published. It is now Envato Elements Envato Marketplace, the whole marketplace thing.
From what I remember, they kind of pioneered the model. There were some sites that were doing it. Now there are quite a few sites that we’ll pay you for submitting articles. I will drop those. I think it’s on Thursday we’re going to be covering that stuff. Of course, the big one is just being a professional blogger, having a blog on your own that you have set up is your own website. We’re going to go through how to do all of this stuff.
We use WordPress, a self-hosted version of WordPress. You can set up the domain name of website hosting at GoDaddy, then you can just install WordPress and start blogging. Really, simple stuff. I think we’re going to go through and actually do that all on a live stream. It might be a little bit longer episode, but just so it’s in the can. And then if you learn something, that would be awesome.
Basically blogging as a profession is you!
- need to restart writing content
- you need to start getting some traffic
- you need to figure out how you’re going to make money with that traffic, whether it’s sponsorships, posting ads, or selling your own thing, which I recommend.
Being a professional blogger isn’t about the writing. It’s not about traffic. It’s about the offers that you make after you get the traffic. But in order to get traffic, you also need to write. So that’s one of those multiple stream things. That is what we’re going to be talking about this week in get-paid-to-write week.
For Questions and Guide
If you have any questions at all, just go to doneforyou.com, fill in the little box in the chatbox. And if you would like to talk about setting up anything business-related, whether it’s traffic, setting up sales funnels, automation, just go to doneforyou.com/start, and fill in the little form, and we’ll get started.
