How To Make Money From Writing.
“One of the easiest things to do, is make money online”
This is a statement I have heard a lot of people say and when you ask them how, they never really give you details, like a step-by-step instruction.
So I find the statement somewhat annoying.
They just say some things that don’t make sense and expect you to be okay with that. Maybe they can not explain what they do or they don’t feel comfortable sharing the information. That is the only excuse I can come up with for them.
Because if I told someone it was easy to do something and they asked me to show it to them, I would.
But out of thousands of online skills, I found one that would make me hundreds of dollars.
And I’ll tell you all about it but before that, I’ll tell you how I stumbled on this.
About a year ago, I discovered something called e-mail marketing and copywriting. It didn’t sound exciting because if there’s one thing I know I cannot do is, be a marketer.
But I decided to see what it was all about.
I eventually got a chance to work with a fashion brand as an e-mail marketer, I gave it my best but it was still below average because It was complicated, at least to me.
Fast forward to one year later, I moved away from home to a new country.
Culture shock hit and being away from my parents means I cannot always ask them for money so I had to get a job.
As a 21-year-old, I find it hard living from paycheck to paycheck.
So I made a plan to build the life I would be grateful for 5 years from now. A life of financial freedom.
And if we are being honest with ourselves, we know a 9–5 won’t cut it and when it eventually does, it will take years.
When I first started writing, I thought it was a phase and even though I enjoyed it, I was worried that I would get tired and drop it.
I soon realized that writing, in general, is a broad spectrum, and it’s not “easy” to make a living from it because it takes time and effort.
So I decided to quickly figure out what aspect I liked because I believe it’s better to be a master of 1 than none.
I found out there are so many types of writing and made a list and looked through them.
Did I want to write fiction, scripts, articles, journalism, history, real-life events, non-fiction? And I thought even if I decided on what I wanted to write I want to make a living from it, not just do it as a hobby.
Then I went back to copywriting, understood its potential and how much I could make from it.
So I made my mind up for my niche to be writing copies and articles.
Copywriting in the simplest terms is, convincing people to take an action with your words.
It is writing to convince from being a potential buyer to a customer. It is not the easiest thing to do but it is not the hardest thing to do either.
The role of a copywriter ranges from; creating a sales page, e-mail marketing, creating copies for a landing page to even working on social media accounts. These are just few of the things a copywriter can do.
Most times people think they can never become good copywriters because they are not very good at writing.
The truth is, you don’t have to be a good writer to be a good copywriter.
Most copywriters don’t identify as writers because what you are doing with your words is marketing.
The skills you need to become a good copywriter are not a lot but they are so important that you might never make enough money from writing copies if you don’t master them.
Now the difficult thing about writing copies is, you are trying to convince people with incredibly short attention span, to take an action.
If you do not get their attention in 10 seconds, you’ve lost them.
This means you’ll need to do a lot of research.
You need to be ready to do a lot of research, practice, and practice.
Writing copies is not something everybody can do because some people generally do not like it but it is a skill everybody can learn.
So I won’t tell you “it is easy” because it is not. You will need to put in your time and effort but is it worth it? Hell yes!
5 Ways To Kickstart Your Copywriting Career
- Start with your social media account: I am more active on twitter, so I'll be using twitter as an example. Find copywriters on twitter and follow them.
This might seem like a basic thing to do, but it has more effect than you think.
An example is; I needed information on how to create landing pages a week ago, found the right people, went through all of their tweets.
And today, I have built 2 landing pages. All of the information on Twitter is free, make the most of it.
2. Practice everything you've seen; Take notes of the things you find helpful and practice them. You cant get better if you don’t practice
If You practice everyday for 3 months, you’ll become much better and would probably land a gig that pays well over $1,000.
3. Stay Simple: The goal of copywriting is to convince your reader to take an action. Whatever action that may be, let it remain clear and simple.
This means that, your audience has no idea of what you want to talk about, so you have at least 10 seconds to get all of their attention before they exit your page.
You’ll need to use a clear and simple heading that explains what you want to do or what you want them to do.
4. Use short sentences: They are easy to read and understand.
5. Research: Use reddit (and sub-reddit) threads and Quora for your research on whatever you want to write about. This is because these apps have real people and you’ll find them talk about almost everything.
The best headlines are sometimes gotten from people’s conversations. If you have great eyes, you can catch one.
There are no new ideas. So, look around for ideas and recycle them.
I hope you start writing today, good luck!
