How to Make Money Online
A lot of people often wonder how they can make money online; either as a part-time or full time gig. Making money online is a very easy thing to do these days, mostly because we are in the computer age and almost everyone is always on the internet doing one thing or another. There are advantages to working online but you would need skills, proper planning, and good execution.
By now, you would be asking yourself; “what are my options?”
You can make money online as a comedian, or by; using your skills as a dancer or singer, selling products, brand promotion, graphic and web designing, and even as a writer; owning your own blogs, writing for blogs and typing data.
Who is making money online for?
Well, everyone!
You can be a student who wants to earn extra cash on the side, a stay at home mum, a mother on maternity leave, a graduate who has not yet gotten a job, or someone that just wants to make money online off something you love doing (writing, dancing and singing).
One advantage of making money online is that you can do this at your free time and avoid the stress of being in a high pressure office environment.
With all this being said, I’m sure you must be salivating at the prospect of earning money from the comfort of your home. Let’s explore specifics shall we?
Freelancing
This involves providing online services to businesses and clients. As a freelancer, you are able to decide if you would be working full-time or part-time and you are able to set the terms of your work contracts and decide to work on multiple jobs at the same time. Pretty sweet, right? It allows you work on a project-by-project basis without being committed to a particular client and you can choose your clients as well as more flexible working hours. The flexibility of freelance jobs makes it a very popular means of making money online.
But not just every Tom, Dick and Harry with a smart device can just dive into free lancing. To enable you get freelance jobs, you need to register on a freelance marketplace. Some of the best freelance market places include;
- Upwork
- Guru
- Freelancer
- Peopleperhour
- Toptal
- iwriter
- Simplyhired
- Project4hire
- Credo
- Fiverr
- Outsourcely
- Textbroker
- Hubstaff Talent
“But what exactly am I going to do once I sign up on this platforms” you might wonder. Well, there are a wide range of freelance services you could offer, depending on your area of expertise. These include;
- Web design/development: You design and/or develop websites and apps for clients.
- Graphic design: You can design logos, brochures, business cards, banners, everyone loves a good graphics designer.
- Social media management: You can manage the social media accounts for small and large businesses and celebrities. It’s no easy task I tell you.
- Freelance writing: This involves writing articles and/or blog posts for yourself or others.
Checklist for Freelancers
These are absolute must have’s if you are serious about freelancing. They include;
- A good working laptop or computer.
- Fast and stable internet connection.
- An organized system to help you communicate with your clients and get paid without stress.
- Special software, especially if you are going into graphics or web design.
- Special equipment if needed (camera).
- Space to concentrate; this could be in your home, library or a hub.
For the purpose of this article, I would concentrate on how to make money online as a freelance writer; since it is one of the easiest ways to make money online. So let’s go.
Freelance Writing
If you have love for expressing yourself in writing, then you’ve gotten yourself a job, friend! Together, let’s uncover how to become a freelance writer and earn money from it.
There are 3 main categories of freelance writing;
- Copywriting: This includes writing for businesses, including business plans, advertising copy, different types of advertising material and research-based pieces.
- Journalistic writing: This involves you writing news publications for print and web newspapers and magazines. This type of freelance writing will need you to have some level of experience in order to get the job.
- Creative writing: this involves writing books, short stories and blogs. These are for poets at heart. Inside this category, you will find writers of magazine articles, essays and thought out pieces, social media posts, outreach emails, sales pages and resumes.
As a freelance writer, you need to be well grounded in professional writing. You don’t want to be submitting pieces online with too much grammatical error. I urge you to register in a training to help you write better. You should have an editing and proofreading tool for an error free writing (Grammarly). You need to also have notepads for outlining and drafting; this make your writing more organized and professional.
How to Improve your Writing Skills
- Read books on writing such as grammatically correct. This will help you learn how to write professionally with little or no grammatical error. You would also learn sentence structures, writing styles and how to best communicate your idea or thoughts to your readers.
- Read written pieces by your favorite bloggers and writers.
- Read pieces from different blogs. This will enable you understand the importance of content to writing.
- Write daily. Have notepads, write your ideas down. This will help you improve your writing skills.
- Always use simple words. Do not try to impress the writers; this may attract failure.
- Learn from expert writers. Make sure to get your writing assessed by them before you put them online. This will enable you know where you need to improve.
How to Become a High Earning Freelance Writer
It is easy to become a freelance writer. But how do you remain relevant and make as much money as possible writing? To answer this question I have written down some important steps you must follow.
- Develop your skills: For you to be able to get more money from writing, you need to have well developed writing skills. No one wants to pay a huge sum for low quality.
- Up your prices: After learning and increasing the quality of your writing skills, the next thing to do is to up your pricing. When pricing, instead of concentrating on the time it took you to write that particular piece, you should concentrate on how much time and effort it took you to get as professional as you are today. You spent money buying books and going for trainings. Let your price be equal to the quality of written piece you are offering. Price may scare some customers away but it’s always better to have few well-paying customers and time to do other things for yourself, than to have so many low-paying customers.
- Start your own blog: this gives you more experience and helps you showcase your work to possible clients.
- Publish guest posts in authority sites: this improves your profile and helps you get more clients because these authority sites have large audiences. Having your posts on these sites also boosts your clients’ confidence in your writing skill.
- Check job boards: high-paying clients usually advertise their writing projects and positions on reputable job boards such as the Pro-blogger job boards, the freelance switch job board. They do not usually advertise their jobs on content sites and they do not hire writers from freelance outsourcing sites like freelancer, this is why you must check job boards if you want to be earning more than the regular.
- Pitch blog owners: you can pitch your writing skills to blog owners and seek for writing jobs on their blogs. This way, you are paid for any of your work posted on that blog.
As already established, you need to be well skilled in the art of writing so that you are able to make money through it on online platforms.
Remember to read far and wide. Also, get as much information as possible on what you are to write on. This would give you leverage over other writers and help you earn more.
So what are you waiting for?