Freelancing

What I’m reading: Heather Graham’s The Dead Room

What I’m writing: Chapter 5

I have never made a penny off my writing before.  It’s not something that ever bothered me, since I’m not in it for the money (good thing!).  But the other day, I got a comment from Jen Brister aka The Green Ninja and I followed it to her site.  There I found a plethora of informative posts about places to freelance your work online and make money.  The thing that snared me immediately was her plug for opening a blog at today.com and getting paid to blog.  What a concept.  Hey, I talk everyday anyway, right?  So I went to check it out.  Obviously, I’ve just gone to all the trouble to purchase my domain and move my writing blog here.  That’s not changing.  But I did decide to move my cooking blog and open up a new blog about frugal living (something I’m pretty passionate about).  This is a really nifty program.  According to their website you get a buck for every 100 word post, plus money for traffic (the more popular your site, the more money you earn).  I plan to post to Frugal Intuition daily, and to Pots and Plots at least twice weekly.  Just based on number of posts alone, that’s $38 bucks a month.  That’s $456 a year, which is more than enough to pay for my new dishwasher!  And if I wind up building a following…  I’m not going to be breaking my neck to build one like I’ve been doing here.  I’m just going to focus on providing good, useful content and see what happens.

My plan for Pots and Plots is to post at least 1 recipe weekly and also to have a sort of serial going on there.  I’ve got a heroine I dreamed up for a future cozy series–Lorelei McIllhenney–and she loves to cook.  I want to do a sort of informal, first person, she’s standing there telling stories (as we are wont to do in the south) as if the reader is sitting there while she’s cooking.  “It all started when my best friend Georgia’s caterer quit the week of the wedding…”  It would allow me to indulge in my love of pantsing since I have no intention of turning them into a big formal book.  And then, years down the road, if I do ever wind up writing that cozy, I’ve got a well developed heroine, and hopefully a following for her already.  We’ll see how that goes.
Anyway, if you’re a blogger about…well almost anything…I’d say it’s definitely worth looking into either starting a new blog at today.com or moving your old one.   And if you decide to do that, if you could click here to sign up, I get a nifty little bonus for referring you.  The downside of blogging there is that there are a lot more ads around the page than with many other sites, but I suppose that’s how they can afford to pay people to blog.

She also talked about writing articles for eHow.  Okay this is the easiest thing in the world to do.  You sign up for the Writer’s Compensation Program and then write brief articles on stuff you know or stuff you’re going to be doing anyway.  I posted a couple of recipes and have earned a whopping 26 cents.  LOL.  Big money, huh?  But it adds up.  These things are out there to earn residual income in perpetuity.  One SAHM I read about made $900 last month on her 200+ articles.  And we’re not talking uber professional stuff.  There’s no quality police here, so if you write a good article, you get more traffic and will earn more on it.  I saw one on there yesterday about How To Be A Good Musician’s Girlfriend.  I mean, come on.  You can think of SOMETHING.  I’ve got a lot of home improvement stuff to post, recipes, and financial type things (which I will be cross listing at Frugal Intuition to try to drive traffic to both).  And Christmas crafts.  I’m nuts for Christmas crafts.  I’m going to be doing them anyway, so why not take 10 minutes more and write out how I did it and take pictures along the way?

She also mentioned Common Ties, where you stand to earn $50 for writing a 50 word or less answer to 1 of their 20 questions.  This reminds me of One Sentence or Overheard In… (though I don’t think anybody got paid for those).

Then there’s Textbroker.  I looked at this one, even signed up and did their little quality sample thing (which gave totally lame options to write about).  They rated me a mere 3 stars, which offended me.  You can improve your rating by writing good articles, of course, but I don’t know that it’s going to be as easy to fit into my time just now as the others.  But it is by the word.  The better your rating, the more you get paid per word.

All in all, I’ve spent a lot of time on this the last couple of days.  I’m going to settle into a groove, I think.  Mostly it’s going to be the blogging, and an occasional article at eHow.  I’ll keep you posted on how all of it goes regarding actual earning.

In the meantime, I need to get back to the actual, you know, fiction.