How to Become a Freelance Writer Online

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By lolaness
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Online Writing Can Be a Great Freelance Opportunity

As a freelance writer, I find myself constantly mystified by the number of posts on forums and discussion boards by people complaining that they can’t find work for freelance writers. If you’re one of these people, and you want to be paid as a professional freelance writer, this guide is for you.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Computer
Internet Connection

Step 1

Example Profiles from eHow Authors

Develop a Profile: Every worthwhile resource for writing online requires a profile. Take your time to polish up a paragraph or two that describes you and the work you like to do best. Save this profile as a document on your computer that you can copy-paste as you need into the profiles on websites that you find.
Step 2

Discover Your Interests: Most freelance writing is non-fiction. What this means for you as a writer is that you'll have a much easier time finding paying freelance writing assignments if you focus on a topic you feel passionately about. If you have trouble thinking of your interests, brainstorm about 3-5 topics that you know you can happily write about. These are the genres you'll want to start with.
Step 3

A Basic, Printable Schedule Chart

Create a Schedule: If you're serious about becoming a freelance writer, you need to take your writing seriously. Create a schedule that you can stick to. Many of us juggle families and regular jobs; if your schedule offers 5 hours a week to do freelance writing, that's your schedule. Stick to it, let your family know what hours you've set aside for writing, and treat it as a "real" job.
Step 4

Subscribe: Perform a quick search on your favorite search engine and you'll find dozens of writer's ezines and forums. Subscribe to at least three ezines and at least one forum that you think sound interesting. Then, find one writing community and subscribe to it. At the end of all these subscriptions (focus on free ones), you should have at least five new sources of information and inspiration.
Step 5

Search: Start looking through market listings. There are lots of writer's market listings online, and you'll probably find most of them right inside the places you just subscribed to. Take some time to make note of at least one source every week that you will submit to as part of your freelance writing schedule.
Step 6

Track and Expand: As you start submitting work to different markets, track which genres you feel most comfortable writing in and which ones tend to get you the best response. These are the ones you'll want to start developing a specialty in. At this point, it's time to start looking into new markets and check out websites that offer to pay for writing consistently (not just on assignment or by project).
Step 7

Keep Records: When the freelance income starts coming in, start keeping careful records of your income and expenses. As a freelance writer, you'll be responsible for all your own taxes at the end of the year. Keeping track beforehand will save you a headache later on.

Comments

Yuwanda said

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on 2/22/2008 Nice, detailed article lolaness.

FYI, everybody: Craigslist.org, Poewar.com, Freelancewritinggigs.com and sunoasis.com are great websites to start looking for freelance writing work. The pay is going to be all over the place. But, there's nothing like landing that first PAID assignment.