Commodity vs Speciality Ghostwriters
Olga writes:
Is it true that some people can make a living just by writing articles for some Publishers? If that’s true, I would like to try myself.
Yes, it is true: you can make a nice living working from anyplace on our lovely planet that has Internet access, writing articles for others.
It seems that most ghostwriters go down the path of producing articles very cheaply… like in the $1-$4 USD per article range…then they get burnt out and try to figure out how to make more money with less words.
This is when some of them discover that ‘copywriting’ is where they can make more money per word by an exponential amount vs. cranking content for low price points per article.
Other writers who don’t have the ‘copywriting gene’ will usually pursue producing higher quality content for offline publishers who will pay $25-$100 per article (please don’t ask me to tell you who these people are, but know they exist and you can find them).
It seems that low price point ghostwriters never stick around for the long-term because they get burnt out.
Offline magazine publishers often pay for submissions and I’ve done this myself. Boardwatch magazine paid me $500 an article and it was a nice $6000 a year of play money for each original article that took me about 90 minutes to 2 hours to write & edit. Other opportunities like this exist if you have a specialized expertise to offer in your articles.
Commodity vs. Speciality Brand
The difference between the ghostwriters who get by vs. those who earn a much more comfortable living all comes down to how they market themselves. If you go to elance or rentacoder and start bidding on jobs like everyone else, selling generic articles like most of them do, you’ll find yourself being perceived as a commodity seller where price points make or break the deals.
If you want to elevate yourself, I’d recommend skipping the commodity path and go right into a specialization! Is there an area that you have some real life expertise? Perhaps you like home improvement, or sports or health & fitness areas and could offer to produce only original articles in those categories.
If I was a buyer of articles, I’d pay a premium to those who specialize in the categories that I want articles written because I’d hope that the quality of the content would most likely be higher than your generic drivel that some cheap ghostwriters crank out (if in fact they actually wrote it and didn’t rewrite a PLR article or steal content or use software to autogenerate the content and then do a quick edit job on it).
Transparency Needed
One last piece of advice if you want to try article ghostwriting: Be sure to state upfront what your ethics are and how you work. Spell out what the license rights will be for the content you produce and go into great detail as to how you produce the content.
Hope this helps… :-)
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