Do you want to quit your job and become a full-time writer? Or you’re thinking of making money writing with a writing side hustle or side business until you can quit your job?
Well, here’s some good news, there are a lot of options for making money writing online depending on your area of interest or expertise.
And this article will show you several ways writers make money writing.
22 Ways Writers can Make Money Writing
1. Freelance Content Writing
A freelance content writer could be creating social media content, writing search engine optimized articles, writing scripts for Youtube videos, writing product reviews or descriptions, or writing LinkedIn page content.
It’s not very good to just call yourself a freelance writer, you would be better off leaning into a particular niche of freelance writing where you excel to show people that you’re an expert and can do the job they need best.
I’ve come to realize that most people hiring freelance writers do not want generalists, so unlike the advice you’ll see online from 2019/2020, please try not to position yourself as a general freelance writer.
Not only can it reduce your perceived value as a writer, but it may also reduce how much you earn writing.
To get into freelance writing, you need to find a niche, gain experience and prove that you’re good at writing in your niche by:
- Creating a portfolio with platforms like LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, free WordPress/Blogger sites, or a blog.
- Working for free or a small stipend for someone you know.
- Applying to websites that need guest posts.
Once you have a portfolio that showcases your skills, you can start looking for jobs on LinkedIn, Upwork, Freelancer, or Fiverr.
2. Technical Writing
Technical writing can be an incredibly lucrative writing field. It involves taking complex or technical information and breaking it down into simple and easy-to-read notes.
It can be pretty boring and requires technical knowledge to a certain extent but it pays.
Technical writers write technical documentation, white papers, test plans, product specifications, technical manuals, etc.
Once you get established in this niche, you can earn a good living for the rest of your life just by writing for companies in similar niches.
Plus unlike other writing niches like freelance content writing or freelance copywriting, this niche is much less competitive and pays more, after all, it involves technical knowledge.
3. Make Money Ghost Writing
A ghostwriter makes money writing different types of content without taking credit for the work. In other words, the written work is instantly sold to another person, business, or company and you have no right to claim it as your work even if you ghostwrite a book that becomes a USA Today bestseller.
It may not seem very popular but there are ghost writers in most writing niches and industries: Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, script writing, screenwriting, essay writing, etc.
Depending on which of these you have good experience in, you can make money ghostwriting.
All you need to do is build a portfolio to show that you can produce good work and then start searching for someone to hire you.
4. Self-Publishing Books on Amazon
Although I titled this part self-publishing books on Amazon, you could also simultaneously do this on other platforms like Kobo, Google Books, Apple Books, etc., depending on various factors.
But Amazon has the biggest and widest market, and it may likely be your main source of income when you first start self-publishing books.
If you go about writing books on Amazon the right way, you will surely make money.
And you don’t have to write books only. If you don’t have the talents, you can also create low-content books strategically. Don’t create 1000 books with the same content and different covers and call that low-content book publishing. Those who make money creating low-content books do a lot of research to create a single book that makes sense and provides value to the buyer.
Read: How Much Money You Can Make From Writing a Book on Amazon
5. Writing Video Scripts
Many video creators, businesses, companies, and individuals are searching for people who can help them write the best scripts to suit their audience on Youtube, Tiktok, and even Facebook.
If you have some script writing experience or training, you can reach out to Youtubers who are doing pretty well on the platform and ask if they’re willing to give you a chance to write one script for free. And if they like you and your script works out, they could hire you.
Sometimes, jobs like these can also be posted on job boards and freelancer sites like Freelancer, Upwork, and Fiverr, among others.
6. Make Money Creating Social Media Content
Believe it or not, many companies, businesses, and individuals need people to manage their social media accounts for them.
Social media management also involves creating the best content tailored for each social media platform.
Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok audience deal with text differently.
A social media content creator like you will have to be skilled at managing the text, captions, pictures, and videos to be posted on these platforms.
You can find Social Media Content Creator jobs on LinkedIn, job boards like Indeed, or freelancer sites like Upwork or Fiverr.
7. Make Money Writing Children’s books.
Do you have experience creating interesting and catchy stories for kids due to your experience with children? Then you can try writing and publishing Children’s books like education books for kids, storybooks, picture books, etc.
If you’re thinking of writing Children’s books, then you should have lots of experience in the niche and you should know that many children like lots of color and illustrations.
If you’re not a talented artist and you need to work with one who will create images to accompany your work with images, remember to sign a ‘work for hire’ agreement which allows you to sell the images and text together to avoid problems from coming up in the future where your illustrator can revoke your permission to use his/her illustration or demand a percentage payment.
8. Build a Profitable Blog
There are two strategic ways to go about building a profitable blog. The first method involves building a big blog that talks about a variety of topics in a large niche and the second method involves building small niche blogs.
I know many people think blogging involves just writing about whatever topic you like and posting regularly but if you want to build a blogging business, you’re going to need to do more than just that. You’re going to need to learn how to push traffic to your blog from search engines, social media, or Pinterest.
Frankly, the best way to get traffic is through Search engine optimization so you’ll need to learn SEO.
You will also need to learn to be very patient because many blogs take a long time to start getting consistent traffic from search engines like Google.
Here are a few ways to monetize your blog:
- Putting Display Ads on your blog – Google Adsense, Ezoic, MediaVine, AdThrive, etc
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sponsored Posts
If you want to learn more about how to make money by building niche blogs, you should take this free Fatstacks course.
9. Make Money Writing Poems
There are many ways to make money selling your poetry such as:
- Building an audience of people who like your poetry via social media platforms
- Self-publishing your poetry
- Selling your poems to literary magazines
- Submitting your poems to Poem Anthology Publishers
- Becoming a Freelance Poem Writer
- Taking part in poetry competitions
Here are a few poetry publishers you can submit your poems to:
- The Sun Magazine: Pays $100-$250
- Poetry Foundation: Pays $300+
- Boulevard Magazine: Pays $50-$250
- Crazyhorse: Pays $20-$200
- EPOCH: Pays a minimum of $50 per poem
10. Make Money Writing on Revenue Sharing Sites
Previously, many people who wanted to make money writing online usually had to build blogs. But now you can grow your writing skills while making money with revenue-sharing sites like Medium, HubPages, InfoBarrel, VocalMedia, etc.
You can write articles or personal essays tailored to stand out on any of these platforms.
11. Make Money Writing Essays
Even though you’re a pretty good essay writer, you should probably realize that most of the people who hire freelance essay writers are students who need someone to help them do their assignments, projects, etc. If you’re not comfortable with this, you might be better off writing personal essays on sites like Medium, VocalMedia, Simily, etc.
Of course, you could also make money writing essays specifically for different sites like Vox, iwriteessays.com, Longreads, Cosmopolitan, etc.
There are also essay writing service subreddits you can join to find people who need your essay writing services. It may take a while to get noticed but with consistency and top-quality work, you will surely get noticed.
12. Make Money Creating Greeting Cards
Are you witty and capable of writing heartfelt thoughts and sentiments that make your loved ones and the people around you happy? Then you can consider becoming a greeting card writer.
While this way of making money as a writer can be super competitive especially if you want to work at major greeting card publishers like Hallmark, you can make money with a small greeting card business.
With nice paper, a good color laser printer, and your interesting fresh new take on greeting cards using your writing, you can create greeting cards, sell on Etsy and market them on social media.
Another thing you can do is submit your greeting card verses to companies like:
13. Become a Copywriter
While the content writing business can be pretty easy to get into, the copywriting industry involves much more study because persuading people to take action or make purchases with copy requires expertise.
Copywriters write content used mainly for promotion and marketing. They write website content, promotion video scripts, blog posts, emails, etc.
There are different types of copywriters and I can assure you that skilled copywriters are sought-after.
You can work as a freelance copywriter making your start on freelancer sites like Fiverr or Upwork until you build your network of clients who come back over and over to you.
Or you can work with marketing agencies or other specific companies that have staff copywriters. You can find jobs like these on job boards or sites like Indeed and Zip Recruiter.
14. Make Money by Writing Serial Fiction
Before we go further, here’s a BIG warning. The serial fiction world is very dangerous. Full of dangerous contracts and traps that you may not be able to escape if you don’t have a lawyer that understands copyright and publishing contracts. So skip this option if you’re not up for it.
Why this warning? With the contracts that some of these serial fiction companies make you sign, you can sell not just the copyright of the book you’re submitting but also the copyright of all the books you will ever write.
Other than the warning above, there are authors that earn money writing serial fiction. Mostly when their serial fiction becomes somewhat popular.
There are all sorts of serial fiction apps, sites, and platforms. I’ll grade some of the ones I’ve heard of below:
Not very dangerous: Wattpad & Kindle Vella
Might be Dangerous: Radish
Dangerous Contracts: Ireader, Goodnovel, Novelcat, Webnovel, etc.
15. Make Money Writing Resumes and Cover letters
As long as people are still applying for jobs and promotions, skilled resume and cover letter writers will always be in high demand.
Whether you build a small business or agency, or you want to work as a freelancer, you can make money helping job-seekers polish their resumes, write compelling cover letters, and tweak their LinkedIn profiles to reposition them to get the job they want and deserve.
You can find resume writing gigs via job boards, freelance sites like Upwork, or with organic marketing mediums where you talk about resume writing such as a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or somewhere you can show that you’re qualified and you know what you’re doing.
16. Make Money Writing Songs or Lyrics
If you’re not a musician but you enjoy writing songs or lyrics, you can try selling your music to producers.
It is easy for songwriters because they can create music and add lyrics to them, and thus, create a song demo that will show producers if you’re a good fit or not.
However, if you’re a lyricist, it might be harder for you to showcase how your lyrics are different from other lyrics, which is why it may be a good idea to either try getting music for your lyrics or highlighting your lyrics by reading them out on social media platforms.
YouTube is a great place to drop demos and get noticed if you want to be a freelance songwriter or lyricist.
If you don’t want this, you can become a professional songwriter or lyricist associated with a recording studio or record label.
You can also sell your songwriting via sites like:
17. Make Money Writing and Managing a Paid Newsletter
You can make money writing by starting a paid newsletter on Substack.
With Substack, you can write, edit and publish posts to the web or as emails in a matter of clicks.
Those posts you wrote can also be paywalled (people have to subscribe to read) or published for free.
For your paywalled content or premium content, your fans or loyal readers will pay a monthly subscription to have access to them and Substack will keep 10% of the subscription fees.
You can also get founding members who pay extra to support your work.
Another way to make money writing on Substack is through Substack Pro where Substack pays creators cash advances and reduces the percentage of their subscription revenue generated over a period of time like 1-2 years.
18. Make Money Writing Short Stories
When most people think of writing books, they think of writing fictional novels. What they don’t know is that many short story authors make a pretty good living with their writing.
You can make money writing short stories by:
- Self-publishing an anthology
- Self-publishing your short stories or novellas on Amazon Kindle and other ebook platforms
- Submitting your short stories to a popular story website
- Publishing with Authors publishing an anthology
- Sending your short stories to magazines or journals.
- And more.
19. Make Money Answering Questions on Quora
In the year 2022, new monetization opportunities opened for creators all over the world including writers on Quora sharing their expertise through their writing.
Here’s an explanation of how this program works directly from this Tech Crunch article:
Although not everybody is eligible to make money this way because Quora+, Quora’s monetization program is not open to all Quora writers.
Similar to Medium, not everyone is eligible to apply for Quora’s monetization. If you’re in countries such as Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Isreal, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, etc, you can make money with Quora monetization.
Other than Quora monetization, I think there are other ways writers can make money on Quora.
Quora writers can send traffic from their Quora answers to their blog posts, Youtube channels, and even podcasts which may be monetized.
Freelance Writers can also use their insightful writing on Quora to get paying customers.
20. Make Money Creating and Selling Useful Ebooks
This is kind of like self-publishing but not totally. You write an ebook based on a topic you’re an expert on. It doesn’t have to be a full-length book but it has to be a book that thoroughly answers all the reader’s questions.
Then you sell the ebook via your blog or a site like Gumroad, Payhip, and Amazon.
All you have to do is to send potential customers to that ebook, that is, people whose pain points are solved via that book.
You can send traffic organically through Youtube, your blog, or a podcast where you share similar but not thorough content similar to what is in your ebook.
You can also send paid traffic to the ebook. I recommend Facebook Ads for this kind of thing but if you’re conversant with Youtube Ads or Google Ads, they can work.
Other than selling your ebook, you could use your ebook to convince potential customers to pay for your course, coaching services, or consultation services.
21. Become a Grant Writer
Businesses, startups, Universities, nonprofits, and even individuals hire grant writers to help them write applications for grants that give them access to funding.
As a grant writer, you need to do a lot of research, compile materials in support of applications for grants from government departments, foundations, and other sources and write persuasively to convince a grant board that your client is qualified and prepared to purposefully use the grant in the best way if it is given to them.
22. Earn money writing Show Notes for Podcasts
If you listen to Podcasts, you will know that many of them have show notes, which are written online resources for podcast listeners to flip through.
Some podcasts even turn their show notes into blog posts of sorts so they can send traffic from search engines to their podcasts as well. Of course, different podcasts approach show notes differently.
If you’re interested in making money writing show notes for podcasts, you can also send cold pitches to podcasters or find jobs on job boards or freelancer market sites.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to make money writing online and offline. I suggest you sit down and create a list of your interests, curiosities, and knowledgeable areas to try to pick the kind of writing you would enjoy trying to make money with.
