SNM060: 5 Ways to Make a Living as a Writer

speaker 0: 0:00 five ways to make a living as a writer on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Social Pilot. The social media and marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses joined over 20,000 social media pros at serve. No master dot com Backslash social pilot today Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place.

Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host guys. Siri's of events have come together in a single day.

They've been following me to put me in a top recording situation Last night, both of my kids were sick and it wore me out and had a sore throat early in the morning, so I wasn't able to record the podcast. It's now around sunset time and lo and behold, there's a typhoon coming in. So this is the windiest I've ever tried to record. I've got my back to the wind and facing the palm trees. It's not a typhoon yet.

It's like the part before it gets completely wild. But I wanted to give you I wanted to give you something special, something really exciting, and I just I thought about slacking off today. But you know, it's so important to put out every single episode. So I do apologize if it sounds like I'm recording from the opening scene of Gilligan's Island. I am next to a boat that's going crazy. I know who tied it to the stock, but they did a worse job that I would've.

It's bouncing around all over the place, but let's cut to the chase. There are five key ways that you could make a living as a writer, and I want to take you through each of them and how you kind of get into that business. The first is writing blog's journals or magazines.

This is where you write for someone else that has a larger presence, and there's a lot of really great websites that are constantly buying content, any website you wantto right for, it's totally possible there's this assumption that it's so hard. If you want to write from the Huffington Post, you just have to write an email to Arianna Huffington. Someone on her staff reads all of them, and that's how they get most of their riders.

People send in an unsolicited email, and there's a whole template you can follow where you send in either an example article or three ideas for a story. And if they like, any of your ideas will email you back and suddenly you're writer for Huffington Post. Most websites have something like that. Often times you have to write 123 articles for free, and then you can add that to your resume. And they have written for the site as you go for other jobs or they'll start paying you.

It's really not that hard to get jobs writing for other places. I'm always looking for new people to write for serve No master. I have over 100 block post that are incomplete. Unfinished. I have 20 new reviews that I want to write now that I've really dialed in and shared with you two days ago, two episodes ago, exactly how to write the perfect testimonial. Perfect review. I want to share it with you.

I'm so busy working on so many things that my sight and many other sites are always looking for new writers. It's the same for magazines and other places most of those industries, because the pay is so low. There's really, really high turnover, but it's a great place to start getting some credits on your resume. Now, As you know, I'm all about working for yourself. So the model I really believe in is something where you take a little more control of your destiny.

The second path we have is something I've talked up before, which is where you just generate lots of lots of content. And this could be where you work for a writing mill or riding farm. And there's a lot of Web sites like these. I've mentioned this before when your brand new writer, This is where I recommend you start because the barrier entry is very low. This is where most foreigners started. A lot of Indian writers, a lot of Pakistani writers, a lot of Filipino writers.

They work for sites like I writer and some of the other competitors that are at the bottom end of the market because it's about quantity rather than quality. And I recommend starting there because you get paid very quickly. You can move yourself up the rankings because your native English speaker and you can really hone your skill.

One of the challenges that a lot of people have is you don't know if they're any good as a writer until you're right and the best way to really, you know, sharpen your skills and get your chops is too right and to get paid for writing. So then you know what people like you, what people don't like and you'll become a better writer. This will help you really build up that skill set. There are so many opportunities for people that could write quickly.

If you could write 10 block posts today, you can easily live any life you want. As you work your way up these blogged bill style platforms, you can start getting paid $35 a block post, then Europe to 80. Some of these places when you have a reputation or you're an expert in this particular field, will pay 35 or even $800 for single block posts. Now, obviously, these air longer block posts, but you're still looking, talking two or 3000 words. That's a pretty good payday.

It's not lack of opportunity. Sometimes it's we have these assumptions that there's no jobs or that there's no way we can make a living as a writer or that there's only one way to do it. I have so many friends that are excellent riders. They think the only way you could make a living as a writer is to be published by a traditional book company. They think there's no other way to make money.

I have several friends who think that, and I make about 10 times more money than them and all of my friends who believe the only way to make money. As with a traditional publisher, all of them have other jobs. All of them have to take other work constantly because they're traditionally published books don't make any money. What I'd like you to d'oh!

While I endure this epic pre typhoon and super deep waves, I'm gonna have to I'm on the dock again, so I'm gonna have to climb Oh, man, or just try and jump about six feet to avoid landing in the ocean. Because the way the stock is built, it's just on a beach, and the back of it is underwater now. So between me and my house, there's a bit of ocean. The water is getting higher. Hopefully, it's not gonna start splashing me, but you never know.

But that's the excitement of serving us. That's excitement of living, you know, the tropical paradise experience. Just yesterday I was trying to record a video, a little video on my phone, and you could see it on the toolbox page. I had to record 20 takes because there was so much wind. And that's a 15 2nd video, hopefully today because I had my back to the window. Have this good Mike, you could really hear what I have to say.

We can connect because I never want to make you wait. Just cause I'm in a silly typhoon, that's no excuse, right? The third way that you can make money, and this is something I really believe in. Building Two is as a Kindle author. This is how I generate a lot of my income. This is a lot of what I teach about serving masters, you know, and the great thing about being kindle off the rather than Tricia Lee published, is that you eat what you kill.

You control your own destiny. You're in control of every single piece of your success or failure. It's more risk, but it's also a lot more reward. If you launch a book with additional publisher, doesn't do very well, sells a couple 100 copies a month, they'll dump you and you'll make nothing. You'll maybe make $100 but if you sell those same books directly, you make a couple of $1000 a month. You'll be able to build a mailing list of your followers.

You will choose your own cover, and when you have a book that's failing, you can make changes. One of my books called Easy Minimus Living. You could look it up if you want. It's right now. Number one in the category for hoarding That book for the last 18 months was a dog. It was my greatest failure as an author was the first book I ever put on Amazon, and for a year and 1/2 it was dead.

It was making three or $10 a month, making nothing now it makes far more today than it used to in a month because they kept making tweaks. I kept making changes. I rewrote the pages description. The ability to modify the building to adapt allows you to turn any unsuccessful book into a champion. I just put new covers on three of my books in the last week as well. I was very unhappy with one of my books about being an introvert.

The book is really good, the contents really good at so many strong reviews for the cover. There was just something wrong with it, and it wasn't selling. You can't make those changes when you're with additional publisher, and when you're with additional publisher, you can't even write what you want. You have to turn in a really deep outline for the book long before you write anything.

And if you want to make any changes from the outline, you have to get permission so you give up a great deal of control. Now there are some benefits. And with those great benefits, as Derek was talking about yesterday, he was telling this amazing story, and if you have it. Listen to the Derrick Tucker interview. I really Mecham and that you d'oh, he's awesome. That's why I rarely do interviews. When I have someone great, I really want to share it.

And he shared something amazing about how people he worked with really enjoy having a strict outlet, help some say, structured and not lose the course. So there are some benefits for some riders. But for me, I changed my mind all the time. I'm very freeform even today. I'm working on the next three books in my syriza body. Released Serve No, master. I've already released breaking orbit and I was looking at Oh, did you hear that monster wave right under my bum?

I'm working on Books three and four. Book number three I've already titled It's called 20 K and a Day. It's how to write 20,000 words a day. The outlines been done for, actually more than a month now. The outlines been totally done, and I've been working on the cover idea for a while. But then I was thinking, Well, what's coming after that? What's the next to after that?

And so I've been brainstorming with some friends and looking at some images, starting to put together that stuff because I like to have what's in front of you, but I don't strict beyond that. I often change the order of the books I'm gonna write. I thought I would do my book about speed reading next, but I'm not really inspired by that. I'll eventually write a book about reading fast, but I'm not excited by that topic right now.

A couple of the other ideas I had just turned out not to be very popular, thought about writing a really good book on email. No one wants to read those. There's a couple of great books about email right now. They're doing very well on Amazon, but they're all 99 cents. I'm not really interested in making 30 cents a book. There's no money in it.

So even if you do really, really well, you end up making, like, $100 a month so a lot of research goes back on board. Sometimes we have ideas to go up and down and having the freeform ability when you make your own destiny is amazing with canned. I love that and you know, I tried to go with additional publisher a long time ago and they treated me like garbage. Well, we're stays in my life.

They let me fly all the way to New York before they told me they weren't interested and by they told me they were interested. I mean, they stopped returning my calls after I flew up and the day before my meeting, I'm walking down the street in New York and I finally got this email on my phone from the assistant's assistant to the person I've been e mailing with before. I got a real taste of additional publishing industry.

So if you want work with additional publisher, I'm the wrong guy to follow, because I will always hate that industry. They're stagnant. They're way behind the times, and it's a failing industry. They're going right now through the exact same challenges. But the music industry went through 20 years ago, and they're adapting justice poorly. There are some new, really powerful publishing companies they're being found in recently, and my friend Jesse has one lifestyle, entrepreneurs, press, and he's in a totally different mindset.

He has a totally different approach to publishing the melodic traditional publishers because his smaller company because he's really in the in the sticks. He writes books himself. He's very agile, but again, even someone who's doing so much he can't publish 100 books a month can't handle huge quantity. Every publishing company could only handle a certain number of books, and so going down that route is very challenging. But with Kendall, you can release different formats. You could make changes. You could turn fair's into successes.

You could build different Siri's. You can build a list of followers. You can do amazing things. My entire business is built around this, so I'm a big fan of Kindle. I love that the next path of writing is copyrighting. I can't recommend becoming a cop greater enough. And I know I've mentioned a few times in previous episodes that I'm gonna put together. Pdf of amazing ads that you can copy by hand. And I mentioned this in the podcast episode about copyrighting.

I have all of the pages together. I just have to assemble them. And in fact, when I walked back into the house and God willing, it won't start rating. Before I finished recording this, I'll add it to my to do list for today or tomorrow. I'll try and put it together ASAP because I know a lot of people really struggled to find ads that they want to mimic, and they want a template.

I lost actually part of ice wipeout for a long time, but I found it a couple of days ago, So I'm gonna put that together, and it's gonna have, like, 3 to 500 really good ads that you could just write my hand to learn. Copyrighted copywriters make a lot. I have someone who works for me, right to my emails. And the main reason I hard her was because she's a copywriter. She writes the first draft of all my emails.

Every email you see is based on my outline. She writes it. And then I go back in and tweak it up because I'm just so busy and what I'm paying her is way more than other writers make. I recommend going down this path. If you couldn't spend and sit down for 1 to 2 hours a day, you making $10,000 a month next year. Easily. There's always work for good copywriters. It's a really great craft because you could learn it for free.

Yes, I am gonna put together a book on copyrighting that is part of my servant Master Siris, maybe to be booked six or seven. I was thinking about it last night. It's very popular topic, but it's very hard for me to justify selling a product or selling, of course about it, when you can honestly learn everything for free. Everything that I know about copyrighting costs nothing to learn. And that's really what's amazing about that system and cooperators.

It's if I could go back, I would have learned copy instead of book writing. If I could go back and change that path, I would have gone originally. Instead of learning copyrighting. Second, copywriters make more Money It's very easy for copywriters to ask for percentage of projects, and it's always, always, always work. And if you can write copy, you can make your own destiny. It's much easier to find work when you can write great copy.

If you could write something that sells, there's always work for you and you can create the products later. It's a really wonderful path to go down and its future profit. The Internet collapses. They're still work. Riding local news letters, writing fliers You could always find work as a copywriter. Even if all electricity disappears, you'll be able to find work in your community. That's what's amazing about that skill. It's really future and survival proof. These waves are getting really exciting. It's getting pretty wild.

Every two or three waves is a monster. Here comes the big one. Ready for it? Yeah, I can feel the water right under my feet. So let me get you to Number five, which is your own Blawg. You can monetize and build a blogged, and one of my new blueprints is about watching your block and how to monetize it. It's very important to start a block with a strategy. Most people start a block and makes some key, huge mistakes that prevent them from ever monetizing.

If you start a blogger like, if I was that served master dot wordpress dot com, I would never make any money from the block because you're not allowed to. You're not allowed to put ads on a site that they control. You have no control of your destiny. That's the most common mistake I see and people still send the links to their blog's that they don't own all the time.

And while it's great, I'm proud that you started writing, I'm very disappointed that you'll never make money for writing. You always be trapped to always be limited. You do have to spend a little money to make a little money, but starting your own blogging patrolling it costs less than $20 a year. It's not a huge expense, and it's really great place to get started. You can slowly build your audience. That's how I started my entire online career many, many years ago.

10 full years ago, I started a blogger called About My Block. It's long gone now. It went through three domain changes and eventually sold all the content. But that entire process started me just writing to myself. I was consistent about my content. I read a few articles about CEO and I started getting a lot of traffic. I became the number one block in the world for the phrase Get a girlfriend had to get a girlfriend because it was about my journey, trying to find a girlfriend.

Obviously, now that I have one of you got kids. I don't write about trying to get a girlfriend more. It's something that's in my past. I don't have any more interesting stories about traveling the world and trying to find myself. But you can find your own destiny, and you could be in charge of your destiny by creating your own block. And I really recommend that, honestly, the best thing you could do is build up multiple tracks and multiple pass to income.

The great thing about starting with the mill, starting with technique number two, is that you're getting paid right away. You got money coming in immediately. Once you have some revenue coming in, what you have $100 coming in every single day. You got a little bit of breathing room to start working on the next level.

Whether that's writing articles for blog's, that will pay you getting a little bit higher, working your way up those ranks to the better and better riding service's so that instead of making $100 a day, then you $300 a day than you make in $1000 a day than you make in $2000 riding block posts or you could start with number two and then use that money to give you the breathing room to start launching Kindle books and everything you need to know about launching Kindle books.

It's covered 100% in breaking orbit. I cover every single step you need launch and make money from that for a skin. The book The thing about Kindle books and the thing about blog's is that they take a little bit longer. Make money from you. Don't make money on day one. That's why technique number two is great. Started with the mill. Started writing for other people allows you to make enough money right away that you can start doing other things.

And as a bonus, I'm gonna tell you about Option Over six, which is ghost writing. There is constantly work for ghost writers. I'm always looking to hire more ghostwriters. I'll tell you that right now, if you've spent a little time honing your craft and you can ghost right, especially if you can write romance novels, I'd be very interested in doing some cool stuff together. If you can write about self help, Awesome. What?

I really look for people that could write the first draft of a book, and then I go through and just give it. You know, the servant Master Special sauce turned it into my voice, and there are tens of thousands of people like me every day on up work. Hundreds of people get hired to ghost write books every day on the warrior. For dozens of people. Get hired to ghost write books. There's always work for good ghost writers.

All you have to do is put the word out there, put out a couple of examples and start funding clients by being proactive and would always ask me, How do you find these really High Plains, High paying, ghostwriting gigs? How do you find someone who'll pay you $5000 to write a book over the course of one or two weeks? How do you find someone paid that much for something that you're that cable of? And it's this simple.

I tell everyone what I d'oh everyone I meet, I say I'm a ghost writer. I write all the time, but I'm always open for new projects. Every time I talk to somebody, say, Hey, if you've got something cool, keep me in mind now, sometimes you tell that to someone you don't hear back for two or three years. But when you do, it's a huge project.

I know that every time I go to a conference, people will offer me where ghost writing for them because I have a reputation and because I back it up. Everything I say is that I might have to serve back to my house. Everything I say, something I can deliver on. And you could do the same thing when you say, Look, I'm a ghost, right? I'm very good at what I d'oh.

If you're ever looking for someone that can bring the noise or drop the hammer, let me know by speaking with confidence, people will back. Wow, no one would talk like that unless they're really good. And that gets you amazing opportunities and you just start off at lower price points and work your way up. You start off writing two cents a word, work your way up to 10 cents a word. Oh, I think the power started to go out. It's getting really exciting.

I hate to cut episode short. We're only a few minutes short, but it's pitch black now and I'm in the water and it's pretty. Typhoon typhoon is not supposed to until tomorrow Power came back. That means I'm going to survive when you're thinking about your path. Is a writer. Key is to not limit yourself. Don't think there's only one path to making money is right. Or don't think that because you started a block, you can't do something else, even where I'm at right now.

In life, I still take ghost writing projects all the time. I like to maintain strong relationships with different clients, so sometimes I take work I don't really need. But also, sometimes it's really an awesome project.

It's a great opportunity, and I know that I know that taking these jobs always leads to more and better higher paying jobs before clients who pay me $5000 a job Now, they used to pay me $800 a job just a couple of years ago, so maintain that relationship means there's always money coming in, and then I could take one of those high paying jobs and then pay other people to write books for me.

That's how I built up some my really big ghost writing presences write about for someone else. Get paid enough to pay 1/3 person to write five books. For me, that's an amazing way to diversify and grow your business. So as I run home through this epic storm, I want you to keep in mind one thing. There was. Always work for riders as long as you go out and find it. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master.

Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to this episode of the serve. No master podcast.

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