The Internet is growing bigger every day and the reason for this growth is not farfetched. Everybody is now online visiting one website or the other even with their phones and other mobile devices.
According to statista.com the number of Internet users worldwide has increased from 2.94 billion in 2014 to 3.17 billion presently as at the time of writing this article.
People use the Internet primarily to source for information and get entertainment. And even though we now have videos, most website contents remain in the form of articles. This means most users of the Internet visit websites to read articles that will give them information and entertainment.
Therefore, for website owners to continue to satisfy their subscribers and get new visitors coming to their sites, they need to continue to update their websites with fresh and unique articles. The impact of this is that more writers are needed to create the articles. This has greatly expanded the freelance writing industry and increased the fortunes of writers.
Google has even made it juicier for freelance writers.
How Google Search Engine Increased Writers’ Pay:
Google, you already know, is the biggest search engine on the Internet, which means it is the one that gives websites the largest and more effective free traffic, depending on how it sees the quality of your content.
A few years ago Google started developing advanced level algorithm for its search engine which can assess the quality of articles on websites. Today, that algorithm is fully operational and all websites with scrappy or poorly written articles are degraded and almost never given any traffic.
This is why most websites that used to have large traffic have seen their traffic fizzled out due to the poor quality of their articles.
It is very important for Google that it serves only the best web pages to searchers. If people use Google search and get the best websites that treat the subject of their search they will be satisfied and continue to use it.
This has kept Google as number one search engine and they wouldn’t want to lose that position to another company. So, they have continued to strengthen their search engine to reward only websites with the best quality content with traffic.
Consequently, for webmasters to maintain and keep their traffic growing they need to hire good writers to produce quality articles for them.
This has separated the men from the boys in the freelance writing industry!
Getting good writers doesn’t come cheap, webmasters know this and they are prepared to pay anything to have only quality articles for their readers.
These are business people who know the value of articles to a website. Articles are investments that bring in traffic to a website year in year out. And from the traffic a website gets, the owner can make money from it from several ways. With the huge advertising budget going online from both the big and small companies, including individuals, most websites with very huge traffic make lots of money, some in the millions of dollars, every month.
To these webmasters, it is common sense to continue to invest in acquiring quality articles that can keep bringing in the much needed traffic. They go only for the very best writers they can find, and are prepared to pay as much as $1,000 for an article! That’s right, there are companies who pay one thousand Dollars for one article and that means there are writers who earn that!
Now, how do you position yourself to be a top writer to tap into the big Earners Class?
The Kind Of Articles Webmasters Pay Big Money For:
If you want someone to pay you $200 or more for an article, you must know that such article will be different from the usual 550-600 word articles commonly seen online. You should be prepared to write from 2,000 words and above and produce an article with tons of information relating to the topic it discusses.
You should be able to research the topic thoroughly and gather all relevant information you can get about it, and be sure the information is correct.
Your article should be broken up into subtitles to discuss each point. This prevents the reader from getting bored at a point, and encourages them to keep reading to the end.
There is really no big deal about writing this kind of articles, especially for experienced writers; however, anyone can learn how to produce such articles, and one way to do that is to study samples of such articles on some websites, such as these: http://www.nutritionsecrets.com/high-fat-foods-that-are-good-for-you/, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/offline-music-apps_n_7649242.html?ir=Technology, http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/20150622/benefits-exercise-insulin-fat?page=1 (in fact, you can study more articles on these websites and tailor yours against them.
If you can produce these kinds of articles, then you are the person the top paying webmasters and companies are looking for, it means you can play in the big earner league of writers. You can charge $200 or more for writing an article.
Your article must be clean of all errors, grammatical or typographical. The webmasters cannot pay you $200 and still need someone else to proofread or edit your work. Your work should be good enough to be published straight away on their website and on other platforms they might want to publish it without needing to proofread it again by someone else; you should have done the proofreading before submitting it.
Your article should be targeted to the audience that it is meant for. If your client’s website is targeting the American audience, your English must be American and not British or Nigerian.
Sometimes, Nigerian writers unknowingly write in “Nigerian English” by the way they use certain words or make certain statements. To help in resolving this, you can run your article through the free plagiarism checker at smallseotools.com before sending it to your client.
The plagiarism checker will highlight areas of the article where there are copies already existing online and where there are errors. If the error message is “undefined”, it means your sentence or statement is wrong and you should look at it and edit it.
Where you quoted statistical information from another website, you should attribute it to the source. That is very important so as not to get your client into trouble with that website over copyright issues.
That’s about what you need to know about such quality articles that webmasters pay big money for, the next thing we want to look at is how to choose topic ideas for your articles if your client did not provide any.
Choosing Topic Ideas For Your Articles:
Sometimes, your clients may not give you topics to write on, while they may at other times. If you are expected to generate topic ideas for your articles by yourself, here are ways to do so:
Visit book publishing and selling sites: Websites like dummies.com and amazon.com are sites where you can find ideas for topics for the articles you want to write. Dummies have tons of titles of books on most niches which can give you some ideas. Also, on the book section of Amazon, you can search for books on the niche you are interested in and you will find lots of them come up which give topic ideas.
Amazon also gives you the opportunity of seeing the content outline of the books there. From the content outline of the books in your niche, you should have lots of topic ideas for your articles.
From articles trending on the social media: You can use BuzzSumo.com to determine the kind of content that has been well shared on the social media. These are articles that a lot of people are excited about in that industry, which they are sharing fast.
When you find a topic idea from any of the sources above, your goal is to tweak it to a unique topic, and to produce a richer article than the original one.
For example, if the topic idea you got is “7 Natural Ways Of Treating Acne”, your own unique topic can be “Natural Acne Removal: Top 17 Ways To Clear Acne Without Chemical Creams”.
You can see that our topic is unique and does not exist yet on the Internet. Google likes such unique article titles and so do webmasters.
Therefore, make sure you don’t present article topics that already exist online to webmasters if they ask you to provide topics you wish to write on.
The next section of this report is to show you how to attract high paying website owners and truly skyrocket your income.
How To Get High Paying Article Writing Contracts:
Just as writers look for clients for their next writing project, so also do webmasters look for good writers to write for them. In fact, the top paying companies who are prepared to pay $200 and above for an article look for the right people to write for them than writers looking for them.
That is the truth! It is not easy to get really good writers that can give you exactly the articles you want without you needing to edit them again. Most people who claim to be freelance writers looking for writing job online cannot produce something you will not need to proofread or edit thoroughly before publishing it. And these webmasters don’t have such time and patience for them.
To get a good writer that will satisfy them, webmasters have to look for them, and if you believe you are a good writer, you have to position yourself to be able to get their attention.
Now, here are ways by which you can position yourself to attract the high paying clients:
Pick A Niche And Establish Expertise In It
It is very rewarding to pick a niche and brand yourself as a freelance writer who is an expert in that area. There are many profitable niches to choose from: finance, investments, health and fitness, social media, tech stuff, nutrition, travels, fashion, beauty and women stuff, men’s health, home maintenance, cookery, sports, music, science, small business, business, lifestyle, etc.
You can do a little research on the niche you are interested in by visiting leading websites in that niche to see their contents and how much responses they are getting from their visitors. A huge response by way of comments and shares done by readers would mean that the niche is profitable and owners of such websites will be needing writers constantly.
Another way to determine if your niche is what the big companies will be interested in to hire writers for, you can also use the Google keyword planner tool found in adword.google.com.
You will need to sign up for a Google Adword account to be able to access the keyword planner. It is free to sign up if you don’t already have an account.
Here are the steps to follow with Google keyword planner to confirm if your niche will attract high paying companies to hire you.
- Login to your adword.google.com account and select keyword planner form the “Tool” button.
- Type in the niche keyword into the “Find new keywords” search box. For example “phone”.
- Click on “keyword ideas” button.
Finding out if there are big companies in the niche: The next thing you want to do after checking the search volume and suggested bid price is to see if it’s a niche the big media companies like Huffingtonpost, Forbes, Newsweek, mashable, nytimes, abcnews, and cnn are in.
It is important that the big media groups are in the niche. They are the ones that drive the cost of articles upward, and beside that you will be leveraging on their writers to boost your profile as we shall see later. The presence of the big website in the niche will further confirm that it has significant followership.
Boosting your profile as a top freelance writer is what brings the high paying clients, and it is what you must achieve if you will be able to charge $200 or more for one article. And here is how to achieve it:
Develop Expert Status And Boost Your Profile As Freelance Writer
The major part of the plan to become a highly paid freelance writer on the Internet is to develop an expert status, which will help to boost your profile.
With a high profile, you will be able to attract high paying companies to use your service.
Now, how do you build expert status?
Here are the different ways by which you can become known as a top expert to go to for quality articles on the Internet:
Starting a Blog
You can set up a blog around the subject you are developing expertise in. Research and write on topics relating to the niche. Again you can use BuzzSumo.com to find topics lots of people are interested in, considering how much shares they have had on the social media that you can write on.
You can also browse Amazon books, books at Dummies.com, and Udemy.com to get topic ideas for your blog from the book and course outlines you will find on these sites.
Make sure you write the same kind of quality articles you would write for clients if they should hire you.
You should describe yourself as a freelance writer with expertise in your niche area. Your description is an opportunity to sell yourself to prospective clients, so make it compelling. If you have been able to have your articles published on big sites like Huffingtonpost, Forbes, Newsweek, etc., you should mention it in your description.
You can use your real name and your picture (make it simple, like wearing a T-shirt) on the blog but don’t write about yourself as a Nigerian or about Nigeria.
Remember you are addressing the global audience, particularly the American public, you should therefore ensure that your language, perception, and the information you are dishing out suit your target audience.
You don’t need to disclose your location or talk about your background on your blog. You can give out the information later to clients who contact you to get details about you before hiring you. As for your blogging activities, you may want to simply picture yourself as an American writer.
You can also use catchy pseudonyms instead of your real name, such as Techwatcher, Mr.Fit, Mr.T, GreatWriter, etc. I’m sure you can come up with an attractive catchy name. You can also use an avatar or any other image to represent you on the the blog.
All that the potential client wants to see is the ability to research the Internet and write quality articles for them, not so much about your name, looks, or location.
They want to be sure that you are an expert who has a strong understanding of their niche market and are able to help them create unique articles that their visitors and users will enjoy.
Once they see those qualities from your blog, you can be sure they will contact you.
You don’t also have to put your rate on your blog. You can simply say that you are available to take on a project and that anyone interested in your service should send an email to you and they will get your quote.
A blog is a powerful marketing tool for selling freelance writing service, especially to high paying clients. Therefore, make sure your blog is professionally presented. Your articles must not only be top quality, it must also be well formatted.
You can use free blog hosting service like blogger.com or wordpress.com to create your blog. You can also use paid hosting if you can afford it.
To be sure you are doing the right thing, look for a successful blog in your niche and try to model yours after it.
Now, let’s look at another way of building an expert status to qualify to earn high pay for your writing service:
Participating in Guest Blogging
A very potent way of becoming an expert in your niche industry fast is to participate in guest blogging.
Find blogs in your niche, especially the ones that already allow guest blogging. Send them an email requesting to submit original and unique articles to them. You can send them two or three titles as well as a short description of the articles you want to send them.
The articles you are sending to each website must be original, that means they must be different from the others. Don’t send an article that has already been posted on a website, including your blog. Once an article has been posted on a website that will be the site the search engines will recognize as the owner. If it is again posted on another site, the one on the second site will be recognized as a duplicate copy.
Search engines do penalize websites with lots of duplicate contents. That is why blog owners who accept other people to write for them as guests or contributors will only accept original articles from them.
The richer and unique the articles are, the more the chances of blog owners, especially blogs with good traffic and readership accepting them.
When your article is published, you will be given a resource box at the bottom of the article where you will have the opportunity of selling yourself and linking to your blog from the site where the article is published.
You should state in your resource box that you are a researcher and freelance writer in your field, providing top quality information people can use; and that readers should visit your blog if they loved what they read.
Work on featuring on many blogs. This will increase the number of people reading your articles and coming to your blog. If your articles are very good by way of the information contained and delivery, you can have many other websites linking to the articles from their sites or picking something from your articles and attributing it to you from their sites. This will expose you to their readers and that surely increases your profile and confers an expert status to you.
The Reward for Guest Blogging:
I agree that guest posting or blogging is hard work, which does not yield the expected reward immediately. In fact, it can take a few weeks before you start seeing the reward of your work. You should therefore consider the work as investment because that is what it is.
And it is an investment that surely pays; it has been proven time and again! By the time you start having lots of people reading your articles, which are spread all over the Internet, including people looking for good writers in your industry to hire, you will have more than enough clients knocking on your door for project and you will be able to demand a higher fee.
This brings us to the third way of building an expert status as a freelance writer online even as a Nigerian: networking.
Networking with Writers and Editors of Big Companies
Networking with writers and editors of the big websites like Huffingtonpost can open great doors to your freelance writing career. They can make it easier for you to write for them too, which will boost your profile astronomically.
Being able to get your articles published in the big websites will not only send huge and quality traffic to your blog, it will also greatly increase your profile as a freelance writer. You can say in your profile that your articles have been published in Huffingtonpost and anyone who wants to hire you will be prepared to pay big.
Getting these writers and editors’ attention:
To network with these writers and editors, you need to find a way to get their attention. One way to achieve this is to “follow up on them.”
Specifically, you can follow up on their articles and be among the first to comment whenever they post an article. Ensure to make valuable comments, including friendly criticism and suggestions, so that they will notice you. Also, you can follow them on the social media and interact with them professionally based on their writings.
When you have done this for some time and they have noticed you, you can then ask that they check out your articles and offer some suggestions or critics. You can also ask if there is any way you can be of help to them on their projects (for free of course).
By the time a sort of friendly relationship has developed between the two of you, you can then let them know you would like to write for their company, and how they can link you up with the editor in charge. They will be glad to assist you in whatever way they can to get published on the big stage.
Like I said before, once your article is published by Huffingtonpost, Newsweek, Forbes, or any of the big media groups, you can be sure that you have hit a breakthrough as a writer online.
Conclusion:
Becoming a top earning freelance writer who charges $200 and above for an article is something all writers dream of, but sadly not everyone can achieve it. Like is obtainable in all professions, there will be the few big players while many will be at the bottom of the ladder struggling to get the crumbs that trickle down from the table of the big boys.
To be a big player in the online freelance writing field requires you to develop an expert status. The big money spenders usually look for experts to work with on their projects and they will find you if you have positioned yourself as one.
The more expert status you have developed, the more you can charge and be paid for a project. You can earn as much as $500 or even $1,000 on an article, depending on the nature of the project.
Apart from article writing, writers who are known to be experts are usually contacted for other writing projects like books. You can earn thousands of dollars from such projects.
In all, writers who have created an expert status for themselves are never short of job to do, in fact, they usually turn down smaller paying jobs for bigger ones, and can regularly turn in five figures in earning each month.
Becoming an “expert article writer” is not an easy thing to attain, but remember that nothing good comes easy. If the possibility of making tens of thousands of dollars each month writing articles online makes sense to you, then it is worth the effort learning how to be one, which is what this guide helps you to achieve.
To your success!
