How To Make A Living Writing Words

If you found this blog it means you want to make a living writing words, and let me tell you–you are in the right place. There are many facets to this blog, if you take a look around. But it all comes back to one thing and one thing only: learning how to win the writing game.

There are a wide variety of subjects on this blog because there are many ways to make a living writing words, and the most probable way to make a living writing words is to combine 2 – 3 methods to reach the goal. Very rarely, somebody will hit a homerun and that’s all you’ll hear about: “This Blogger Started Making $10,000 Per Month After 3 Months Of Blogging!” We like to have outrageous optimism around here, but we also are realistic in the effort it will take to win.

Plan on 3 – 5 years of hard work. If you can make that commitment, to work daily and put in anywhere from 20 – 30 hours per week, odds are high you will succeed in the writing game. Yes, it’s hard work. But the payoff is enormous: living free via writing words.

9 Different Paths To Make A Living Writing Words

There are many paths to making a living writing words, as I said above, it will take most of us 2 – 3 methods in order to live well off of our writings. Review the various methods and options below and choose what you think will work for you, be open minded and be sure to choose a path that focuses on strengths, rather than interests.

Method 1: Build A Series Of Niche Blogs

The days of building a single blog and pulling in five-figures of monthly income are over. Yes, people do that. Yes, it’s possible. Yes, my high school garage band may get back together and get signed to Columbia Records, thanks for asking. In the meantime, though, we gotta play probabilities. And probabilities say (check my math here) more blogs equals more avenues to break through.

Obviously, you can only launch the amount of blogs you can handle, and if you at all have the mindset of Naysayer Ned from above I recommend to give up your writing dreams and instead dedicate all your time to consuming programmable TV. That’s all your mind is good for, to consume. I hear they have an exciting new season of the masked singer lined up for ya.

For the rest of you, I know you get it: a handful of blogs adds up–one blog earns $200 per month, another does $1,000, and oh that one is doing $5,000, this one over here is doing $2,000, etc. Either flip the low-earning ones or put them on autopilot as much as you can in order to focus on the bigger winners. Taking more shots gives more opportunity to launch a successful blog. Sometimes you take your blogging shot and fail, and that’s okay.

You don’t launch a dozen blogs at once either. You start by launching one blog, and you work hard on it and you get it off the ground, which is the hardest part. Once it’s humming along you can maintain it and launch a new blog, which you will find out is way easier to build than the first blog you launched. Skills and experience compound.

What kind of niche blogs should you launch, exactly? I’ll tell you what I’m doing.

• Your Name Blog – I went with austinjames.blog. The .com was taken, which should always be first choice. Anyway, I’ve quite fallen in love with my .blog TLD (top level domain). I think it may be the future of blogging. There are so many ridiculously good .blog domain names available it makes my head spin. I think it’s the future, did I already say that? Your Name Blog can be anything you want it to be. For me, it’s my laboratory. It’s my journal. It’s anything I want and need it to be. Everybody should have one. It could also be a professional page, so when people Google you it’s the first result they see, which is smart.
• The Expertise Blog – I’m currently working on putting together a social work blog and it’s gonna be my flagship blog. It’s the only subject that I could be sworn in the court of law as an expert witness. If you want to win the blogging game, you must launch an expertise blog, AKA the thing you do for your day job. It’s the only thing you are an expert in. Everything else is a hobby. Most of us, including me, are resistant to launching an expertise blog because we find out day jobs boring and we would much rather launch a blog about something exciting. Ignore that impulse. Your blog for excitement can be launched after your massive blogging success. Focus on strengths, rather than interests.
• Nerd Hobby Blog – My nerd hobby is Florida history. I was obsessed with it for about five years and I’m still interested in it. During my obsession period I collected public domain articles on the subject that aren’t anywhere on the internet. I have over 70 articles. I decided I’m going to publish them all. I don’t expect this blog to do big numbers, but 95% of the hard work is already done and I’m sitting on 70+ articles. Might as well publish them and put them to work reaching my blogging goals. What nerd hobby do you have?
• The Review Blog – Get approved for the Amazon Affiliates Program (easy) and do a review of everything that’s in your house and use the Amazon affiliate links to link to the products. Commissions are small, usually 2 – 3% but this is an incredibly easy way to jump start earning online money. You must do blog + YouTube channel for this to work. Don’t spend a dime on video equipment. Just use your phone or computer to make the videos and use a simple, free video editor (or none at all and just upload the video raw, that’s fine for our purposes). Drop the Amazon affiliate link in the video description: “and if you are interested in buying this coffee maker, I left my Amazon affiliate link, which provides me with a small commission, down in the video description.” Write up a review on the blog and drop the Amazon affiliate link a few times, also link up the YouTube video (good for SEO). Once you run out of stuff in your house to review, try to gain enough YouTube followers (about 1,000 minimum, more to be safe) and apply for the Amazon Influencer program. That way companies will send you free products to review.
• The Review Blogs+ – In various places on my blog when I talk about launching 20, 30, or 50 blogs, review blogs are what I’m talking about. Once you get the above review blog moving, you’ll be able to approach harder-to-get-approved-for affiliate programs that have much higher commission rates, often in the 20 – 30% range, some programs give 50% commissions. But they are much more picky as to who they work with. At this point, you’ll be able to point to your great Amazon Affiliate Review blog and YouTube channel and tell them you know what you are doing, you’re gonna launch a new blog focused in their niche, and you would be an asset in promoting and protecting their brand. Also, these types of blogs are easiest to flip. A review blog making $2,000 per month will sell, on the low end, for around $30,000.

Method 2: Launch A YouTube Channel In Conjunction With Your Blogs

We touched on the importance of a YouTube channel above, so we aren’t going to spend a long time discussing this. First, our goal isn’t to become YouTube stars. Nobody reading this blog wants to be on YouTube. Everybody here wants to make a living writing. However, YouTube MUST be part of the plan because there is an enormous, engaged audience on YouTube that will come to your blogs and/or purchase your books if you are on YouTube.

Every single article you write should be supported by a YouTube video. Even if it’s just “Hey guys, let’s take a look at the latest article on my blog, and to read the article directly just click the link in the description. Okay, here we go…” Not every article needs a YouTube video embed though. I’d only use that regularly for review blogs. But there are many times it will make sense to embed a YouTube video. Here’s why: a large part of getting ranked high in Google is time on page. If a reader stops to watch a 4 minute video on your blog page, that dramatically increases time on page and signals Google to increase the page ranking.

The main lesson I want you to take away is this: YouTube is a powerful ally in achieving your writing goals.

Method 3: Blogging On Third Party Platforms

In my social work career, I see a common scam, which is legal, and I have had to help people in this terrible situation. It’s trailer parks.

An individual of modest means will buy a manufactured home in a trailer park because it’s cheap, comparatively, to traditional houses. However, they do not own the land underneath the house. They have to rent that from the trailer park. Needless to say, rent on the land goes up, up, up until the tenant cannot pay. Then the trailer park evicts the tenant, confiscates the house, and sells it to the next person. Turning a tidy profit. That’s literally the business model.

Third party platforms are the trailer parks of the blogging world. I do not like them and I do not recommend to build your blogging house on their land. However, there are some advantages to dabbling with them.

Below is my shortlist of third party blogging platforms that can help you reach your goal of full time writing, if used wisely.

• Medium – The platform most writers think of when thinking of third party platforms. All their top writers left and everybody said don’t write on Medium. I’m dumb so I thought it was an opportunity to fill a void, I went there, messed around, and found out. I rage deleted my entire account out of frustration (a story for another time). Anyway, two things: 1.) Google loves Medium articles 2.) Medium has a built-in audience. If you so choose to get on Medium, use it as a way to build an audience and move them to your blog. Don’t get fooled like I did and sign up for their “make money writing” program, just use it as an audience building tool.
• NewsBreak – Another trailer park blogging platform. I have not personally written for NewsBreak, it’s on my to-do list to try out. It’s focused on writing news-style stories for your local area. I hear this same situation repeatedly: writer works really hard, builds an audience, starts getting decent payouts in the thousands for several months, and then payouts go to zero and writer cannot bounce back. I think the platform tries to hook in writers, pays them decently, and then stops paying them in the hopes the writer will keep writing for free, thinking thousands of dollars per month again is right around the corner, but it isn’t. Here’s the play: work hard on the platform, build a following, get paid, and when pay heads to zero move your audience to the blog, and then abandon NewsBreak because they will not pay you another dime ever again for your writing. It’s a cash grab and an audience grab. No need to be loyal to platforms trying to play writers, I say play them instead.
• Quora – Being on Quora has been an interesting experience for me, I’m not entirely sure what my goal is over there. They claim to have a revenue-share program, but my understanding is new invites for the program haven’t gone out in years and the top people are only making pocket change. It’s not good for link-building, that will get you an instant ban. Hard to build a following too. But for some reason I keep going back. I think it’s because I like the Q&A format. There are an endless amount of questions to answer, which gives me tons of ideas for content on my blogs–I think that’s why I keep coming back. It’s helps me build content ideas. I say dabble in it, but it won’t be a cornerstone in your writing efforts.
• X – I’m not sure what to think of X. It has audience, revenue share, is primarily a text platform, and is pushing hard to grow their articles function. Seems like they check all the boxes for what a blogger would want. But, it’s chaotic and seems to have a Kings and Peasants situation, meaning, in my opinion, it appears certain accounts are chosen to have massive reach (and chosen to collect all the rewards) while the vast majority of accounts are relegated to posting into the void and can only be seen by being lowly “reply guys.” Who knows, maybe I’m wrong. I experimented with an anonymous account (recommended for starting on X, there are countless trolls whose only goal is to get you to reply in anger, and you will regret if your real name is attached to one of your angry replies; only use your real name once you get a handle on the platform) and learned enough to conclude it’s a platform I need to build on, icky as it may be.
• Threads – X for people who don’t want to be on X.
• LinkedIn – As noted about, I believe everybody should have an “Expertise Blog” which is based on your profession. For your expertise blog, LinkedIn must be part of the growth plan. LinkedIn is social media networking for professionals. You can make connections with others, build an audience, and write articles that can get massive reach. This is a no-brainer for when you launch your professional-based blog.

Method 4: Substack Newsletters

For a long time the internet game was “get eyeballs by any means necessary” to get ad revenue. This led to an internet that was nearly unusable. How was this problem solved? Subscriptions: Netflix, Spotify, Kindle Unlimited, and now–Substack.

Yes, this is a third party platform which includes the dangers mentioned above, but it deserves it’s own entry on our list. Briefly, readers sign up for your Substack Newsletter for a fee and your writings get sent directly to their inbox.

Per their advertising materials at least, you own the email list and can take it with your wherever you go. The writers, freed of ad networks, SEO, and the other trappings of the for free internet, write purely for humans and, the popular writers at least, write very well and very thoughtful pieces with very useful information.

I believe, for us, this is eventually going to be a cornerstone in our blogging efforts. I have a number of writing projects to get off of the ground before turning to Substack, but it’s certainly part of the plan for my blogging future. The usual subjects do well there–politics, health, and wealth. The odds of me writing a newsletter on politics is exactly zero percent, but I have a couple other ideas that I believe will work well on the platform. The key is to make sure it is a subject your target audience will be willing to pay for and is able to pay for.

Other newsletter options include Ghost, Behiive, and Patreon.

Method 5: Kindle eBooks

If you are reading this blog you already know about Kindle eBooks, and while the platform has been around for a while now, it’s still a powerhouse for writers. Many writers who have taken the platform seriously (churning out books quickly and promoting them) are making a full time living on this platform alone.

Strategic writers continue to make $10,000+ per month on the platform publishing romance novels, mystery novels, niche non-fiction books (e.g. Guide To Get Rid Of Acne), and coloring books.

Below is my short list of ebook types that work well in generating income on the Kindle platform.

• Romance Novels – Romance is the top-selling book category on Amazon, bringing in billions (billions with a “B”) of revenue per year. Many independent, self-published writers have made a VERY good full-time living churning out romance novels, sometimes as many as two a month. Keep the novels short–around 200 pages, have an attractive cover, and make sure they read fast. Romance readers cannot get enough, it’s not unusual a for a romance reader to read a book a day.
• Mysteries / Thrillers – Mysteries and Thrillers move A LOT of books too, again there is a VERY dedicated fanbase to the genre (including yours truly). Not unusual for mystery novel aficionados to read anywhere from a book a week to a book a day. The novel I’m working on falls into this category. Make sure: cool cover, reoccurring series, 200 – 300 pages, reads fast.
• Niche Non-Fiction – Books that solve very specific problems do well (Guide To Get Rid Of Acne). Self-help books are big that cover a very specific problem. People are searching on Amazon for stuff like “Kindle book how to be assertive.” Almost 10 years ago I wrote a guidebook for my local amusement park and, with zero marketing, sold several copies per month for years. I keep thinking I need to update that book and actually promote it with a proper blog and run some ads on Amazon to it. With what I know now I could probably be earning $200 a month from that book alone. I guess I’ll put the project on my to-do list!
• Coloring Books – While getting saturated, there still more juice to squeeze out of this lemon, in my opinion. Basically, people are using AI tech to quickly make coloring books and putting them on Amazon. Put all your coloring sheets in a PDF, upload to Amazon, and Amazon has a program where if anybody orders your coloring book they will print it out for you in a nice professional-looking physical coloring book and ship it to the customer. All you have to do is upload a PDF. Obviously, there is an ENTIRE world of strategy to this, but it’s an option where many have found success.

If you use the Kindle Unlimited program for your ebook, you are limited to the Amazon platform. But if you use Amazon without Unlimited enrollment, you can publish your ebook on multiple platforms–including Barnes and Nobles, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books. While 80 – 90% of your sales will come from Amazon, don’t sleep on these other platforms.

Method 6: Traditionally Published Books

While us in the blogging world love to scoff at traditional publishing houses and talk about how the royalties suck compared to Amazon, be honest–all of us would publish a book in a heartbeat with one of the big traditional book publishers for free and throw in a song and a dance too if they asked.

Every single one of us dreams about being a New York Times Bestselling Author, even if we tell others the New York Times is stupid, fake news, stupid gatekeepers, lame legacy media, dinosaurs, etc. All of us would be thrilled to see our names on that list and would make sure everybody in the world knew about it, “Hi, nice to meet you, my name is Austin James New York Times Bestselling Author.”

This is my goal and, be honest, it’s your goal too. It’s okay, though. You don’t need to tell anybody. Part of the reason I launched this blog under my name, rather than something like onlinewriting.blog is to have an author website ready to go that is already deeply intertwined in the interwebs when it’s time to promote my future NYT bestselling book. The odds of a bestseller increase dramatically if the author has a solid, wide platform. You better believe every single email list for all of my various blogs and every single social media channel will be promoting my future book. Start building your platform now.

Method 7: Copywriting

Don’t go into copywriting with the thought of “I’m gonna get clients to write for!” Anybody telling you that is still a viable path has a course to sell you. All those clients are already turning to AI because AI copy is pretty decent and it’s free.

Rather, the future of viable copywriting is knowing how to do it well yourself, training an AI model to write copy the way you like, tweaking it, and then building websites and landing pages around products and services you are promoting via affiliate links. You are your own copywriting client. That’s the play.

To do this well, you’ll have to learn SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and how to build excellent landing pages. All of this is very possible for somebody to learn from scratch.

Method 8: Old Fashioned Journalism

Yes, there are still newspapers, magazines, and websites that need old-fashioned journalists and staff writers to write articles. Usually, when reading an article like “How To Make A Living Writing Words” we think of being self-employed.

However, there are options to be employed and write words for a living, and many of these types of jobs allow remote work, allowing the type of independence and freedom you are dreaming about, plus you’ll get health benefits and a 401k to boot! Sounds like a win to me!

The great benefit to this is many journalists and staff writers do well with their writing side hustles–Substack is currently a popular option. Also, imagine working for a large newspaper like the Tampa Bay Times and being able to use that platform to promote your new book. There’s a reason so many journalists are also bestselling NYT authors!

Method 9: Freelance / Ghostwriting

I guess this is an option, but I don’t like it. I want to be a writer, not somebody always scrounging around looking for low-paying writing gigs. And if I’m gonna write a book, I’m putting my name on the cover–somebody would have to pay me A LOT of money to put their name on it instead.

Again, if somebody is telling you this is an awesome path to writing riches, they got a course to sell you.

Best Strategy To Obtain Full-Time Writing Status Is To Combine 2-3 Options

As always, it’s possible to make a living writing words from only one of the above options, but most likely you’ll need 2-3.

Examples:

• Blog + YouTube + Kindle eBook
• Traditional Journalist + Traditional Book Deal
• Niche Review Blogs + Copywriting
• X + LinkedIn + Substack
• LinkedIn + Freelance + How-To eBook

Remember the cringe buzzword synergy?  It was right up there with “leverage core competencies.” Anyway, what we are doing here is synergy. Pick 2-3 of the above methods and synergize them for success!

I recommend to build out your methods one at a time, don’t build all at once because then nothing will get done. It will require suffering to build a successful full-time writing platform, don’t quit. Once you get to the point where you feel like you can maintain method 1, then start to build out method 2, etc.

Drop a comment below if you have any insights on how to make powerful and effective combinations for writing success. I’m all ears!

Until next time, blog on, friend, blog on.