How I Made $11,000 From Writing in 30 Days And what it took to get there

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I never could have imagined that I would be able to make money from writing online as a writer. I didn’t have any special skill or gift, and there was no one I could learn from. So how did this happen?

I’ve made more than $11,000 in the last month from writing. After doing an audit of my expenses for that time period, I realized: “Holy shit — there’s $11000+ coming in my bank from just one source!”

So here’s the deal: If I am able to make money from writing online, then you can do this too. The reason for this article is that the most common queries I still get are:

1. How do I get started?
2. How does typing words actually make money?

I’m going to share with you my secrets for how I was able to do this successfully, despite all my dreams of Ferraris and selfies (with Richard Branson).

Ready? Let’s go.

From 2014–2017

Not a single dollar was made from blogging during these years.

I clearly want to mention that Starting was a slow burn for me. However, if you avoid some pitfalls that I fell into when I first started writing, your work will improve more quickly than mine did.

The pitfalls in Writing Career:

• Don’t start your own blog, Building your own blog will cost you time and money, but nobody is going to find it.
• Write wherever you can in starting (Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram)
• Do not ask for help from other writers until you have completed a significant number of your own writing projects.
• Pitch major publications once you have found your lane, not in the first week of starting
• Don’t take too long to pitch major publications, though
• Do not spend a dollar on logos, paying to boost articles, or portrait photos

By Eliminating these mistakes, and you’ll have more success faster than I did.

Getting Started

I’ve made this process so simple that anyone can do it. You can also read our 8 Habits That Will Make You Successful At Anything.

Pick two topics

The two I chose were entrepreneurship and personal development. Write about these two topics and nothing else.

Make sure they are topics you know something about or at least have enough passion to research without getting bored.

Schedule the writing weekly

I picked Saturday at the beginning because it was the only day I was work free. The point is Pick the day that you know you’ll have time to deliver your best. Set it in your calendar as a recurring event.

Bonus tip: For added accountability, make a pact with a friend that if you miss setting aside time to write on Saturday, you will pay him or her $100. It will be a challenge for you to compete with yourself. (This idea came from when I had a personal trainer and often couldn’t be assed going to the gym, but the fear of him being upset, and the loss of $35 due to cancellation, was enough to get my skinny little ass to the gym and pump those weights.)

Do not think about money

You can’t expect to make a living from writing until you have spent some time honing your craft.

You could make a few dollars on sites like Fiver, but the work would likely be so uninspiring that it might cause you to give up. Writing for $20 an article is fine, but to make real money you need a high-quality writing portfolio.

It is a good mindset to have, especially when you are just starting out as a writer, to write off at least the first year. Start by doing it for free because that will help you learn more about whether this is something that truly interests you or not and if it doesn’t seem like fun, then there’s no point in continuing with your writing career.

Try not to overdo it

Right now I could write every day, but instead of doing it consistently, I deliberately don’t. When you first begin something, it can be both exciting and a little overwhelming. But Overdoing it leads to you feeling as though you have run out of ideas.

For example, I could write a novel every day. But if I did that, I would have nothing left to say. Instead, I take breaks from writing and then return to it refreshed and ready to go.

Here is what took me five years to understand:

• It is essential to pay attention to the world around you and what people do.
• An everyday life spent away from writing is the wellspring of a writer’s ideas.
• Taking the same route to work each morning and evening gives you lots of material for your writing.

If all you do is write, without removing yourself from your desk and engaging with people on a day-to-day basis, the realness of what’s going on in your life will be missing.

Use someone else’s platform

I advised you not to start with your own website for a very good reason.

Making your own website will force you to piss fart around choosing site’s templates, engaging with web developers, paying for hosting, endlessly screwing around with column widths and a whole bunch of other BS that won’t make you $11,000 per month later on.

Start with someone else’s platform.

I started writing on my freind’s WordPress blog. He did all the things I don’t have time for, like SEO and marketing, so that I could focus on writing.

One way to begin is by using a social media platform. The obvious choice is Medium, but other options that people tend to overlook include:

• LinkedIn articles
• Long-form copy on Instagram next to an image
• Short posts on Twitter
• This one is really crazy: you could write a long-form article as a comment on someone’s post who has a big audience (someone like Gary Vaynerchuk)

That last point is very left-of-center, But I have seen people become successful writers. Practice the art by finding new ways that work for you. I’ve seen people create interesting pieces of writing by being inventive and trying out different kinds of styles.

The goal is to find a good place where you can write without loosing your focus and hope. Where you can say something useful, inspiring, or entertaining consistently for wider audience.

Through that process, you find what works and what doesn’t, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a small audience soon.

Spend a Stupid Amount of Time Writing in the Beginning

I wasted so much time in the beginning promoting my work to an audience that hadn’t earned it.

Whether you are just beginning or have been writing for a long time, you need to find your niche, develop your voice and work on putting sentences together in a unique way.

There is no substitute for doing the writing itself. If I could go back in time the way Marty McFly did in Back To The Future and do one thing differently, it would be to stop being distracted by bullshit and just do the writing.

We avoid doing the writing because it’s always harder than we expect. But Doing the writing, though, is what made me the $11,000 in 30 days — not anything else.

Format Your Work Like a Pro

My early writing was riddled with run-on sentences and comma splices, making it impossible to follow the flow of ideas even if you had 20/20 vision.

Use generous amounts of white space between your sentences. Good writing deserves good images, so take the time to find high-quality images that match your article.

Remember, an image you choose is just as much a statement as the words themselves. Use bold and italics to emphasize important ideas, but don’t overdo it. A little goes a long way.

If I were to do it over, I would use bigger and more colorful images that attract attention. I would have used more bolding, images, and other formatting tools to break things up. Also taken off my safety pants.

Using these tools is all about balance. You can also overdo it with them, which is just as bad (if not worse) than not using the tools at all.

If you are feeling lazy and don’t want to format your own work, watch the way experienced writers have formatted their work.

Making MONEY from Writing

Once you have established yourself as a writer, it becomes easier to earn money from your work. But so many of these writers hide their profits in the dark pockets of their cloaks, hoping you will pay them for the secret of how they make money writing.

Here is how you can make money from writing:

A paid column

If you write long enough, people will start to notice. Large publications pay good writers to publish exclusive articles on their website. That’s how many bloggers make a living and make money online.

Guest blogging will help you a lot to share your writing skills with others. We are also a leading guest blogging platform working to provide an easy and safe environment for writers.

Some pay per article and others pay per month. However, I know a few writers that are paid to write on a regular basis (retainer). If you want to share your free work to get some extra exposure and want to earn money from writing then you can start guest post submission on Unstoppable Domains.

Money from Medium

Medium’s partner program pays writers based on the number of people who engage with their articles. This includes people who read, share and comment on the article. The more engagement you get, the more money you make from writing.

You can join the partner program here: https://medium.com/partners

This means that you can make money from writing online by simply publishing articles on Medium. As of now, they only pay when people read your article and share it with their network (via email or social media).

Although it might only be a few dollars at first, the most important thing is that Even only getting $10 a month from Medium makes you a paid writer.

Ghostwriting

A ghostwriter writes a piece of copy that is published in another person’s name.

This is one of the most valuable secrets in the writing world, but it’s so well-kept that you can’t find out about it by searching online. Big names want to make sure they hide this secret from everyone else. they don’t want anyone else using their techniques and getting ahead of them.

All those CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders and influencers hire ghostwriters to write books or content for them. If you are willing to write without receiving credit and for a small amount of money, this is one way an experienced writer can make some easy ongoing cash.

These opportunities will come to you directly, but if you don’t see them, feel free to send a direct message on platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram.

Don’t contact potential clients with a sales pitch. Instead, send them a link to your work and tell them “I can do this for you.”

Consulting

Writing is one of the biggest headaches for businesses. Most companies have to do it themselves and cannot afford the time or talent required.

Without too much hard work, if you write where the eyeballs are, then businesses will come to you asking for help. You can consult to them by helping them generating good content or suggesting them some good content writers, mapping out content, and inspiring them to keep going.

At the point when I get these offers straightforwardly, I make an honest effort to utilize habits. Expressing something like “I have a couple of key articles (give joins) about how I make it happen and I likewise parttime counseling for the people who need something else. What choice appears to be legit for you?”

It’s soft, polite, non-egotistical and most of all, helpful. Copy and paste the text above if you are lost and don’t know how to turn inquiries into consulting.

One-to-one coaching

Writing helps you express your thoughts and feelings, but it can also help you to educate other people.

Some people are more than willing to learn from what you have written and that is great.

Other people want to learn from you and not just receive your advice. They believe in you enough to let themselves be coached by you.

The job of a coach is not limited to people with certain qualifications. Anyone can do it by writing or teaching others how to write well.

My first few clients were not charged for my services, so that I could gain the experience. I figure out how best to establish a fee structure and how to make money from writing.

Here is my coaching structure ended up looking like this:

• I always offer a free consultation, to ensure that I am the right match for my client and vice versa.
• Ten-week chunks of coaching paid upfront via PayPal
• A specific area to cover each week
• One to two homework tasks for the client every week
• A final assessment at the end of ten weeks
• A soft offer to continue after ten weeks if it made sense (sometimes it didn’t)

Speaking at events for a fee

When you develop a voice, people again want you to go that extra step and help their teams — sports teams, leadership teams, business teams, not-for-profit teams — with your knowledge and experience.

The price range for this varies greatly and a lot of it comes down to how good you are at negotiating. I’m going to be completely transparent and say that I have been offered anywhere from $5000-$10,000 for up to sixty minutes of speaking.

Someone I know gets $20,000-$40,000 for one hour, plus business class flights and five-star accommodation. There is another dude I know who is just starting out and gets $500 a talk.

The price range is endless but it’s another way to make money from writing.

An online course

I launched a course last month, but it flopped and I wrote about why. However, even though you can make good money helping beginners in your field of expertise, that doesn’t guarantee success every time.

The problem with online courses is that you need a lot of people to buy them. This can be difficult, especially if no one knows who you are and what your course is about.

I think it’s best to start small and build up your reputation before launching a big course. For example, I’m going to launch another course soon but it will only be $10 so that there is less risk involved.

Like with most of the advice in this article, don’t overdo it, okay? If you love cricket then you would love to know How to Earn Money with Cricket Fantasy Apps?

YouTube ads

Many writers also become vloggers. they use videos as another way to express themselves. If you want to get really creative with your writing, embedding your own videos in it can be a great tool for connecting with an audience.

Creating a YouTube channel that focuses on an obscure or narrowly-defined niche tends to be more successful than has having one with a broader focus. If you produce a lot of short videos over the course of a year, you can make money from them by including advertisements in your video clips.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to sell you a dream. It’s important for you know that YouTube is one of the most difficult professions in which to succeed because it’s been around so long.

Although getting views is not easy, you need to be dedicated if you want your videos to succeed.

Well-Paid Writers Have Lots of the Following

One more bit of advice is to remember that soft skills are just as important as technical ones.

• Honesty
• Humility
• Kindness

This is the work that takes you from earning $1000 per month, which is decent but not great, to earning $11000. No one wants  to read an author who thinks their writing stinks (and so does everyone else).

Be yourself in all its glory because now you know the tricks to make money from writing online.

That’s How to Make $11,000 in 30 Days

Now, is it worth asking yourself whether you would like to do the same — because I totally think so.

If a normal middle class guy from India with no grammar or spelling skills can make $11,000 in 30 days, then you can too. I earned in Dollars because I have to many USA and western clients as well as Indian clients.

Remember that the money will come naturally if you keep helping people.