If you’re looking to get started with ghost writing for other people over the Internet, you need to know the different writing options are that are available for you. You need to know what types of content you can provide.
You should off by writing standard types of content. Don’t attempt anything complicated like sales copy.
When you’re thinking about standard content, there are three good types you should be looking at. These are: (1) internet articles, (2) blog posts, and (3) more formal reports which tend to be anywhere from a few pages up to several hundred pages in length.
The first option you have when ghost writing for others is to produce articles for them. Now the accepted definition of an article on the internet is somewhere around 500 words long. This could however vary. That means you could be looking anywhere from 400 words up to say 1000 words and this qualifies as an article.
An article isn’t a long piece of work, it’s just enough to give a sense of or an introduction to a particular topic. You’re picking a fairly precise topic and talking about it, but not in a great deal of depth. And articles are the real basis on which the one World Wide Web operates. They’re the content on which you see on every site.
If you can get yourself into pattern of writing 500 word articles with maybe 8 to 10 paragraphs in there covering a few relevant points with a good introduction and conclusion to go with them you’ve picked up one of the main internet writing work. You need to master this to become a content writer.
The second type of writing work you might be considering if writing blog posts. Now traditionally blog posts tend to be shorter than articles. A typical length for a blog post might be 250 words. Of course, this can vary depending on the particular assignment that you’re working on. Some people like long content on their blog, so they’re really publishing articles.
You do need to talk carefully to the person that you’re writing the blog post for. My finding is that most sites just like to have a blog where the content is updated regularly. It may well be that two blog posts appear on the particular site every day and these need to be kept 200 to 300 words.
A good way to look at blog posts is to think of them as single use items. You may base these around things that are covered in the media on the particular day you’re writing them. If you can get into the habit of writing short 200 to 300 word blog posts which can be used as is necessary, you’ll have a good potential market there for your services.
The final type of writing work you need to think about are writing reports. Report will vary depending on the length of it. You might be writing something like a 5 page report in which case by the time you have a table of contents, a disclaimer, or a title page. It will relieve you a great deal of stuff so your whole report the meat and bones of it may really be just 1,000 words in length.
A report could also be much longer. A report may be printed in a physical format or published online in an eBook. A 50 page version could also be appropriate if that’s what your client wants. You need to have more of a flow of continuity to a report than you would an article because you’re taking a subject and developing it over a number of chapters. You want to keep the reader involved and interested all the way through.
There’s often a lot of research involved in writing a report and that’s why you can charge a premium for report writing. That’s because of the need to develop that flow and writing style throughout. This is very different to an article which you can often put together in a short time period. Reports can be a very lucrative business to get into if you have the talent to write for them.
When you’re looking to get going as a writer you don’t need to consign yourself to solely be writing articles there are different types of content you can write. And the ones I would suggest you look at are the articles themselves around 500 words in length, shorter and more frequent blog posts of around 250 words in length. Finally you may decide to specialize in longer reports which can command a premium by being anywhere from 5 to 50 pages in length.
If you can work out which of these options is best for you, you’ll soon be able to get your ghost writing business going. You’ll be able to develop your niche and show you have real expertise in the area that you’re writing about.