If you’ve been doing writing work for any length of time or if you’re looking to get into it then you’ll know that the typical 500 word article doesn’t pay very well. It’s common to see rates of $5 for 500 word articles out there.
You have to write an awful lot of these 500 word articles to make a good living from article writing.
If you can find alternatives that pay better than articles then this can be a lucrative to you and your business.
There are many such things you can write. You may concentrate on press releases. You may want to write short reports. You may want to get into sales copy.
All of these can be a much better bet than articles for making fast money on the internet.
So what, of the first option of these three. What is a press release?
It’s very simple, a press release is a sensitive release of news information which your buyer would want to be picked up to go on the internet or to be reported on as the media as a whole. So if your client has just developed a new service they might want to release a press item about it in order to tell people that it’s there. And if they can get a journalist interest in interviewing them then that can bring a lot of potential business the way of the company that you’re writing for. And so being able to write press releases can be lucrative because they do tend to have an additional advantage over articles. Not only do they provide content, because press releases exist as content the same way that articles do for the search engines. They can also give that media expertise. The difficulty of press releases is they tend to have a very standard format that not many people know how to write. If you can master that format you can charge a much higher rate for a press release than you would for writing an article. Even though you’ll soon find that the time you take to write a press release isn’t that much more than writing content articles. It’s a good bet if you’re looking to increase the amount of money you make online.
The second thing you can look at is writing reports.
Now a good report is more than just a collection of shorter articles. If you’re writing a 5,000 word report it’s not just the equivalent of ten 500 word articles. A report is going to be split up into sections and they need to have some sort of flow between them. This means that your report tells a story for the reader. It teaches them how to do a particular skill from start to finish. Because you’re writing something with that flow to it the amount that you can charge for a report is much higher than content articles. A lot of it is down to the research. You can’t reuse a lot of the same points in a different order as you may do over a sequence of articles. By getting into report writing you can charge a premium price and reports tend to have larger perceived value. This is definitely one thing to look at when you want something that pays better than writing articles.
The final thing you should be looking at is sales letters.
Writing quality sales copy is very much an art rather than just the case of putting words down on paper. A standard sales letter might be advertising some kind of new report. It might be advertising some kind of service. But the most important thing is it will encourage people to buy that report and to do that you have to know the art of sales copy. It doesn’t take a fairly standard form as a self-help with a headline, then there’s some form of story and some form of proof about why the particular item being advertised will work for the reader. Then more detail about what the offer itself is going to be about. What are they getting for their money and what are the benefits of buying this. Then some form of guarantee to show them their money isn’t at risk by buying this. And finally an option to purchase. You need to know exactly what elements to put in the right order. You need to know what type of power words to use to draw the maximum empathy from the reader and encourage them to buy now.
If you can master sales report writing it can be very lucrative. The best sales letter writers negotiate a percentage fee rather than just working for a fixed rate. But if you’re working on a fixed rate then there’s no reason you can’t charge 500 dollars or more for a sales letter. So it’s defiantly something to learn about and to read about in books n and to practice if you’re looking to get into the higher end of the content writing market.
There’s certainly no reason why you need to sit down and write articles for people that are as low a rate at $5 an article. You can use your skills to write in less competitive areas each of which pay more than articles and which if you take the time to master the skills need not be that much more challenging to write for than articles are.
Take some time and go ahead and look at what a press release is, how to write a short report, and most importantly how to get into writing sales copy. Soon you’ll find that you’re doing much better paying work than you might have otherwise thought possible.