SNM004: Turn Writing into Dollars

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getting paid to write from the comfort of your own home. Today's episode is brought to you by writing jobs when you want to get paid for the words you write. The best place to turn Thio and the place I always go is writing jobs to find out what they have available today to get you paid. This week, go to serve. No master dot com Backslash Writing jobs Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. One of the main ways that I drive income into my business is by writing. Writing happens to be my passion, something I love to do, and it's one of my favorite ways to express myself. Just this morning I wrote 5000 words in a book for a project. I'm doing for one of my clients, and I am involved in a myriad of difference riding projects. I write books for myself. I put books on Amazon just like my books serving a master, which is on Amazon. Now that's one type of project Ideo. I also write books and put out books under pen names. I have books in romance category of books about parenting. Have books about personal development, have a lot of my own stuff. But I run through Amazon a kind of sell books that way. They also books that I run through publishers and direct response marketing, and then I ghost right for different types of projects. I'm very involved in all the different ways you can make money from writing, and I want to show you how you can develop the same skill and make money the same way. The Internet is driven by the need for content, Any website you like. Think about any of the blog's you go to Web sites, read news websites. They need new content every day. Nobody wants to read yesterday's news, The news website that I go to They have new stories every couple of hours, so That means I come back every couple of hours when you have a Web site that has a new block post once week. Well, people only visit once a week. It has a new block post every day. Their customers will visit once a day. But if they have several throughout the day with and people keep coming back so you can turn one visit a week in tow. Seven visits week or 21 or 30 visits week you could really increase your traffic numbers, which massively increases your profitability. So as much as websites are driven by the desire to bring in new visitors, they also want their existing visitors come back more and more The way Google ranks websites, newness is very important. New content is very important. When a website is static, when there's no new information, no new block post, no new data, nothing's changing. Well, then it starts to decay and its rankings can often drop, so they'll start to see less and less new traffic as well. So for these two main reasons, the fact that you need lots of new content to get new traffic and they need lots of new content to get repeat traffic. That's why people who own websites are always hiring more and more writers and people, right block posts. And in fact, a going rate right now for writing a blood post is pretty good. You get paid 30 to $35 for a single block boast. And when you learn some of the writing methods that I'm gonna share with you throughout this course and I talked about that my books on my website as well. Well, then you could write very quickly. You can write one of those block posts in 30 minutes. You don't need any specialized training. You don't need to be super smart. You don't even actually have to know to spell very well, because these days, word or any word processing software will auto correct most of your spelling mistakes and will really help you with that stuff. So we have self software technology to really help make up for those types of things, and as you get into writing, you'll get better once it becomes your craft. Once you realize you could make $70 an hour riding block posts, we'll start to take this very seriously, So let's say your goal. You've established your goal right now you wanna make an extra $1000 a month for every three block post to right, you get $100. That means you need to write 30 block posts a month. It's one a day you write one block post a day for someone else, and you've hit your financial goal. That's how we can quickly hit our first goals by realizing the power of ghost writing. Now there are certain service is you can go through where you kind of have a middleman, and in these notes for this episode, I'll provide you with tons of links below. But their service is where they're kind of in the middle and they give you jobs and you get paid per article. The challenge with working with one of those is that you lose partier commission. So instead of getting something around four cents a word, you'll get around two cents a word. It cuts your paycheck in half. So now for that same block post, you might get 15 or $17 so you do have to do more work. That way, you can take advantage of that type of work toe. Build up your portfolio, though, so if you have no idea how to get clients you've never in your article. Funding was before. You can start off working for those service is and there's a couple of them that called text right, and I write, I forget all the names because they're kind of changing. There's a couple that around for a few years. What you do is start working for them. Just you're getting study work, and once you've written 10 or 20 articles, you saved copies of those articles. Then when you approach a client directly, or someone who posted an ad looking for someone to write for them, you can see here's examples of what I've written before. So that way, instead of just writing portfolio for no reason, you've actually been paid to create your portfolio. It's very important to start off with a portfolio because otherwise you'll never get any work. No one's gonna hire you as a hammer great writer, cause she's nothing written. No, I haven't written anything it right Sometimes people I talked to people about jobs. I was recent talking to someone actually about a copy writing job. I said, Hey, I know someone's looking for a full time copywriter and they're willing to pay the kind of money that you're looking for. I asked this friend of mine when somebody been worrying whether said how much money you want to make per month and he told me his number. He was This is my goal And I said, Fine, I talked to my other friend. Is it Hey, if you're looking for a full time cop writer, this is a salary of some someone I know is looking for. And then I said, I need to see your best work. What's your portfolio? And unfortunately, we're fully wasn't really assembled. You hasn't put it together properly where it's just a zip file of like 45 different sales letters is written with numbers and stuff, so I'm still going to try and connect him with the job. But the possibility of kind of it working out it's kind of gone down a little bit, and that's what happens when you don't have a portfolio tight. So I really recommend we have examples that you can show people because if someone says to me, Hey, I see example of your writing, I say, What do you want to see? You want to see something? I've written about health. You want to do something I've written about dating for men dating for women, something I've written about, Oh, prepping I've written about right people. There's a lot of stuff like Right wing and the world preparation. I've written e mails, blogged posts and some sales materials in that industry. So whatever industry someone's from, that's what they want to see, right. If if someone says to me, Hey, I need someone to write Ah, a couple of block posts about long distance dating. I go great. Here's an example of me writing a review of the new iPad. It doesn't make any sense. Just cause you could write about one thing doesn't mean cried about something else. So the great thing about taking these low paying jobs to start off is that you'll get the most random of projects. So we'll give you a wide spectrum of industries and topics to write about, and we'll start to expand you and you'll start to write about things that you have written about before. Now, as you build up a little bit of portfolio. Then you could start posting ads on different websites. There's a couple of AH forums and different Web sites where people just post ads for content writers, and you can start off again with a lower price point. Okay, so maybe working for service, you're getting two cents of words you offer say, Hey, I'll do a discount and all right for three cents a word. You hire me through someone else. It's four cents a word, but now you get a discount. Just the fact that you're a native English speaker means that you'll get offered a higher number whenever I get an article that was written by someone who's second. Language is English. I could always kind of tell so she, because I taught English for a very long time. I taught English as a foreign language around the world. I can kind of feel when someone making mistakes for idioms or some of their sentences have a little bit of a weird structure, and I noticed those mistakes and those affect the value of the article. So just by being a native English speaker, the mount you could charge goes up now. If you graduated high school, you can add that high school graduate. Okay, that increases your value because you're a native English speaker and you graduate high school. If you went to college and graduated high school, you have a graduate degree. If you have any experience, all of those things you can add to your portfolio add to your job offers. And people say, Oh, this person's got these experiences. That's why the price is a little bit higher. You know, if you've written article that appeared in The New York Times or The Huffington Post or you wrote a best selling book within your price goes up. That's why my prices are so high. So you start out at the bottom of the hill but doesn't take you that long to climb up. You post these as an offer review copies offer discount copies, and you'll start to get testimonials. Now, when you've written articles for someone for review copies or discount copies to start to build up your reputation, you can say, Hey, I'll give you a discounter of you copy. You have to leave an honest review, and so what you're doing is giving them a discount in exchange for something that's worth more to you. Every single review of one of my Amazon books is worth gold. Okay, a single five star review from someone who's actually read one of my books is worth more than 50 sales. To me, it's so much more valuable to me because it drives more sales. It helps to build my business. It helps my reputation a single positive. You can lead to 20 or 30 more sales easily, easily, and then you have tons and tons of reviews. They start to build on each other. When I see a book on Amazon that has two or three reviews, I almost never even look at it. I go. Both of his parents and his best friend left a review, right. That's that's how you get your three people. So when we see really low numbers, we don't trust them. We need to see numbers above a certain tipping point. So using some of the websites that I share with you in the show notes, you start to get these first level of direct clients, right people that hire you directly for a discount. Now the people that will grab you for a few copies and discount copies. They're not really the clients you want long term because they can't really afford the full price. That's why they're snapping up anytime someone's to review copies. But that's okay, then what? You d'oh! During this time, you set up your profile on some of those direct websites. Okay, websites like up work websites like fiber and a couple other ones where people hire writers directly. When someone hires you off one of these forms or places where you doing discount offers, you get them to pay you through what these other sites and say, Hey, I actually want you to pay me using up workers, the payment processor. What's great about that is when they pay, the money goes into escrow. So you know they've really paid the money. You don't actually get the money delivered until they're happy with the articles. So that's why I use that service a lot. It protects both the client and the person delivering the content I've been hired through before. I hire people, threw up work all the time. You see the land. Swaziland's now emerged. So now it's called up work. Who knows? Maybe the name will change again. So just check the show notes in case they change the name of their website again. What's great about using this escrow system is that you get reviews in a place where you can get really high ticket offers. I was just scanning through the other day, and there were job offers writing short books for $5000 writing articles for $100 actually really high paying, high ticket offers. I have a friend who got hired by a major corporation to write a series of articles through this Web site, and they had him $65,000 so you can get a serious job, right? You do that one job, you're probably take the rest of the year off. It's pretty good numbers, right? So there's a lot of amazing opportunities. The hard part about breaking into these types of websites is when you join and you have no portfolio, you have no reviews. No one wants to hire you and give you a chance. Like even when I post an ad and people say, I'll give me a chance and I go and they have a portfolio with one or two articles that have drawn one or two pictures. No one's ever gonna hire you. You have to have a portfolio with 10 to 20 articles on different topics. You have tohave reviews. People go. Okay. This guy's written for someone else. I know that you could do the job and deliver on time. So someone finds you on another website. They find you on a forum type website. They pay, you threw up work, they leave you review in both places, they leave you the same review. But that's great. So now you have 5 10 15 reviews. Okay? Use your view copies in your discount copies. You've used the escrow system. Now they do take a cut. I can't remember what percentages, but they will take a cut your payments. You're not gonna make a lot of money. During this phase, you're gonna have to write 15 or 20 articles, you know, and make just a little bit of money. Not gonna make nothing, But you probably make similar what? You're making it the first place. So maybe you're gonna make two sons a word. It's okay, right? You're right. You're 20 articles and you make 3 $400. It's not amazing money, but the reviews are the value you're getting paid to build your portfolio. You're getting paid now to have reviews. When you have these reviews, you can then start bidding on the higher ticket projects. You no longer have to go out and kind of find drone independent clients. What you can do is the way these websites worked. Way websites are fiber, the other are up work. Work is people will post jobs and say, Hey, this is a job and you say Yeah, I could do it. Here's the price Years along will take me with fiber. People kind of just hire you directly. Just have an ad and again, no one on viral hire you even It's $5 a little gig. No one's gonna have you for anything until they see a bunch of reviews. No one want to be the first person to hire you and kind of play that risk game because it's not worth it, because most people on that have no reviews, have interviews for a reason. So once you have built up a little bit of a reputation by being strategic, see, I see people they join up work, The Post, two articles, things they wrote in high school or college, you know, that are not really relevant. They're not blogged posting articles. They're just like school papers or things like that and have no reviews. And they kind of respond to all these things. They can't understand why no, to hire them north and give me a chance. Give me a chance. I could do it. I can do it. And the reason they can't get any jobs is because they haven't treated it like a business. When you approach this like a business and you follow those series of steps have shared with you, opportunities will begin to arise. Now you can then transition into larger scale projects. I don't write articles, I'll tell you that right now, I don't write block post for other people. And I don't take article jobs the way my mind works. I don't really like that. I'm much would. I would much rather right Ah, 35,000 word book than 800 word black bus. Now you could make the same kind of money. I'm you know, you could make the same kind of money per word, but for me. I'm very good at writing long projects to write, like 10 little Block posts. It doesn't. It doesn't work the way my mind works. For other people, riding block Post is much, much easier. You simply want to pay attention to the way your mind works and find the type of projects that work for you. If you want to write articles, you could do a lot of articles. But if you want to move into books like I do, you can easily move into books. Your average book on Amazon Right now, the most popular books tend to your own 8000 words. They're quite short. That's 10 800 block posts. It's really the same thing you just write. 10 articles column, Chapter one through tens of Article 1 to 10 but an intro and an outro. You know, a beginning and a conclusion and you have a book. So it's really not that different. It just happens to be my personal taste. The one thing you do want to avoid is doing one off articles. What I would never accept is a one article job. Once you've written your 1st 10 or 20 articles for different clients. Then you only want to do articles in packs of 5 10 or 20. Because really, you're not gonna get that excited doing a job for $20 then you got to drone find another one. The big hurt For a writer, the big challenge is finding clients the more time you have to spend finding clients, the harder to see if you have to find one client and they pay you $1000 with, you know, I'm gonna find one climate month. But if it's $20 you have behind 50 clients a month to make the same money. So you want to move into the room, we're taking higher ticket jobs. So along the way you want to build out your website. Now I have extensive step by step explanation about how to set up your first website. Had a kind of install WordPress, all those different things with tons of screen shots on my website. Okay, if you don't have to sever his website, do that. You definitely want to have your own time, and you want to be something like amazing writer dot com or Jonathan the rider, dotcom, Anything like that, something lets people know what you do, and you build a website, has your portfolio on it, shows some of your projects, and you want to be very careful. You're right. So you're proud of everything You work on one of things I've discovered. Some people have terrible work in their portfolios. If you've written something that's not good, remove it from your portfolio and put something better when I'm looking to hire writers for small projects. Like if I want to hire someone for a small Kindle book that I'm gonna put under one of my ghostwriter names, you know, one of those 10,000 word books that I expect them to write and like, you know, seven days or something like that, they'll send me a link to a book that they put on Amazon. Now I don't mind. I don't mind hiring a writer that's good at riding and sucks it. Marketing. There's plenty of people that are amazing writers and have no idea how to find an audience on Amazon. That's fine. Okay, that's what I'm really good. I love to work with people like that, but sometimes the reviews are like all the words are misspelled this person doesn't speak English. When I see reviews like that, I just think myself. Why would you point me to that? Why would you point me to something you've written that has terrible reviews and says You're a terrible writer? So be very conscious of what you're doing in the reputation you're building. I work really, really hard on the things that right to try and make it the best quality I can't. The mount of quality control that went through my servant master book is the most I've ever done. It's the first time of word with an outside editor anyone. After the editor went through the book I went to again and personally edited and that I said the book out. Almost 200 early reviewers to do line by line scans for any mistakes keep every couple of days. I was getting an email with a one word was about here or use the word good when you mean the word food, all these tiny, tiny things, because very hard to catch every little Grammer stick. When you write a book that's our foreign pages long. Even though I personally scanned the book multiple times a few things slip through the cracks so that dedication to excellence is so important because my name is on it. I want it to be the best it can possibly be. I would hate to have a review that says, Oh, fill the grammar steaks or misspelled words and all those things. I would hate that. So you want to take pride in your work and that pride will come across in the type of projects that people bring to you. You don't have to be an amazing writer right now. You might be thinking, Hey, all this stuff sounds fun, but I hate working with a typewriter. In that case, there APS on your phone that will record you talking and converted to text for free. There's a dragon dictate for phone that does it, and there's a couple of other ones, and it doesn't have to be that long. You can actually become or really, really high paid article writer using this method when you speak. On average, you speak about 150 words a minute, so that means in five minutes you'll speak 750 words, so you could actually bang out an article every 5 to 6 minutes. Now you'll then have to go back through and edit it a little bit to make sure that each word got properly converted. But you could be very quick. I tried using this method. I actually have the full scale Dragon Dictator, my computer. I'm not great at dictation writing personally because I write so fast. I'm the only person I've ever met who writes is fast as they dictate. OK, most people I work with, they're much faster. And if I'd started using Dragon Dictate three or four years ago, that's what I would be doing. If I start with the dictation method, the problem is that I got so fast it riding when I was writing my servant master book. At some point, I was writing 5000 words an hour. Now, with dictation, you can't hit eight or 12,000 words. Now I can't. There's this type of dictation where you just recording the audio file and then you pay someone to read it and manually add in the period in the spaces. The punctuation, it takes a long time. It cost so much money cost around a dollar a minute to get that done. And then it takes like a day to get the dictation transferred. So it adds more time. It takes a bunch of money, and it doesn't really help me. So I don't like that method. And when you do a really long project, uh, and you just recorded use software, well, then it doesn't put any punctuation. So you run into some challenges for longer projects, and you can simply learn how to do it. But if you're slow or normal to be writer for anything slower than me, then you can dictate while you're looking at the screen on what you're writing and will be faster than typing. So their software for your computer you gotta pay for that. There's no free versions, but on your phone there's tons of free opposite to the exact same thing. I don't know why they don't make free versions for your computer, but they dont Macintosh. It does come with a free dictation app. I haven't used it that much because I tried Dagen dictate, which cost a couple 100 bucks. I'm not I'm not doing a hard recommendation on that. I would say Start by doing it on your phone. But you can dictator a block post today pretty easily. You know, it's been five or 10 minutes talking your phone. Clean it up a little bit, and they've got a block post every single day. That's a consort to generate some real money, so you don't have to be amazing. A typing Jimmy An amazing writer. Everyone has their differences riding James Patterson, most prolific and most successful author in the world, far more successful than any all three thinking of right now. Okay, no one is in the same league as in the guy puts out so many books a year. He writes his books by hand on yellow legal paper. Okay, that's something that I find amazing, cause I would be so slow with that. But he has this whole system, his whole way of writing books, this whole process. And once you develop your process, lock into it. So find the process that works right for you by the system that works right for you and start taking action because you're a native English speaker. Just by your ability to speak the language you were born with. You can make money online right now. Writing articles for other people. And if you're stuck in a manual labor type job or physical labor type job, you're making minimum wage. You could make more money riding for three or four hours, and you can work in the hard physical job or 78 or nine hours. So there's a real opportunity here. And this is one of my favorite ways to make money in line because it really lets you express your creativity and there's always work. Other. I always have more work in front of that I can handle. I can tell you right now that I have so many projects that I'm always behind because there's so many opportunities in front. So there's always more writing, and it's a great way to escape the necessity to go to an office every day or work a job they don't love. It's one of the quickest and easiest ways to start making money very quickly to celebrate the launch of the serve. No master podcast. I'm giving away some app, big prizes. You could win an Amazon tap and have me personally turn you into a best selling author toe win. You're part of over $20,000 in prizes, go to serve no master dot com backslash contest Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow.