Any alternatives to iWriter and Freelancer?

Posted by Felix Okoli on Tuesday January 7, 2014 at 12:30:48:

Sure, offering writing jobs at freelancing websites like iWriter and Freelancer are a good way to make money online from writing but you don't have to limit yourself to them alone.

Are there other alternative ways to make money from online writing? Yes, there are and I'm just going to write aobut one or two of them.

Hubpages
This is a great platform to make money from your writing skills. The trick to making real money from Hubpages lies in writing articles on keywords that people are mostly searching for. Writers who focus on search engine traffic tend to make more money than writers who just write about anything that comes to their mind.

How Hubpages work is that you don't get paid for just writing an article and submitting it. You get paid when that article is published and then gets traffic which ultimately converts to an affiliate sale or click on a PPC advert.

I've written a good number of articles on Hubpages, about 100 during my early days and till date, they keep bringing in some income for me passively. The reason why they keep bringing in income is because they keep bringing in traffic which comes from search engines.

The key to making money from Hubpages is Writing about articles that would be of continuing importance to people for many years to come and not just a one-off article that is only relevant for today's world.

Amazon KDP
A second platform where you can make money from your writing skills is on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing(KDP) program. The KDP is a platform offered by Amazon that allows writers to write books and then submit them for sale or lending to the Kindle store on Amazon.

You can write a short(<200 pages) or long book(200 pages+) on categories like fiction, stories, tutorials, novels and so on. Once you write a book that people love to buy and read, you are already in business.

There i a growing number of books on the Kindle store and there is still room for more. People love to read books and if you are good at writing, then you can take the initiative and write books that would last for a long time.

The thing about publishing a book on Kindle is that it is cheaper than traditional book publishing and you would also have the opportunity to list your book on a massive platform that has lots of digital readers who are ready to buy.

I've had some success at writing for Kindle and I sell a book at least every month even though it is just at $0.99.

When you start writing for Kindle, you need to write to suit your potential buyers and not just locally. If you are writing from Kenya, it's best to not limit your target to Kenyans but to the rest of the world particularly Americans and Europeans since they are the ones most likely to buy from you.

I noticed that most of my e-books on Kindle which related mostly to Kenya don't sell well but the ones that relate to the world in general perform better and so I guess I'll keep heading in that direction.

So, there you have it, my other ways to make money from writing apart from just i-Writer and Freelancer.

The good thing about writing for publishing sites like Hubpages and Amazon KDP is that your articles or books will keep selling as long as they remain relevant and you don't just get a one time payment like you'd get for writing an article job, instead, you get paid a royalty based on your work.