New Writers Can Make Money: 5 Ideas That Are Working For Me
How a ghostwriting contract inspired me to make money
Here’s a brutal truth.
If you want to make money writing online, being a great writer isn’t enough. You need to learn the business of writing as much as the art of writing.
I discovered this accidentally.
I’d been writing on Twitter (X) for 4 months and had started to grow a small, loyal following. And I received a surprising message from a brand I follow. They had noticed my content and wondered if I did ghostwriting. They were looking for someone to write their X & LinkedIn posts.
I’d never considered ghostwriting.
But I said yes.
I felt inadequate but couldn’t waste this opportunity. But what would I charge? In $100m Offers Alex Hormozi strongly argues you should charge more than you think.
The truth is I’d spent £500 on writing courses. And devoted 500+ hours to developing my skills. That must be worth something right? So I set a price of £100/hour. I was shocked when they said yes.
This transformed my view of what is possible as a writer
Anyone can make money writing.
You just need to learn how.
Once you make your first $1 you gain confidence. So building on my ghostwriting experience I’m exploring 5 money-making routes.
This range of options will inspire you to believe more is possible.
(Warning — this is a work-in-progress story rather than an I made 10k in 5 minutes superhero story)
5 Money Making Routes I’m exploring:
1. Newsletter email list
I’ve gained 1300+ followers on X & Medium but question the value of followers. You can’t contact them and most don’t even see what you write.
This makes an email list vital. You can contact them directly and it opens up new possibilities. Most money-making routes flow from this foundation.
I launched The Compelling Writer 4 weeks ago and have 79 subscribers. Each week I send out a practical writing tip and include other titbits like my best tweet or a photo of a book I am reading.
With 98 Medium articles finding content is easy.
My welcome email invites people to send me their writing challenges and I reply with advice. This offers a valuable personal connection.
Newsletter deepens your credibility and authority with your readers
2. Affiliate opportunity
I didn’t want to taint my writing with an affiliate.
(where you promote someone’s product and receive payment)
But Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing course transformed my writing on Twitter (X). Boosted my growth from 50–600 followers in a few months. And gave me the ghostwriting contract mentioned above.
Then I discovered Kieran was offering £100 for each affiliate sale. The course helped me so I was happy to recommend it to others.
Adding a link to a X post and an email to my subscribers is so easy.
It’s making money whilst being helpful.
3. Coaching service
As my audience has grown (I only started writing this year). I’ve received requests for writing advice. People have found it useful when I’ve given feedback on their writing. So I set up The Writing Clinic — offering feedback on short & long-form writing.
What started as a free service has become something I charge for.
Providing your services for free is a powerful strategy. It helps you:
- tests the market
- hones your skills
- builds your confidence
- produces client reviews
The Writing Clinic is a low-risk experiment. All it took was to set up a landing page and then promote it.
Look for low-risk, low-cost experiments to make money.
4. Digital Products
I’ve written 103 Medium articles this year.
Valuable content I own. Creators on X are always impressed by Medium writers because of the depth of content we generate. I was asked:
Why don’t you bundle up 10 articles and sell them on Gumroad as a digital product?
The honest answer was I didn’t value my content that much. But my ghostwriting gig changed all that.
So I’ve started designing digital products (email series, video-based, and ebooks). Using the content I already have makes this easy. Article comments are customer feedback. They tell you what is helpful and what other questions you need to answer.
The costs of offering a digital product are low. Gumroad is the perfect platform for this. My first product is already available there. It took 15 minutes to set up.
Put your content in an accessible format then sell it.
5. Explosive earnings on Medium
I made $0 in my first 3 months on Medium.
$20–26 for each of the next 4 months.
Then this happened:
$310 in one month.
A 1000% increase because an article was boosted. My following and Medium subscribers have increased massively too.
This has renewed my confidence writers can make money on Medium. The boost is for high-quality articles. So double your efforts making your writing original.
Hopefully, these ideas inspire you. Don’t get attached to the $$$ results. Experiment. Learn. Have fun.
And if one of them works?
Celebrate — because you deserve it for taking a small risk.
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