Unconventional Ways to Make Money as a Writer

According to one of the most popular Quora writers of all time

There’s nothing ugly about earning a living as a writer.

You’re not a sell-out for wanting to write words and pay your water bill with them. I have recently stumbled across what can only be described as peculiar ways to make money as a writer. I’m fairly certain you haven’t heard of these ways to make money as a writer.

Messenger Apps to Sell Digital Products Rather Than Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around since the ‘90s. My grandpa was doing it in the back of his Toyota Camry.

I stumbled across this radical idea by accident. I launched my first online course. I decided that video and written content were a dime a dozen. I thought back to the start of my writing career.

The biggest challenge was not being surrounded by other writers just like me. I wanted to fix that and came up with an online course that was focused on a community — where the Q&A component of the course with other writers (not just me) was a goldmine.

This idea then went further. If I got the students into the group chat then this could be an honest place to talk about any other digital products I wanted to sell in the future — without it feeling like a one-night stand, the way it does with a conventional landing page.

What if a community in the form of a group chat in a messenger app was more powerful than an email list?

The email channel has become incredibly noisy. Group chats that provide people value are a better place to sell without it feeling like a sale.

A CTA That’s Not a CTA

A CTA (call to action) is a link you put at the end of free content. They’re done to death. Many publications don’t allow them and they can look cheesy as hell. A lot of CTAs these days look like giant ads. Who likes ads? Not me.

I read a book called “The Art and Business of Online Writing” written by one of the most popular writers on Quora (a social media platform) of all time. Nicolas Cole defied the odds as a teenage gamer who became one of the highest-ranked players in North America for a computer game called “World of Warcraft.”

After crushing it on Quora he took a break and decided to set up a business. Recently he closed that business down because he realized having employees was mostly a nightmare.

I read his book thinking it was going to be a giant waste of time. Books about the business of online writing make my eyes bleed. Cole’s book was a little different. Cole introduced me to a different way of thinking about CTAs that will help you with your own writing.

A better, less obvious strategy for inserting a Call To Action into a piece is to make the CTA a credible example of whatever you’re talking about.

Then it’s not a sell. It’s an option a reader can choose to click.

So what Cole does is he puts whatever the link is he would use in his CTA as an example in the body of his story. Now before you content market yourself to death — the key is to make it genuine. If all you do is throw in CTAs everywhere because you want to get rich, then readers disengage.

Selling via a CTA is about being real. It’s better to omit a CTA than try and jam one into the body of your story.

A CTA is one way writers make money offline. A CTA leads a user to join someone’s email list. This is where money can be made in exchange for adding value to the reader’s life.

I took years to take this step because I wanted to ensure I could provide a big return on someone’s investment in one of my digital products.

You can make money with unconventional CTAs that don’t appear at the end of your story, just be cool about it.

You Can Take Free Blog Posts and Put Them Together in an eBook

This one from Cole is so stupidly simple. You know what I did when I wrote my eBook from scratch earlier this year? I wrote the whole thing from start to finish over the course of a few days.

What’s smarter is to look at the articles readers spend their time consuming, liking, and sharing, and put together your top performers into an eBook you can charge $20 for.

There is another step you can take:

Group articles together and publish them as eBooks on Wattpad and Amazon [and charge money for them].

I only sold my eBook on my personal website. You can also sell an eBook made up of your best-performing articles on Amazon, which many of you know. What I didn’t know about was the website Wattpad. Wattpad is a new place to read and buy books. You can slow-release your book via Wattpad and get paid for it.

Don’t underestimate the power of repurposing written content into many different forms and earning money from it.

“People buy content for convenience”

You might be thinking that this idea is crazy. If you take your free content, package it up, and sell it as paid content, then won’t people get angry? Nope.

Nobody has time to scan thousands of free blog posts.

An eBook equals convenience.

And people love convenience (that’s why we buy $6 milk from 7-Eleven rather than walk down to the shops and pay $3).

Payment in Return for Implementing

Traditional content — books and blog posts — are nothing more than ideas.

Many people never take action on the content they read and they know it. That’s why an eBook or a blog post is really just a shiny brochure. A percentage of readers will want a human being with a pounding heart to help them take action and implement the ideas.

This is another way to make money as a writer. Call it coaching, consulting, virtual assistance, freelancing, ghostwriting — it’s all just a way of saying help me “do the thing.”

Get paid by readers for ideas with rock-solid action you can deliver as a paid service.

Use Free Content That Leads to a Paid Newsletter

I’ve talked about this one before. Substack is an easy way to charge money for a newsletter.

A newsletter is just an email. A newsletter is just a blog post in your email (convenience, again).

A book costs between say $10-$20 on Amazon. Cole stuffed up my conventional thinking with this idea:

Publish a book chapter by chapter as a paid newsletter

“You could take your book-in-progress and publish it chapter by chapter as a weekly paid newsletter instead of publishing it the conventional way — and probably make more money.”

You can get, as a writer, a one-time purchase of a book.

The worst part about selling a book is Amazon doesn’t give you the reader’s email address.

So you have no idea who bought from you and you can’t sell them another digital product in the future. Publishing a book chapter by chapter turns each chapter into money. And once the reader has finished the book you deliver to them via a paid Substack newsletter you can just start sending them your next book or your blog posts — and get paid.

The traditional book publishing industry is broken.

Don’t wait to be chosen and showered in special sauce by a book publisher.

Choose yourself and deliver a book via a paid newsletter.

Sales Copywriters Earn the Most Money

I am a dummy. I had never heard of this way to earn money as a writer. Surprisingly, according to Cole and many other six-figure writers, this is the most lucrative way to earn money as a writer.

A copywriter is someone who writes words designed to sell.

Each of us is sold to every day. What if you could write sales copy and earn a share of the profits on whatever your words are selling? Well, you can.

Imagine your words were helping to sell a $5,000 event. You could write for free and ask for 10% of the money from the event. This business model for writers actually exists. I had no idea.

Final Thought

Learn to think about earning money as a writer differently and you can make it your side-hustle or even your full-time gig. There are tonnes of ways to make money writing when you think about the reader, process, platforms, and income streams differently.

If you can be creative with your writing, then you can be creative with how you earn money from your writing.