How to Make Money Writing: 5 Ways to Get Paid to Write in 2023

Writing for a living offers a ton of advantages – you get to choose when and where you work, and with whom.

No wonder this promise of creative and personal freedom attracts so many people.

But the truth is that most of them don’t want to think about the practicalities of becoming a full-time freelance writer.

They don’t want to think about the uncertainty, the rejection, the self-doubt.

They don’t want to think about all the small, unglamorous tasks that make a writer’s life possible.

Deep down they fear their perfect dream will tarnish if they drag it down to earth. So it just hangs there in a shiny bubble, waiting for the day it miraculously comes true.

But let’s be honest — it just won’t happen. Or do you really think someone will approach you one day and say:

“Hey there. I heard from someone that you were thinking of writing something, someday, and I’ve love to pay you to see where that someday could lead.”

Of course not, but without a concrete strategy, that is what it would take to make your distant dream of having a writing career a reality.

Experience shows that vague plans fail. Grounding your dreams in reality is what makes them happen. Even if it means thinking about the things you’d rather not consider.

It’s not enough to say you want to make a living as a writer; you need to know how. You need a concrete plan to bridge the gap from where you are now to where you want to be.

And the more realistic your plan, the better. Don’t bet the farm on a path that only a small handful of super talented (or incredibly lucky) outliers have followed. Choose one that’s worked for lots of people.

1.The 5 Most Realistic Ways to Make Money Writing

2.Get Paid to Write Articles for Blogs, Magazines, and Journals

3.Make Money by Creating Collateral for Content-Hungry Businesses

4.Get Paid to Write by Becoming a Best-Selling Kindle Author

5.Make Money Writing as a Conversion-Focused Copywriter

1. Get Paid to Write Articles for Blogs, Magazines, and Journals

Despite talk of global “content fatigue,” major publications — both on- and offline — must keep publishing content or die. Just look at the plentiful opportunities for writing gigs on any job board (like our own Smart Blogger Jobs Board).

That means popular WordPress blogs, magazines, and journals remain hungry for quality content writing — and many are willing to pay good money for it too. You’ll need to hustle to find the best paid writing jobs, understanding that success won’t happen overnight. But freelancing for these publications is still a smart way to make money online as a writer.

Let’s start with the blogs.

Although writing articles for popular blogs (a.k.a. guest blogging) is still typically unpaid, with most new writers trading their content for exposure (via a byline or author bio), numerous exceptions still exist.

2. Make Money by Creating Collateral for Content-Hungry Businesses

In the last five years, content marketing — this concept of creating valuable content to attract customers and build credibility and trust — has undoubtedly gone mainstream.

The result? More and more businesses are getting into the content game. Some have a clear strategy, while others are just jumping on the bandwagon and hoping it pays off down the line.

This has created a market for smart writers who can write for a specific audience. These content-hungry businesses need articles, white papers, case studies — the list goes on. And they fully expect to pay for them.

Breaking into this market can be tough without a few contacts to get you started, but it’s not impossible.

Initially, you may need to jostle for attention with thousands of other eager freelancers vying for online jobs on marketplaces like Upwork.com.

3. Get Paid to Write by Becoming a Best-Selling Kindle Author

What about making it big as an author? Could that be your best route to a life of freedom as a full-time writer?

Well, it’s certainly more realistic than it used to be. Ten years ago, writing a best-selling book was a distant dream for most writers and self-publishing on Kindle was often dismissed as a vanity exercise.

But today, thanks largely to Amazon and Kindle, the self-published book market is gigantic and making money from writing books is far more achievable.

Of course, more achievable doesn’t mean easy. If you have visions of publishing one book and retiring on the profits, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

To succeed, you need to be commercially minded and target an established market with proven demand from readers. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow your passion but be prepared to validate it first.

You’ll need to be persistent and prolific too — chances are you’ll publish several books before gaining any traction, and you’ll need sales from multiple titles to approach anything resembling a full-time income.

However, according to a report earlier this year from Author Earnings, 1,600 indie authors are earning $25K or above from Amazon book sales, and 1,000 published their first book three years ago or less.

But should you be writing fiction or nonfiction? Nonfiction is the most natural fit for the average blogger, and if you’re blogging in a popular niche, the chances are that books covering similar topics will also be popular.

If you want to find success as a self-nonfiction author, check out Steve Scott. Even though he’s recently switched his attentions to a regular podcast on self-publishing, his old site still has a ton of useful information.

4. Make Money Writing as a Conversion-Focused Copywriter

Copywriting, in a nutshell, is writing that’s designed to make readers take a specific action.

Sales letters, video scripts, even product descriptions — these all need writing by someone, and they live or die on the results they produce.

Copywriting may not seem fundamentally different to other forms of writing skill, but in practice, it’s a discipline all of its own.

While there’s a trend towards more conversational, empathetic copywriting — moving away from the hype-fuelled “hard sell” — you still need a solid understanding of the principles of persuasion.

So unless you have a copywriting background be prepared to invest a lot of time (and possibly money) in learning the fundamentals. There are some excellent books on the topic — CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone (affiliate link) is a good place to start. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark shares his favorite titles here.

The most famous training course on copywriting is probably AWAI’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting.

Notwithstanding the steep learning curve, the rewards of copywriting can be significant. A high-converting sales page might earn you $2,000, plus a slice of the revenues too.

As a bonus, a foundation in copywriting will also be valuable should you ever decide to sell your own products.

5. Build a Niche Blog and Promote Third Party Products

I’ll be honest — building a popular blog is tough. Really tough.

And once you’ve scaled your blog beyond a certain point, you might be surprised how little time you actually spend doing the thing you love — writing.

So if your dream is to build a six-figure blog, you’d better be as excited about the prospect of running a business as you are about writing your next blog article. (In fact, if you’re making six figures, writing is one of the things you should probably outsource.)

But there is a path to making money from a blog where you still spend a good proportion of your time writing. And it starts with picking a writing niche where a large, passionate audience already exists and — this is crucial — where you can find successful products from trusted names to sell.

Promoting affiliate products (affiliate marketing) is a much smarter way to start earning money from a blog than creating your own product. With an affiliate product, someone else has already done the hard work of validating the market, building the product, and enhancing it based on customer feedback. Someone else gets to handle the pre-sales inquiries, payments, refunds, and product support.

Many affiliate products pay high commissions too — 50% or even more — because the incremental production cost of digital products is essentially nothing.

The secret is finding the right products — ones that you can stake your reputation on. Pat Flynn is the undisputed king of passive income, earned (mostly) from sales of affiliate products — check out his video on Choosing Affiliates Products to Promote and How to Sell Them.