Writing for money, what to do and what not to do

All writers have to start somewhere, and where you start isn’t necessarily where you’ll stay. But all new writers should know and follow the basics. Avoiding mistakes already made by others will only behoove you, while observing the fundamentals will help you to establish yourself.

Write what you know and stay there:

Professionally I am a business consultant, personally I am husband and father, and my hobby is playing and teaching music. I have also done informal work strategy writing for a locally based consultancy group and I am political analyst/columnist for three different bi-monthly publications.

What this means is I have the credibility to write over related subjects: the first lends me the credibility to write about business, employee/employer relationships and roles, the economy. The second gives me the credibility to write about husband and dad issues. The third is a bit different than the average bear because I wrote a textbook, Cyclopedia Music Theory. Lastly, my unofficial work in politics lends me the credibility to write political and economic analysis.

I write over these subjects because they are not only what I know, but know well and have experience in. I won’t win a Nobel Prize for science like Messrs. Elinor Ostrom or Oliver E. Williamson, but they’re not likely to write a music theory book like I did either.

Find your niche, cultivate your own style and develop continuity:

Opinions are like bad jokes, everyone has one to tell, but no one really wants to hear them. As in the above examples, look to your professional and personal life experiences and write on those subjects. You’ll find you’ll have more passion and fluidity then trying to break into the hot topic of the day or latest trend.

Diversify but be consistent:

Publish your own pieces on your own blogs. If you’re an investment adviser, write about that and have a blog title that encapsulates your professional life.

I subscribe to a particular writer’s posts on one of the sites for which I regularly publish. This author will publish a piece about relationship commitments, SEO writing and national economic policy all in the same day on the same website. While this author may have some credentials to write about these subjects, they are missing the diversity of cross publication.

Take your subject matter and divide them among the websites and/or publications for which you write. Your personal blog should focus on your personal life. Writing for a site like eHow or HubPages should be reserved for “how-to” articles, which lend themselves more to professional and hobby readership.

You’ll also have to be consistent in your writing, not letting weeks or months pass by without publishing on your blog or user-based website. The minimum should be two or three articles a week, spread over the same amount of publications.

Promote yourself:

Even if you’re a part-timer, you’ll have to be consistent, with approximately 231.5 million as of April 2009, you’ll have to stand out – somehow – and here’s a couple of ways how…

Keep up with the trends and hot search terms in your writings by using Google Trends or Yahoo Buzz. Work some of the day’s biggest searches into your pieces without hammering a square peg into a round hole.

Network with other writers and websites/publications looking for content are both a good source not only of potential readership but editorial advice.

Don’t write a piece just to get paid:

If you find it tempting, resist. This is a mistake that may well catch-up with you in the future. Writing pieces only for money that you truly have no or little interest in will show through the published piece. It will also spread you a bit more thin in trying to be authentic and trying to complete more suitable tasks at-hand.

Don’t forget the basics:

Be sure to include who, what, when, where, why

Support your writing with facts, statistics, polling, hard numbers; anyone can spout their opinion, make yours count

Make sure to proofread and spell check

-- Owen E. Richason IV