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How to Get Paid for your Articles

If you have a way with words, why not invest in it? More and more people are discovering the joys and rewards of freelance writing. Instead of writing for yourself, write for other people who will enjoy reading your articles. Best of all, you have be a freelance writer without disrupting your current lifestyle, or you could say goodbye to your place behind the desk and work conveniently from home. Here are some friendly tips on how to get paid for your articles.

Know your expertise.

Good writers are great wherever you put them, but if you are going to make money out of writing, you’d rather write on topics you are most passionate about. This way, it won’t feel much like a task. Lots of writers complain of writer’s block, or the inability to find the words for a written piece. If you know a lot about a topic, and are passionate about researching, you can get away from this challenge easily.

Know where to submit your articles.

Once you have decided on which topics you’d like to concentrate on, you can now choose where you’d like to submit your articles to. Websites like Squidoo and Associated Content are popular among freelance writers. While you don’t get paid for writing per se, you will earn a percentage of advertising fees every time your article is viewed.

Join a writing team.

If you would like to be spared the trouble of looking for people who will buy your articles, you can join a ghostwriting team which already usually has a list of clients their members write for. Ghostwriting means you won’t have rights to the articles, but you will get a good price for your material.

Sign up at an online job marketplace.

Elance and Freelancer are two common online marketplaces where writers and other freelancers meet buyers who are willing to pay for writing services. Discover how you can maximize your potentials by browsing a large database of jobs and finding the one that best suits your qualifications.

Mistakes to Avoid when Freelance Writing

Once you have made a decision to become a freelance writer, you will need to learn how to make your writing business gain positive light. Freelance writing newbies often commit mistakes that send their chances spiraling down the drain. Here are just some of them:

Plagiarizing
This is the mortal sin of all writing, freelance or not. This basically happens when you steal someone else’s ideas and make it your own, getting credit for someone you did not work hard on. When you plagiarize, you are hurting someone else’s business, but are hurting yours even more. You could be blacklisted and may have a harder time applying for freelance writing jobs. To avoid this, do adequate research and learn how to substitute words and phrases with your own, a process called paraphrasing.

Being incoherent
Never be in a hurry to make some money out of your articles. A common mistake is writing pointlessly, without a proper introduction, body and conclusion. As a result, the reader is confused and may not be driven to believe what your article is saying.

Taking grammar and spelling loosely
No matter how well you write, you will definitely lose customers and readers if you don’t perform a spell-check and proofread your articles before submission. Bad grammar and spelling tells a reader you are not professional and not credible enough.

Writing bad titles
The title, or the headline of your articles are always the attention-grabbers. But if you write lame titles, don’t expect your articles to get any attention. Write titles in the form of a question, and make sure it implies a benefit to the reader. Otherwise, the reader will be left thinking, “What’s in it for me?” and will move on if they don’t find anything interesting about the title.

Choosing bad keywords
Finally, if you are SEO-writing, you will need to know that the income of your articles will depend on how well it does on search engines. So, before you write an article, choose a set of strong keywords that will help your articles land on a high place in several search engines.

Some of these things they don’t teach you at school, so it takes experience and research to learn.