If you are like many freelance writers and would-be freelance writers out there, you no doubt are intrigued by the opportunities that self-publishing websites provide. The income of freelance writers is largely determined by our ability to find paying clients who can keep us busy every day and who can pay us a rate that allows us to live the lifestyle we want. This can be a tricky thing to do. Most clients do not have a steady amount of work they need done, and so it’s easy to feel like you are constantly trying to juggle your work schedule in a way that keeps the income flowing rather evenly.
The Promise of Self-Publishing Websites
There are several websites online that allow you to self-publish your own pieces, and they offer payment in a variety of ways. For instance, Yahoo! Voices allows you to earn an up-front payment as well as an additional income from the number of views your piece gets on an on-going basis. HubPages is another site, and it pays you through the number of clicks the ads on your article page get. These are just a few of the many self-publishing sites available to choose from, and generally they offer the promising of allowing you to write as much or as little as you want and to get paid for your efforts. This seems to eliminate the need for freelance writers to constantly be on the hunt for new clients to work with in order to enjoy stable income.
The Challenges
Many people have tried their hand at earning a living through these websites. Many who have used them in the past have talked about how challenging it was to come up with enough great topics that would garner views or that were worthy of click-thrus on the ad links on the page. It is one thing, after all, to come up with enough topics to write about for a day or week, but it is another thing to keep up that pace for months on end. More than that, you cannot simply copy topics that have been written about a hundred times before by other people. You have to find fresh, unique, interesting topics that really create a buzz. Plus, to really get the most life out of your articles, you do have to promote them through your own blog, social media sites, and other such efforts. This takes time, and you may not see much financial reward for your time and efforts at promoting your work right away.
A Full-Time Income?
Some people have written about how they have been able to use these self-publishing sites to earn a full-time living. This may be possible, but it does require you to first have a lot of content already online and earning an income. Whether you are getting for clicks on ad links or simply for viewership on the article itself, the amount such sites pay is rather nominal. So you have to have a large number of articles working in your favor. Five, ten, or even a hundred articles will not provide you with a full-time income. Further, you have to constantly be writing new content, and this does require you to put in full-time hours working on articles. Even with the best of efforts, however, earning a full-time income is not guaranteed. Further, earning a regular, steady income is not guaranteed either. You are earning an income that essentially is based on the whim of people to first read through your articles and in many cases to click on various links. So a full time income may happen, but it also may not.
While there is no guarantee that you can earn a full time income from these sites, they do have a place in the work schedule of many freelance writers. Every freelance writer does have slower days than others, and these sites present you with the opportunity to work on pieces that can produce income for you even when you don’t have a paying client waiting in the wings. In this way, they can help you to meet your income goals as a freelance writer.
