Hello everyone! I received an e-mail from my online friend Lina who wanted to share information about how she writes and works from home. She has a quick Youtube video to summarize the post below. Enjoy!
Anyone who has tried to work from home by writing content knows it is not impossible to do.
There is a ton of work available in the marketplace through various sites and brokers. The challenge is definitely not in finding work.
The challenge of the process is making enough money while writing for a reasonable amount of time so that there is enough time left over to spend quality time with children and handle other tasks at hand.
It is easy to spend 12 hours a day writing in order to make a decent amount of money, and first of all, writing for a 12 hour stretch is insane.
Also, spending 12 hours a day writing in order to make ends meet sort of defeats the purpose of working from home because there is not much time left to spend with family or to take care of yourself.
Often times good writers will get caught up competing with “going rates” when it comes to writing, and end up becoming a slave to the content they are committed to produce. You do not have to charge what “everyone” else is charging in order to be competitive in today’s writing market.
Ghostwriting is not just a service that involves a delivery of words.
The truth of the matter is that ghostwriting is not just a service that involves a delivery of words. People who seek ghostwriters will often look for other assets in a writer that could justify a higher rate.
I spent about a year of my life ghostwriting almost-full-time, when I lost my job while I was pregnant and was trying to figure out how I was going to make ends meet.
I quickly learned that I just did not have the stamina to write for other people at low rates while still making enough money to sustain myself. I did not have a very high standard of living – I just was looking to survive.
I quickly learned how to produce loyal clients that was willing to pay me more for my writing, simply by being attentive to their needs that went beyond delivering word counts within a certain number of days.
There are many writers out there.
The first thing to understand about writing is that the market is completely saturated with people who want to write. However good writers and reliable and consistent writers, are hard to come by.
If you are a good writer, and you are reliable, and you can deliver your work fast (I used to deliver most of my orders the same day or next day), then you have a basis to charge more than “going rates”.
On top of that, if you are a native English speaker and you write well, you also have a basis to charge higher rates.
By charging higher rates for your work, even just by a little bit, you will cut down the number of hours that you write per day to make the same amount of money – just increasing your rates by 50% would shave 25% of the time that you spend writing while still earning the same amount of money.
That is extra time that you can spend with your children or relaxing and enjoying your work-at-home lifestyle.
In my case, I had my own projects and my own books that I wanted to work on, so I really did not want to ghostwrite full-time and expend all my energy writing for other people.
I was able to successfully make money by working part-time ghostwriting, and manage my personal projects the rest of the time, until I really did not have to ghostwrite anymore.
Today, I definitely do not have to ghostwrite, but because of the foundation I established, if I am ever in a bind and I need money today, I have a set of loyal clients that would be more than happy to pay me today to ghostwrite content for them.
Finding loyal clients is important.
By following my specific process, I was also able to cultivate loyal clients that ended up commissioning me for work that went beyond writing.
In fact, I have one client that I met just from writing a 250-word piece of content for $5 who I have now billed well over 6 figures for the various work I have billed out to them over the last several years.
In fact, if you get to know your clients, and you offer quality work, your clients will want to pay your rates and you will be able to work more comfortably and produce better quality work.
The key is to hone in on clients that can produce recurring work, which is pretty much everyone who seeks ghostwriters nowadays – the typical person who is looking to hire a writer pretty much always has recurring work available.
If you are looking to make a living as a ghostwriter in order to get some other personal projects of yours off the ground, following is my personal recommendation from someone who has been there and done that:
Evaluate your rates – don’t undercharge. If you are producing quality work and are delivering your work fast, look into charging more. There are easy ways to do this – I talk specifically about how to do this in my book, Ghostwriting Blueprint. In fact, you can get a free preview of my book’s first chapter at http://preview.ghostwritingblueprint.com.
Thank you very much for your consideration today – I will check back on this post regularly, so please post a comment if you have any questions or concerns.
Written by: Lina Trivedi, Author of Ghostwriting Blueprint and many other books available on Amazon.com
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