The Only Income Streams You Need as a Writer
Photo by David Iskander of Unsplash
A writing income stream is defined as a source of money that you get for creating written content. Potential revenue streams for freelance writers include:
content writing
SEO writing
scripts for YouTube videos
affiliate income from recommending products
ghostwriting
and about 10,000 more options
I see so many articles about writing income streams that focus on the number they can offer, as having 27 writing income streams means you’ll earn more than if you have 26. It’s not like that. Creating income streams will not magically earn you more money.
First of all, there are so many different potential sources of income that it makes no sense to try to count them all. Second, it’s far more helpful to categorize all the writing income streams into the only three categories that matter. Income streams examples will vary, but you’ll notice parallels for all of them.
As a freelancer, I have money sources coming out of the wazoo. Typically, I have somewhere between ten and 15 income streams on any given month. On this particular month, I have 13 writing income streams, which is kind of wild. But all of them fit under those three writing income streams I’ll get into. I’ll explain:
what each writing income stream is
how I got it, and how you can get it
how much money it makes me on average every month
what I like about it and what I don’t like about it
I hope that you can use this information to build your own blogging empire with as many or as few streams as you need. For those of you looking for ways to add income streams, this will walk you through how you can.
Writing Income Stream #1: Client work
This is the easiest to understand, and it’s the one most people will be familiar with.
What is this writing income stream?
Client work is when a company or a business pays you money to write about them or for them. This article might live on their blog, it might live on your blog, and it might be ghostwritten and not under your name at all. It’s worth knowing that freelance writing passive income is an oxymoron — it’s all extremely active.
There are two parties involved. There’s a business, and there’s you. This month, I’ve got about five different clients that I work for.
Two of them are agencies, which means there’s a little bit more complexity thrown into the mix. These agencies all work with other companies who hire them to farm out their content work to writers like me.
What are the pros and cons of this writing income stream?
As a writing income stream, agencies are great because they usually provide a higher volume of work. They’re also really good because you get to write about a ton of different things. That’s why I enjoy my agency work.
The downside of agency work is that there are often a few more lines of communication. I’ll write something, I’ll send it to the agency, they’ll have feedback for me, I do their feedback, they send it to the client, the end client has more feedback, I have to do more work.
Direct client work is awesome because you don’t have to deal with that. The downside is that there’s not as much work as you want. At the moment, I’m doing between eight and ten pieces per week for my agencies. Freelance clients just don’t need eight to ten articles a week.
The volume is lower, but you have a much closer relationship with the brand, which makes it easier to write those pieces. They tend to be a little clearer on what they want from you.
How can you grow this income stream?
I got all of my clients three ways.
They came to me because they saw my work on Medium. I treat Medium a lot as a portfolio, so prospective clients will find my content and hire me off the back of it.
Networking. As an example, one of my clients came to me through Medium. A couple of months later, he let me know he had recommended me as a content writer to another company in a similar industry.
Applying on LinkedIn. I’ve only done this for one agency, actually, and it was this January. I was a little low on work, so I found an agency on LinkedIn. I applied and I was accepted. That’s what I would recommend you do.
I can’t control the networking aspect, but my three pieces of advice to get these types of clients and grow this writing income stream:
Make sure that everything you publish is something you’re proud of and that you can imagine your dream client reading and enjoying.
Treat your clients like gold. You never know when one client is going to refer you to a second client.
The work is out there on LinkedIn. Go find it. Freelance writers are in high demand. You just have to go out and look for them.
How much did I earn from this writing income stream?
It’s really hard to predict how much I make from clients as a writing income stream because they come and go; they scale up and scale down. This month I’m going to make somewhere between $3,000 to $5,000.
Writing Income Stream #2: Platforms.
Platforms are a little less intuitive as a writing income stream because there are three parties in the mix. There’s you, the content creator. Then there’s your audience. These are the people who are consuming your content and who ultimately pay for the content. And in between, there is the platform.
Continue reading: How to Publish Your Book on Kindle
What is this writing income stream?
Platforms have one very important thing: they have access to that audience. In exchange for you creating content, they will give you access to that audience. Many platforms have distribution algorithms to help you access those readers or viewers.
A great example of this is YouTube. There are zillions of viewers on YouTube. I upload my videos, and YouTube decides who’s going to see them. Usually, it’s a mix of people who follow me, but some people don’t. But the algorithm thinks that they might be interested in this content because of my SEO work, or because similar viewers also enjoyed my video.
What are the pros and cons of this writing income stream?
Platform work is some of the most frustrating income I earn.
I know what my audience wants. I know, deep down, the platforms are trying to serve the right content to the right audience. But the way that is surfaced in the algorithm can be a little hairy. Sometimes I’ll be creating content I know is valuable and I know lots more people want to see and want to have access to. But for whatever reason, the algorithm doesn’t pick it up and there’s never recourse here. I can’t demand to get more views, I just have to do better next time.
You’re super dependent on somebody else’s business. If YouTube has a bad month, for example, if advertisers start to pull out, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just going to eat that in my paycheck. Likewise, if I break some kind of rule on Medium and I get banned, there’s nothing I can do.
I don’t think either of those things is likely, but as I said, I have no control.
That’s why with this writing income stream, it’s really important to try to start owning that relationship with your audience as soon as you can.
How can you grow this writing income stream?
The good thing about these streams is that they’re so accessible. All you need is consistency, a voice, and some excitement about what you’re saying.
You can go on LinkedIn, you can go on Instagram, you can go on Medium, and you can go on Twitter. All you have to do is create content and if you follow the rules of their distribution, your audience will find you. It’s very low stakes and very high rewards if you learn to do it right.
What I don’t like is that sometimes it’s hard to learn how to do it right. Then you invest all this energy learning how to do it right, and they change the rules for you. There’s nothing you can do about it.
How much did I earn from this writing income stream?
With platforms, I usually make about $3,000 a month. I’m never totally sure until the day the money comes in because again, I don’t control the algorithm. And unlike clients, I can’t just go out and look for more. If I were to start a new platform tomorrow, it would take me time to build up that audience to a level where I was earning money from it consistently. So it’s easy to get started. But it’s hard to keep going with platforms. That’s what I’ve learned.
Continue reading: How to Start a Freelance Business
Writing Income Stream #3: Yourself
This is the one everyone overlooks. It’s you. You’re your own writing income stream. You as a brand, you as a creator.
What is this income stream?
Remember: platforms have those three parties involved — you, the platform, and the audience.
When you’re considering yourself as a brand, the relationship is much smaller. It’s just you and your audience. The income that you get from this is by creating things that are valuable for your audience without any go-between. So, for example, this can be services like consultations, editing, or coaching. It can be products like templates or on-demand courses. It can be recommendations from affiliate links. If you’re looking to grow passive income for editors, you could opt for a downloadable checklist or similar.
What are the pros and cons of this writing income stream?
The most important thing that you have to remember is that you are marketing yourself to your audience. You have such an intuitive understanding of what your audience wants from you. And you have the tools to create something that’s going to be good for them, and you control the distribution stream.
I don’t have to count on an algorithm distributing my content because I know if I email it out, people who want to see it are going to click on that email.
How much do I earn from this writing income stream?
Unlike client work, I also have a lot more visibility and insight into how much I’m going to earn every month from myself as an income stream. So, for example, this month probably only going to be a couple hundred. But for January, February, and March, I was making between $3,000 and $5,000. The reason for this difference in scale is that it comes to earning money from yourself, you are the only limiting factor.
How can you grow this income stream?
You have to sell and you have to market yourself to your audience. And that can be a little painful sometimes. That’s my least favorite part about myself as an income stream. If I want to make money, I have to market myself. There are some automated income streams I have.
This is where most of my money is going to come from this month — I have a couple of evergreen email funnels set up where somebody signs up to my mailing list. They get some awesome free resources at the end. In the end, I offer a paid resource. So I’ll earn between $100 and $300 from that this month just through the automated systems. This is as close to a passive income for writers as I’ve ever experienced.
But if I want to earn the Big Bucks, I have to go out and get them. I have to promote stuff. I have to create a product. I have to market it to my list. And I have to hope that they’re interested in what I have to say.
What I love about this stream is that I know that they’re interested in what I have to say. And I know that I can create products that are awesome and valuable and solve problems for the people that I want to help. That’s an amazing feeling to have as a creator. To know that what you’re making, and what you’re building is valuable to the people who want to hear from you. It’s not the same as publishing on a platform or writing for clients.
That’s why I am, honestly, my favorite income stream. I love to earn money by creating products that I know other people will find valuable.
I lied. There’s just one stream: your writing talent.
What are the different types of income streams? You can fit all writing income streams into one of those three options.
But you can further condense those three down into just one: your own writing ability.
All these writing income streams feed into each other. Consider this non-hypothetical scenario. Imagine I published something on Medium. A potential freelance client finds it, reads it, and hires me. I publish an article on my freelance client’s site. A reader finds my byline. They see that I write about how to grow your blogging empire. They sign up for my mailing list.
Maybe I send a video to that reader as part of my mailing list. They are super engaged; they click on it. That causes whatever distribution engine behind the scenes on YouTube to think, “Oh, wow, this is obviously a super great video.” They push it up higher. That potentially exposes me to new audiences who can sign up to Medium or YouTube or my mailing list or who might hire me.
(This really happened, btw.)
These writing income streams are connected on a loop. The most important thing that you have to remember is that you are your talent. You are your value.
Whether you’re getting money through clients, whether you’re earning money from platforms, or whether you’re earning money from your audience, the one thing all those three things have in common is you, your values, your creative style, and your standards.
At the end of the day, those factors define the kind of money you make, how much you make, and what your potential is.
I hope this clarifies your thinking on how you earn money as a freelance writer/creator. I won’t list all the different streams you could have because there are honestly probably hundreds of different platforms, different client types, and different products you can sell to your audience.
Most streams of income will fall under one of those three brackets. The better you understand that, and the better you understand yourself which one of those three you prefer, and which one you want to build your business on, the faster you’ll be able to grow your blogging empire.
If you’re looking to build your poetry and writing career, consider joining the Poetry & Author Community of A Writers Business.
Zulie is a content creator, cat mom, 6-figure entrepreneur. Get 2x weekly emails on how to make money writing online: https://zuliewrites.ck.page/3e3d3a8187