How to Use Your Writing Skills for a Home Based Business
A cursory internet search for home-based business opportunities will throw up literally millions of results showing the popularity of the concept today and a growing trend for people looking to take control back into their working lives. As with many things on the internet, you do need to steer clear of the snake oil merchants peddling little or no information in the hope of making their own fortunes. You can generally spot these sites quite easily. They're the metre long sales pages telling you how you can make thousands of dollars (or pounds) with absolutely no effort. If you take your time and look carefully though, you'll see lots of opportunities that are real and could work, if you're willing to put in the effort.
One of the most popular areas of discussion in recent years has been around having a home-based freelance writing business, producing web content, articles and copywriting for customers across the world. While this may, on the surface, seem to be an easy area to get into, it's actually quite a difficult sector to establish yourself in. The market may be enormous, but so is the competition. There are literally thousands of amateur and professional writers out there already offering their services
Getting started is probably the hardest part and building a portfolio of work is crucial if you are going to be able to show your prospective clients what you can do for them. Many budding writers make the mistake of shooting straight for the high paying customers and soon realise that their experience, and sometimes skill level, is not sufficient to meet the customer's expectations. Start slowly and work towards creating a portfolio of your written work that potential customers can examine. Make it a showcase for your skills. To do this working from home is relatively easy. You can set your own targets and don't have to be driven by deadlines, at least not yet. There are a great many websites that you can write for, or publish articles to, that will allow you to publish your writing for free, on almost any subject. Sites which allow you to get feedback or that rank your writing may be of even greater value to you if you're looking for opinion on the quality of your work. This means you have a live web link that you can supply to a client, allowing them to see your work on someone else's website.
Once you've established a portfolio, you will be in better shape to approach new clients. Your confidence will be higher as you now have examples of what you can achieve. Try looking for places where writers might get hired. Look for freelance writing websites advertising job opportunities. Try Craigslist for your local area or even internationally. If you want to target web content writing, or copywriting as some call it, try going to forums where website owners and developers are swapping information. Many of these site owners or marketers do not write their own page content and they will be able to give you clear direction on what subjects they are looking for. Be careful not to get into subjects that you know nothing about until you are confident that you can research and write quality content quickly. Your reputation hangs on being able to take a requirement and deliver the content, right first time and on time.
How many times have you read a web page that looks to be either badly written or not written by someone with a firm grasp of English? Instead of leaving the website, why not send a message to the website owner and ask if they would like some assistance to rewrite their content. Many non-English speaking webmasters would welcome help from a native English speaker and you might just land a job through it.
Making money online working from home is never going to be easy but with the right approach and skills, it's just possible you could give yourself an opportunity to change your life and take back a little control of your working time. It takes dedication, perseverance and skill to write for a living in such a saturated marketplace but many have proved that writing can be a successful home-based business option.