Get Your Writing Published

This is the second post in the series “How to Start SEO Copywriting.”

In order for someone to pay you to write, they are going to want to see content that you have written published on the internet. You’re going to have to write for free.

Before you get upset and say you can’t work for free, let me tell you my story.

I started my writing career as a blogger with a little personal blog. Then I met other writers and discovered paid blogging. It didn’t pay much but it was a little extra money.

Then, again through fellow writers, I found a site called eHow. They have now changed but at the time anyone could write how-to articles for them. They paid you a portion of the proceeds from ads that appeared on your article pages.

So I wrote. I wrote everything from recipes to articles on green funerals. In all, there were a little over 100 of them. But they weren’t simply random subjects, I took the time to find topics that I thought others would find interesting.

Once the online portfolio was in place, eHow was left behind and the articles were used as examples when looking for paid work.

But before I leave the subject of eHow, you need to know this. At first there was no pay, then after a few months it grew to $20 a month, then it grew a little more. And it became a residual income.

I wrote the articles, walked away and they kept earning. I usually received around $300 a month from them. Last year they approached all of the writers who had articles that were earning revenue with a buyout offer. They were changing their business model. I had the option of either taking the rights to my articles back or a check. The $10,000 came in handy.

Building a writing career is like building anything else. There’s a lot of sweat equity involved. But eventually it pays off.

In the next post in this series I will begin a discussion on finding places to get published. They’re out there!