Active and Passive Freelance Writing Income
First time writers have a lot to learn about making a living as a freelance writer online, and one of the lessons that many learn much later than they should is that there is more than one way to make a living writing online. If you’ve ever had a job, you understand the normal concept of employment. Work an hour, get paid for an hour. If you’re salary, work a month, get a month’s pay. While this model does exist (and is most prevalent) for freelance writers trying to make a living, there is also another payment model that writers must be made aware of.
Maybe as an example you ghost write a book for $1,000. But once that book is wrote, you get your money and that’s it. You never get royalties, you can’t re-use the writing or anything like that but the work that you’ve done you were paid for once and you will never receive another payment for that time spent.
Then there is another form of payment that is often referred to as passive or residual income. Passive income isn’t a recent idea, but the changes in technology and the Internet have made passive, or residual, income more common than ever. The best example of passive income before the Internet age would be royalties from a published novel.
Passive income takes place when an article you wrote, or web page, is online and continues to make money for you week by week, month by month, long after you’ve finished working on it. Usually this is done by having some kind of ads on the page where the writing is displayed, and when someone clicks on those ads the author gets at least a cut of the money made. This way an article that you write a year ago or more can continue to make money for you every week, month, or even day after you’ve finished working on it.
Maybe the most common way for pages to do this online is using Google AdSense. They’re the most famous, but there are many other advertisers who offer a cut, as well as affiliate marketing, and “pay per view” websites. Beyond these examples, there are also websites who take care of the money making aspects and allow writers to simply write and then give them a cut of whatever amount is made. This allows the writer to write and keep getting paid.
Online freelance writers are in a situation where they can actually earn both types of writing income: both passive and active. This is actually one of the best strategies that a beginning freelance writer can have. The one time payments help you pay the bills, learn your craft, and get an idea of how the markets work. Meanwhile, when you have sent out query letters or have all your bids out for online jobs, you can write for yourself and build up your passive online income. It takes a lot of time for passive income to grow, which is why it’s so important to have a writing strategy that uses both.
The combination of passive income and pay up front assignments can allow online freelance writers to make an excellent living. Many writers have a hard time with this, and the key is to be persistent, and to not give up. The more a writer sells, the better his or her portfolio is and the easier it becomes to get work. Far too many writers have given up in under a year, and so never learn the in and outs that could have made them successful business people, as well.
If you are a beginning freelance writer, please take heed of this article and don’t limit yourself to just one income stream. Freelance writers, especially early on, need all the income they can get, so work on both passive and active income streams and you won’t be sorry!
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