First Website that Paid me Significant Money for Writing

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being an astronaut, a major league baseball player, or a writer. The first two didn't work out, and I never really had the confidence to try to pursue writing as a full-time endeavor until June of this year. Although I am still working at finding more clients and building a bigger income, I am earning enough that writing is now my full-time and only occupation. I'll use this blog to talk about the different websites available that pay you to write or help connect you with other paying clients. When I decided to try my hand a being a full-time writer and making a full-time income through writing, one of the first websites that I heard about was Constant Content. I signed up there and uploaded a few articles. They put your articles up for sale to clients who come to the site looking for content for their website. They have a handy feature that shows which articles have sold recently so you can figure out what topics are popular. They also allow clients to request specific articles on an open bulletin board like system. The request describes the article the client wants, how much they are willing to pay for it, and any other client comments. The articles that I posted to the site didn't do well. I sold only one. However, every time a new client requested content at the site, that I felt I could write well, I contacted them immediately through the messaging system at Constant Content and told them that I'd love to write the article for them, told them my price, and pointed them to a few related samples of my work on the web. Samples might be from sites like Digital Journal (although I hadn't found Digital Journal yet at that point). I would also ask them to issue a Private Request to me for future work. This worked very well. I quickly acquired a number of repeat customers who placed Private Requests, meaning the work orders were only visible to me and no other writers had a chance to compete for them. One of these clients asked me for 100 articles, another wanted 2 every week indefinitely, another wanted 30 articles, and so on. This really helped me starting out since it provided steady and ongoing income from writing. To make a long story short, Constant Content was the first site where I started earning hundreds of dollars on a regular basis from writing. The site advertises for new clients so they bring in quite a number of paying offers and sell a lot of articles. New authors can be successful there, IF you are proactive in contacting clients and aggressively offering your services. You need to work at being successful as a writer. In the old days , before the internet, it would have meant sending out queries and submitting to many different magazines or other publications. These days, it means contacting every prospective client you can find through the internet. Constant Content helps bring those clients together in one place. Of course, once you have connected with a client, you absolutely must deliver quality work meeting the customer's demands, and you must deliver it on-time if you want repeat business. You should always look for repeat business since that will mean you get to spend more time writing (and being paid for it) and less time looking for new clients. Constant Content is mostly about articles that can stand up over time. There are some clients looking for very timely articles for blogs and such, but most of the content requests are wanted for websites or print publications that want them to draw readers for months or years. Reviews, health and dieting information, parenting tips, and things like that do well there, but there are many, many popular topics and I don't want you to think you have to write only about a few narrow topics to be successful. You can even offer "single usage" rights for articles that you have previously published somewhere else, provided the original publisher doesn't own the article under whatever terms you sold it to or published it with them. This site really helped me to start establishing an income through writing, and I hope you have success there as well. Of course, sites like Digital Journal are great too. To make a good living as a writer, my opinion is that you need to write every single day. Digital Journal provides a good outlet for that and pays you based on the popularity of your articles. It's great to have multiple sources of writing income coming in. I'm currently writing (and earning money from) 11 different websites. I don't think writing for just one or two is going to get you the full-time income for which you are looking, though others might have a different experience. I recommend setting aside a certain time everyday for writing. It is at least as important to set specific goals like finishing 3 articles each day, contacting at least 1 new potential client every day, or signing up with at least one new website each week. If you want regular writing income you need to set consistent goals and work at it every day. Writing is not a free ride, but like any other job, the harder you work, the more success you will find. And just like any job, if you want to get paid, you need to show up every day and put in your hours.