Cameron Chapman

I make a living writing. It may not be a great living, but then again, I don’t really work that much (less than twenty hours a week on paid work). I’ve been making at least a portion of my monthly writing for almost two years now.

Photo by AMagill, via Flickr

Now, growing up I always dreamed of being a writer. I wrote and read constantly. My teachers said I had talent. I did writing workshops and summer programs. I wrote a lot of (really bad) poetry in high school, along with some short stories. In college and immediately after I wrote screenplays. I got involved in my first-ever writers group website (Zoetrope.com, run by Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope, and still a great place to go for critiques if you’re a writer). I got reasonably good reviews there, too. And I even had my screenplay requested by a production company (they’d seen it on the Zoetrope site).

Then I had the most severe case of writer’s block for about five or six years. I wrote very little in that time. I made a few attempts at starting a novel but nothing really worked.

In the summer of 2006 I started looking into blogging. It seemed like a great way to get my name out there and maybe make a little money on the side. So I started a WordPress.com blog, GreenStyle Magazine (which I still have, though it’s currently on hold until I have more time to focus on it). It went well. People visited. I decided to migrate to a self-hosted WordPress blog so I could run ads on my site. I posted like crazy, sometimes posting six or eight posts in one day. I was working full time, spent two hours a day commuting to and from work, and then came home in the evenings and wrote blog posts for another two or three hours (scheduling them to go up the following day, every couple hours).

I got more traffic. I read everything I could about blogging, including how to get more traffic, how to make money, designing blog themes, linkbait, and anything else I could get my hands on. I started looking at the ProBlogger.net job boards to see if there were other blogs out there I could write for. I applied for anything that looked like it might be a fit.

And then I got lucky (no, not that kind of lucky, get your mind out of the gutter). Mashable.com was looking for bloggers. At the time, I think they were ranked somewhere around #10 or #11 on Technorati’s 100 most popular blogs list (they’re now #5). I sent off the requested information in an email. Not long after I got an email from Mashable’s founder and CEO, Pete Cashmore. He wanted a writing sample. We bounced ideas around and finally I submitted an article to them on web design tools. That article was published on July 24th, 2007. I’ve written on a semi-regular basis for Mashable ever since.

I almost landed a great job with a startup blog after I started writing for Mashable, but sadly that fell through before it even got started. I’m still hoping it might get going again someday, and that the owner of that site will still be interested in bringing me on board.

My next paid writing gig came a little more out of the blue. I was looking to do more paid blogging last fall. Since I turned to writing full time, I had the time available. So I looked through the list of the top 20 or 30 blogs on Technorati. I brainstormed some ideas for a couple of them, and went to their sites to see if they were actively seeking writers. Smashing Magazine had instructions on their site for becoming a writer for them. I submitted what they asked for and within a couple days was working on my first blog post for them. I’m now writing regularly for them, too.

I’ve also just landed my third paid blogging gig. This one happened in a completely different manner. I was contacted through this site by someone looking for articles similar to what I’ve published. My first article for them will be done next week. I don’t want to disclose who it is yet, but I’ll add the article to my portfolio as soon as it’s up.

I’ve also played around with some other paid writing sites (like Helium.com). I’ve had very little luck making money with them and treat them more like practice sites and usually only write for fun (or to add writing credits). If someone was willing to invest more time in it than I am, I can see where you could make a nice supplemental income (and hey, it’s better than slinging burgers for a part-time job).

Here are some of my tips for making money blogging:

• Start off with your own blog. You need to build up some writing credits, prove that you can do this long term, and otherwise show you know how to write. You don’t need to build this into a huge and popular blog to land jobs with some great websites. But make sure it’s professional and regularly-updated. I was blogging for nearly a year before landing my first paid gig.
• Don’t sell yourself short. I see a lot of ads for blogs looking for writers who are only paying $5 or $10 a post. Unless that post is just a quick link and a couple of sentences, it’s not worth the time. Good blogging is hard work. It’s no different than writing an article for a magazine or newspaper. Would you write a feature article for a magazine for $5? Probably not. I’ve never blogged for so little pay (well, except on my own blog. That probably averages out to more like $.25 per post). I don’t want to disclose what I get paid per post, but I’ll put it this way: if I can write four or five posts in a week, I’m doing really well (posts take me an average of 3-6 hours to write, plus another hour or two for editing sometimes).
• Write great content! This one is really important. You have to write good content if you want to make it as a blogger. While it doesn’t need to be Shakespeare, it does need to be coherent and offer up information your readers are looking for.
• Read other blogs. You need to see what others are doing and what they’re writing about. Make sure you engage with other bloggers, too.
• Use WordPress! There are a lot of free blogging programs out there. WordPress is free (whether you choose to go with a WordPress.com blog or host it on your own server). It’s easy to use. It’s incredibly powerful. And there’s a great support community, thousands of free themes you can use, and plugins to allow you to do just about anything you could dream of.

There are plenty of other things to do as a blogger, but there are entire blogs devoted to those topics. Here are a few your should read if you’re thinking of starting a blog.

• ProBlogger.net: This blog focuses mostly on how to make money with your own blog and offers up great general blogging tips. It also has an awesome job board for finding paid blogging jobs.
• Daily Blog Tips: They offer up information on a daily basis about how to be a better blogger.
• Dosh Dosh: This blog is devoted to making money online and has a ton of resources on blogging (and marketing your blog).
• Adii Rockstar: Adii is a WordPress theme designer and entrepreneur. He’s got some great info for blogging and the Internet in general.
• John Chow dot com: John Chow makes a ton of money online. Blogging is only one part of that but he offers up plenty of information on how he does it.
• Northxeast: This blog focuses entirely on creating great blog content and becoming a great blogger.

If you have additional blogging tips or other ways to make a living writing, please share them in the comments.