How to use multiple income streams to feed your body and spirit with your writing.
I fell in love with writing almost forty years ago.
I’d always been an avid reader. But it was my seventh grade English teacher who introduced me to the idea that I could write my own stories. From that year on I wrote short stories, plays, and I even wrote a serialized novel and carried it around with me in my Trapper Keeper.
I rarely showed my writing to anyone. I was writing for me. It was never presented as a career, a way to make a living.
Feeding Just the Body is Draining
Later in life, as a single mom of four, I needed a way to pay the bills and put food on the table. And to me, and it seemed to everyone else back then, that meant working a 9 to 5 job in the brick and mortar world.
For my parents’ generation, you chose a career path and that was what you stuck to. You worked for one company until you could retire, hopefully with a pension.
Back then, you made a choice and you stuck with it, forever.
For me, as a single mom of four, I was constantly trying to get a better job, one that would cover the bills. I didn’t have the luxury of a job that would also feed my spirit, although a couple of them came close.
I was never truly happy with my work.
I either had a job I hated that paid the bills or a job I loved, that paid so little, I’d have to take part-time jobs to supplement. I was still writing, often well into the wee hours of the morning. It left me exhausted, stressed about finances, and took me away from my children.
In June of 2011, my father passed away. Because I was doing freelance work at the time, I was able to be at his hospital bedside for the last two weeks of his life. That experience made me even more determined to have my own business and never go back to that 9 to 5 rat race.
My guess is, you can probably relate.
Is your job leaving you exhausted and drained because it pays well but doesn’t feed your spirit? Or, are you stressed out over finances because you love your job but it doesn’t quite pay the bills? Do you know there’s more out there if you could just figure out how to get started or scale up what you’re doing now?
If so, it’s time to make some decisions to get you on a better path.
The first thing is to visualize your perfect day five years from now. Shaunta Grimes has a great exercise to help you imagine your perfect day. It’s a great way to figure out what kind of thing will feed your spirit.
Diversify Income Streams to Earn a Living
The truth is very few writers, fiction or nonfiction, earn a livable wage just writing one thing.
Many successful writers have discovered that writing novels isn’t reliable enough to provide for a family. The secret to being a successful working writer, one who earns enough to pay all the bills and maybe take that vacation every year or buy that new car, is diversification.
If you’re new to the idea of writing paying the bills or at least some of them, you may wonder how writers get paid. There are many many different ways to be paid as a writer but, I’ll list some of the main ones below:
Freelance Writing (Fiction or Nonfiction)
I started out with freelance writing. What I didn’t know when I started is that there are a ton of different types of freelance writing you can do to earn money.
The sooner you figure out what type of writing you’re best suited for, the sooner you can start making decent money through your writing.
If you’re persuasive or can sell things, you might want to look at copywriting or B2B content writing, or writing blog posts for small businesses.
If you’re an educator or teacher at heart, you might be well-suited to writing long-form articles or blog post content for B2C companies, writing curriculum for educational programs, or writing grant proposals for non-profit organizations.
If telling stories is your jam, consider writing personal essays, ghostwriting short stories or novels, brand stories for businesses, game scenarios for video game developers, or case studies for businesses.
Written content is everywhere, not just in newspapers, magazines, and on webpages. It’s there in the instruction manual for putting up your tent or using your new phone, the email sequence you get from your favorite author, and the operating manual for the new machine at work.
In fact, more and more companies now are utilizing freelance writers to do a lot of the written content they need. Freelance writing is even in the product descriptions of your favorite online shopping website, the billboard in the plaza, that commercial you love, and sometimes in the blurb and book description on your favorite author’s Amazon page.
Blogging
If you’ve been using the Internet for any length of time, you know what blogging is. But you might not know how bloggers make money with their writing. In fact, you may have a blog that you’ve been writing for months or longer without even realizing how you could monetize it.
Bloggers earn money in various ways. The biggest of these is affiliate marketing and ad revenue. Believe it or not, most companies offer some type of affiliate program. All you need is an affiliate account with a company and when you recommend that company’s products or services, you include your affiliate link in your blog post. It’s that simple. You probably link to things you like or recommend all the time if you already have a blog. Why not get paid for doing it? It’s a win-win situation.
Bloggers can also monetize their blogs by placing ads on their sites. The ads can be random and often unrelated to your blog content or they can be more targeted and directly related to content. How you do it is up to you. Companies pay to place ads on your blog which will be seen by visitors to your site. The more traffic you have to your site, the more money you can make.
But writers can also write blog posts for other people. You can write blog posts regularly for corporations, small businesses, and even individuals. Some of these ongoing blog post writing projects can be very lucrative. Corporations often pay several thousand dollars monthly for targeted, SEO content that gets their business seen online.
Teaching
If you have experience writing, you can teach others how to do what you know. But you can also use your writing to teach others about any number of different topics.
You only have to be a few steps ahead of your audience to be an effective teacher.
There are also a ton of platforms out there for those with a degree in a subject to teach formally. You can teach young children who are homeschooling or doing public online school, or teach adults returning to college or working on a graduate degree, or even help people all over the world who want to speak better English or just learn about a different culture.
Coaching/Consulting
One of the things that has happened organically for me is coaching. I have several clients every month who pay to get on a call with me once a week. On those calls, we talk about what they’ve been working on and what their goals are and I help them figure out the best ways to make their goals a reality.
For some, coaching is about the accountability of checking in with someone every week. For others, knowing they have someone to help them bounce ideas around and figure out the next steps is what keeps them moving forward in their plans.
Several of my clients frequently need help with the technology they need to do their business online. I also offer live tech help calls to small groups of writers.
There Are Other Ways to Monetize Your Writing
You can write an e-book and sell it, or create a course that you distribute via email or sell on Amazon.
One of my future goals is to build passive income through a YouTube channel and some courses and books. Passive income will keep coming in even when I stop working, whether due to age or illness.
For me, the place where writing, technology, and teaching come together is my sweet spot. It’s what I’m good at and it’s what I love. It feeds my spirit. And now that my fees for that are more aligned with my income goals, it’s a great income stream for me that is helping me meet my financial goals for my writing business.
So, here I am, more than forty years from when I first fell in love with writing and my writing not only feeds my spirit, but it feeds my family too.
How to Start Your Journey to Being a Non-Starving Artist
I talk to writers every day as part of the Ninja Writers community. Most of them are my age or older and they all want the same thing, to write.
Many of them start out not thinking about how to make money from their writing. They’re retired, their kids are grown, and it’s finally “their time” to explore what they love. Sure money from writing is nice, but not everyone has to have that extra income stream. But then again, some of us, myself included, do need it.
So if you want or need to earn money from your writing, the first thing to do is determine how much money you need to earn. Set an annual income goal.
Then break that annual amount down into monthly amounts. Once you have the amount you need to earn each month to meet your goal, start planning how you can do that.
Can you sell an e-book to 100 people for $5? That’s $500. Or can you start a membership program where people pay $25 a month? Can you pull in just ten people to pay that much each month? That’s $250 a month. Or maybe you can write blog posts or articles that pay between $200-$400 each.
If you do five posts a month at even $300, it’s $1,200 per month income for you.
Figure out what you can do to earn the money you need monthly to meet your annual goal. Be sure to consider all the different types of freelance writing and to diversify your income streams as much as possible to meet your goal.
I guarantee that as soon as you set that annual goal and know that amount you need to make monthly, you will begin to see opportunities around every corner.
I’ve Surpassed My Goal and I’m No Longer A Starving Artist
That’s how it happened for me, actually several times over the last decade or so. Every time I would set a goal, determined to make my writing business a priority, an opportunity would pop into view that would make my goal a reality.
It just happened to me again in December of last year. I set an income goal. I wanted to replace my inheritance income with my writing and start putting money into the bank to save for a new house.
I gave myself one year to replace that income.
By February, I had someone pay me to teach a technology class — before I had even created the course! A month after that I had two private coaching clients and a weekly group tech call with everyone in the group paying monthly. By April, my tech calls had attracted the attention of Ninja Writers founder, Shaunta Grimes, who offered to pay me to teach them for her members.
And now in July, I’ve not only met the goal I set back in December, but I’ve also surpassed it. In just six short months. And I love what I do every day.
You can do it too. Set your goal and make a plan. Put your intention out there in the world.
And go do what you love, what feeds your spirit. Then monetize that passion so you can feed your body too.
Ready to find more freelance writing jobs? Get my free Market Mondays newsletter every week. It’s chock full of links to writing jobs and other markets that pay writers and my best tips and tricks for freelance writers.
Meg Stewart has been freelancing for nearly two decades. She’s a multi-passionate skill hoarder and the intersection of freelance writing, technology, and teaching is her sweet spot. Freelance Filter was founded to help writers get paid and help solopreneurs do business better. Meg and her family, (along with two dogs, two cats, and two leopard geckos), live in Northeast Ohio.