Make Good Money Working at Home as a Self-Published Writer

Does making a good living as a self-published writer seem too good to be true? It isn’t. Forget the old stereotype of the ‘starving writer.’ There are plenty of people out there right now making good money writing for a living.

Thousands of ebooks, articles, manuals, newsletters, and white papers are published in print and online every year. And the demand for information is still growing. Do you want to be a part of this income-generating opportunity? This article will show you how.

Find a Market with Money to Spend

The biggest mistake that new writers make is to come up with an idea and then try to find a market for it. If you’re independently wealthy and you can afford to write about whatever you want, then this way will work just fine for you. For the home-based business that actually needs to make money, it makes more sense to locate the market first.

People won’t buy what they don’t want. On the other hand, they are often willing to pay large amounts of money to get what they do want. How do you know what people want? Go onto sites like overture.com and see which keywords people used the most. Or you can go to yahoo and look at the top searches for the week or the month.

Do you see anything in this list that you would feel comfortable writing about? Is there something there you would be willing to research? Once you locate a few likely topics it’s time to test them for profitability.

Make Sure Your Chosen Topic is Profitable

Remember, we’re trying to make money in this home-based venture. You know that people are interested in this topic. But are they willing to pay money to read about it? You can test this. Go to eBay and type in a search related to your eBook topic. Let’s say you want to write a report on choosing a daycare service. You might type in ‘daycare service report’ into the search box.

This will bring up results. Now go to the advanced search and click on the closed bids option. Now you will see what items similar to your own actually sold for. If 4 reports like yours sold for $15, it’s safe to assume that your clients will want to pay that much for yours as well.

You now have some decisions to make. You have to decide if it’s worthwhile writing your report. You figure this out by estimating how long it will take you to write the report. Multiply this by how much you think your time is worth. Take this number and divide it by the price of your report. So if you think it will take 5 8 hour days (or 40 hours) to write your report, and your time is worth $20 per hour, then your report has to make $800 (20 x 40) just to break even. That’s approximately 54 reports.

Write Your Content

Once you find a report that is profitable to write, it’s time to sit down and write it. If you’ve never written a report or ebook before, study what other people have done. Look at how they set up their content. You may want to check out a how-to book from the library. Don’t rush through this. Offer high-quality material, you will have repeat customers.

Market Your Content

Plan your marketing strategy carefully. Are you going to publish your informational product in print or as an electronic download? Who wants content like yours? How can you reach them?

Finding the answers to these questions requires research. If you are marketing something to parents, you may want to place an ad in a parenting newspaper, magazine, or internet site. You will want a simple website that sells the product as well. You can also turn excerpts from your product into short articles that you submit to article sites. Just remember to start small and eliminate the marketing options that are not working.

If you have always wanted to run your own home-based writing basis, now is a great time to start. Do your research, find your market, and you will soon be generating income for years to come.