Granted, you love to write.

Anything, from opinion pieces to pastime stories; non-fiction to political features.

Not only do you want to write some more, you sure even want someone to pat you on the back and embrace you. Who knows, your write-up might even go viral?

At the end of the day, you really don’t care about any of those. If you can’t pay the bills, those perks won’t matter altogether. You want what those side-attractions will eventually lead you to . . .

More money.

Yes, writing is good and so is getting your literary works in the front of a large audience. But if you’re reading this, I take it that you’re tired of endlessly “getting busy” doing the wrong things, depending on peers and parents for daily bread – and that you’ve probably thought of becoming the next Linda Ikeji to make any sense of writing text for pay online.

It isn’t that you can’t make something profitable as getting millions of ad clicks (and money) from your blog, you can eventually get there.
Except you’ll have to go back in time, start punching your keyboard furiously, be the one who gets to break strings of headline stories again and again. Either that, or you keep getting dog-tired of “making money online” or not sure where your next meal comes from.

Or so you’ve always thought.

What if there could be another way to write and get paid for your efforts? What is if it can be done in lesser time, without anyone knowing about it?

Most Nigerian writers don’t have the faintest idea of earning profitable income from their craft, or they aren’t getting paid enough for creating content, or both. Bottom line, most of us aren’t making money.

Why is that?

The Business Side of Freelancing is everything

You’re likely thinking of freelance writing as a part-time job you can take on, which lets you work on those passions you’ve always wanted to work on – and let you live the plush life you want.

But hear this:

If you really want to get paid to write online, you need to handle it as a normal business:

1. You need to have a product or service in this case, which is your writing skill (in other words, something to sell)

2. You need to look for who are willing to pay you to write for them (in other words prospecting)

3. You need to contact and communicate your value to them, and why your service will be a good value for their money (in other words marketing)

4. Once you land the client, you work with them and monitor how your writing efforts meet their initial expectations (in other words customer service and satisfaction)

5. Iterate and continue tweaking the process (in other words, continuity).

This entire process essentially defines your business framework as a freelance writer, which will allow you work with clients from anywhere in the world, regardless of whether English is your fifth language or you don’t have a Paypal account.

Does this process take time?

It does, because it should – any business in which thousand-dollar weeks for writing articles are frequent, is flexible and independent of your location, by definition, is going to require you to an investment of time and creativity to get established.

It’s the same question others keep asking themselves if it’s really possible to break away from slave-writing a quality 500-word article for $2.

Or chasing middlemen who use dead-in-the-water tactics to game search engines with N300 articles they buy from you.

If earning decent rates like $70 per piece you write seems like impossibility, then this post is for you. You need a push to show you why you’re making little or no money where you’re in your freelance writing career – where you’ve no results to show for your time and efforts.

Let’s go through the reasons why that’s happening, and what you can do to fix it:

Problem #1: You’re Chasing Opportunities, Not Running a Business

You’re likely juggling way too many options, and worrying over a whole lot that running a stable writing business seems next to impossible.

The most common problem that freelance writers face is getting a steady stream flow of clients who pay them well. In other words, you’re not sure where your next paycheck will come from.

And if there’s no cash flow, then it doesn’t matter for how long you browse, how many e books you buy or money seminars you attend, because you’ll soon run out of money so fast that renewing your web hosting account will even be an issue.

So the first line of action is deciding to start a writing business that consistently attracts clients. Here are some reasons you might not be experiencing that yet, and what you can do about it:-

1. “I can only get paid $20 per article”: First things first, you need to be sure there’re some people on planet earth that are willing to pay you pretty decent rates to write articles for them. If you find it hard to believe, or think this is another joke, you’ll never stop earning 150 naira per article. Chances are if you even think $20 is good money for you as a freelance writer, you’ve got a problem you need to fix. Way more than what you see around, clients are ready to pay you profitable rates to write articles for them.

2. You’re not sure you deserve it: One thing is for you to accept a fact; another is to see how it applies to you. If you’re convinced that people are really paying freelance writers good cash online, that’s great. But what if you feel YOU are not worth it? It has happened to me, and I can vividly remember the feeling when I got an e mail when someone was ready to pay me $575 for writing a 15-paged report, to be submitted in 48 hours. I’ve always thought I was confident enough to ask for and get such rates, but once the reality dropped in and I got the Paypal notification, I almost felt like I was robbing the client!

I needed to really know why clients would be ready to pay such fees for what I felt wasn’t worth it. My discovery shows that once I keep honing my craft, looking at the right places for clients and writing pieces that attract them, it all comes down to the Law of Cause and Effect – that I should really be paid that much for my writing efforts.

For the sake of landing more clients and closing sales faster, it’s necessary to know that you deserve higher rates. Tell yourself, and never let a day go without taking sharp, definite steps to sharpening your writing skills.

3. Nigeria is no Business-Friendly: If you’re just writing worthless crap and useless garbage to “game” the search engines, then it won’t be friendly for you. Even if you’re able to get one or two clients for a start, you won’t be able to keep them (or get new ones) because let’s face it, your work is useless; and if you were a client, I’m sure you won’t go back to the same writer who keeps producing content that never get results.

But, if you write and improve as you go on, you need not worry a bit about the peculiarity of being a Nigerian citizen or the harsh business conditions associated with it. Businesses want results, and they’ll gladly pay anyone who gets results for them. Once you’re reliable, diligent and good enough to write great content, no one’s ever going to ask you where you come from. There’re other things you should worry about as a freelance writer, and trust me, where you come from is NOT one of them – not even Paypal issues, or the degrees you have.

4. No writer website: If your goal is to write for money, not just to throw off your political sentiments, you need a marketable platform. You’ll be working and interacting with your clients mostly online, and if you can’t be stable enough to buy a domain name and dedicate fixed hours per week to develop and market your website, then you simply don’t deserve to be taken serious – and yes, this also applies to your hosting.

And while you’re at it, get a self-hosted Wordpress blog, not a free one. In other words, use BusinessBlogger.com, and not BusinessBlogger..

5. Your writer website sucks: No matter how good you’re and for how long you’ve worked on your skills; nothing is worse than your inability to explain to a 7-year old how your writing services will benefit clients – it’s even worse than having no website at all.

Once you’ve your site up and running, your site should tell us who your bio, the services you offer, who you work for, how clients can work with you, what others think about your work and relevant writing experience.

In all, we’re looking at 4-5 pages on your website for a start; Your website probably need a total revamp if you can’t write coherent, readable copy, and take time to edit and proof-read each page for grammar, relevance and sentence flow.

6. You’re writing for passion, not for business: It’s a popular, yet deadly career advice that’s telling you that you need to follow your passion to make money. You aren’t in a position right now to know your true passion, and how to monetize it. So, why should you keep deceiving yourself when you can study what works, and apply it?

The only time this advice will even work, is when your passion coincides with what people want to buy, and the chances of that happening is less than 2% when you start out. Except you’ll be snagging up a Special Adviser on Communications gig, your political ranting blog is of no use to your writing career . . . or you’d be patient long enough for Arianna Huffington to invite you to come write for Huffington Post.

7. Not setting clear active hours: Once you start seeing yourself earning high freelance rates for your writing services, there are chances you get carried away and think you need to work 14 hours per day to get started. If you’ll be starting from a cyber café, you’d likely get burnt out if you keep buying tickets for hours unending, and ultimately achieving little.

How you allocate specific hours each week to your writing business is crucial to getting more done. Never end a day without detailing how the next day would look like, as regards your writing.

Are you going to tweak your Home Page copy? Send out new Letters of Introduction (LOIs) to new prospects you just qualified? Update your Blog? Settle on 5 key activities you’ll get done, and work on getting them done.

At the very least, this will make sure you still get things moving even you’ve got no laptop, you have less than 4 hours to spend on your business daily and with no day job to offset your bills.

8. No ‘sparkling’ clips (or writing samples): Since you won’t the only writer around, clients need you to give them a reason they should hire you, and NOT SOMEONE ELSE. An effective way to do this is by having a writing portfolio relevant to the services you offer.

Though you might just be starting out, no client likes to think their job will be your first. Here’s the good news? You can create writing clips that will convince clients to use your services.

In a normal day job, you can’t get jobs without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job. Sound familiar?

Yes, it’s more difficult to get an assignment without clips;

Fixing your freelance writing business, one word at a time

Every writer could certainly use some help to get better in their craft – while most definitely need all the help they can possibly get.

So which problem are you going to fix first?

It depends on where you’re in the freelancing journey.

If you’ve already earned a benchmark of at least $100 in the past by simply stringing words together, then you deserve a pat on the back. Now, you need to work your way back, and see what you can learn from the past. If you’re careful enough to notice how you got that gig (and all that went down with it), you’d be able to conclude on a tip (or set of tips) that worked for you back then, and how it applies to where you’re today.

If earning decent rates as a freelance writer sounds strange to you, then start at the beginning – start by knowing how good you are. It’s as simple as telling yourself you can definitely pull this off. Don’t wait until you’re perfect (because you’ll never think you’re) – just strive to get the minimum required writing skills that someone out there would appreciate, and pay for.

Write an article today, yes just ONE

Pick a simple concept (anything for now will do), and try to scribble (or type out) the idea in as much words as you can. Don’t worry about the word count, grammar blunders or the glaring errors. Your aim is to explain the concept convincingly to an imaginary friend, sitting across the kitchen table. If you can pull it off in 700 words, good; if it’s 2000, so be it.

Are you done?

If you’ll be using this strategy (and I strongly suggest you should), chances are you’ll feel like punching yourself for the crap you just produced, you might even feel sorry for yourself.

But don’t.

A better writer is always practicing. You’re only great at what you repeatedly do.

Once you’re done with the first draft (yes, that’s the first), let your mind incubate for a while and put away the write-up. Do everything else, apart from whining about it.

Walk away, get a good night’s sleep and plan to take a new look at your draft first thing in the morning.

Now, you’ll be looking at it with fresh eyes, and you’ll definitely see the need for radical editing – I can assure you of that.

You’ll notice how some words don’t fit together, why a paragraph shouldn’t follow the next and better words to replace an existing one.
And the list goes on. By all means, make all the corrections you deem necessary, move the words around and take a look at your new draft. It should be an improved and better version of the first.

Fold the paper neatly and get ready to type. You’ve got to punch the keys to present your article in an easily-digestible and readable structure.
Now, can I ask you a quick question? How long are you willing to wait before your writing skills start bringing in money?

It’s crucial that you set realistic goals. If you bump into it as though you’re expecting the big break tomorrow, you’re going to burn out rapidly and ultimately lose interest, before you ever make a dime.

And if you choose not to move at an acceptable progressive rate, you might find yourself failing to catch up with market realities and find it hard to pay your bills.

So what kind of race do you plan to run as per your freelance writing career?

If you’re willing to spread it out so it can span up to 2 years before consistently making money, then a good strategy is to start honing your craft, learn about the mechanics of writing persuasive content for the web, get better at marketing to clients and closing sales.

It’s a long shot, I know.

What if you’re willing to see results sooner? I can get you some help. One of the most important secrets of successful freelance writers is to surround themselves with inspirational case studies of real people like themselves already making it.

What spurs you better than seeing others already achieving what you’re planning to?

For example, you can check out 19 Lucrative Online Markets and Projects Currently Paying Handsome Rates to Freelance Writers, the 2014 Version. I'm compiling a list of niches, industries, markets and writing specialties that anyone with a profitability mindset and the willingness to succeed can study, run with it, and use to turbo-charge their freelance writing career.

And yes, it’s free. Once it's ready, you'll see the active link in my signature.

Till then, what are you going to do today, to contribute positively to your writing business?

Ђø̲̣̣w really can one start for α start I won't mind $20 α piece....I feel very interested A̶̲̥̅̊₪d̶̲̥̅̊ I do hope ÝÒu'ld reply me soonest thanks