Turning Pro
Jun 8th, 2008 by alyoung
What is the difference between a pro athlete and an amateur one? Most people will say the pro athlete is more skilled and play at a higher level of competition. Most of the times that is true but not always. For instance there are many amateur golfers who are just as skilled as professional golfers. Yet they are considered amateurs. The main criteria in determining if an athlete is an amateur or pro is if they are being paid. Once you sign a contract or accept prize money you lose your amateur status forever and you are considered a professional.
If we go by that definition I guess I would now be considered a professional writer since I have recently been getting paid for my writing. Not much but I still got paid. My ramblings on this blog are still amateurish to say the least but you can add freelance writer to my list of titles. Here are some of my paid and published writing projects.
E-book: Not only am I a writer I am an author. I have co-authored a real estate e-book titled “Tenant in Common Investing-The Uncommon Path to Massive Profits”. Writing this book has been quite an educational and hopefully profitable experience. It is a lot of work to write a book, but once you write the book it is quite rewarding. There are many benefits of an e-book over a regular book. First the costs to publish an e-book is very cheap compared to a regular book. We got our initial printing costs of the e-book back on the first day of sale. What other business can do that? There is also no inventory to carry. You don’t have to print a lot of books and have no one buy it. Once someone buys a book they just download it. You can also charge more for an e-book than a regular book. If you go to Barnes and Noble you will see a 1,000 page hardback book being sold of under $30. Yet e-books of 50-75 pages can sell for as much as $60 and people buy it. E-books can also be sold 24 hours a day. I can wake up and see that I sold several books overnight to people from anywhere in the world. We have some marketing campaigns coming up to promote the book and I have a few ideas for other books I am working on.
Ehow: I am also writing articles for a “How To”website. You can check out the site here. These are all instructional type articles on a variety of subjects. This has been my bread and butter so far as a writer. You won’t find my name on any articles on the site. That is because I go through an agent who I get my assignments from and they sell it to Ehow. I sell the rights to my articles as well so it appears on ehow as written by staff even though it was written by a contractor(me). This month I have written over 60 articles for ehow. Am I an expert on 60 subjects? Hardly, I don’t think I am an expert on even two subjects, but 10 minutes of Google research and I am qualified to write an article instructing others. For example I have written 5 articles on variations of “How to Snowshoe” and I have snowshoed exactly once in my life. For the amount of work Ehow pays decently. They also pay quickly. Once my article is approved they paypal me immediately. I have been so busy with these articles that I have outsourced some of my assignments to a writer in India. I just edit the articles and send it on. This frees me up for other writing projects.
SEO Writing: SEO stands for search engine optimization. This type of article is writing for the Internet. It is just like regular article writing but for the Internet. For example I might be asked by a client to write a 400-500 word article on “Getting a Mortgage” using the keyword “California Mortgages”. That means I have to write the article on “Getting a Mortgage” but 3-5% of the words must contain the phrase “California Mortgages” That is because when someone types in the phrase “California Mortgages” in a search engine such as Google, the article and information on my client’s company will appear prominently. This kind of writing is a little tricky until you get the hang of it but I prefer it. So far I have only written a few articles for 1 client but I hope to do more of this type of articles as I think there is a good demand for it.
Miscellaneous: In addition to these other projects I have few other articles scattered among several web sites. These are short articles that pay very little, but it gets some exposure and I can build my writing resume. Here is an example of such an article.
Writing and blogging is fun and a good creative release for me, but anything is even more fun if you get paid for it.
