If you’re looking for income streams for writers you’re in the right place. Not only do I make money blogging and freelancing, but I know many other ways you could make money as a writer. Whether you want to write books, create online courses, ghostwrite, or leverage your writing skills in other ways – there are plenty of options out there.
In this guide, you’ll not only find out the best income streams for writers, but you’ll also find out why writing is the best thing you could master.
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Starting a Newsletter
The first income stream you could pursue through writing is a newsletter. The reason I chose this one to be first is because starting a newsletter gives you multiple ways to monetize. This has become 10x easier through the Beehiiv platform, which allows you to monetize in many different ways. Let’s go over what they are.
Recommendations (Boosts)
If you have an audience, it should be pretty easy to get some subscribers. With Beehiiv, you could make money by simply getting people to sign up to your newsletter. When you set up your newsletter in beehiiv (must have the scale plan), they allow you to apply to boost (or recommend) other people’s newsletters. Other newsletters set a price per subscriber (you will see it when you apply), and whenever someone subscribes to your newsletter, a pop-up will come up saying something along the lines of, “you may like these newsletters as well”.
If your new subscribers subs to those other ones, you’ll make money.
If the newsletter has email boosts turned on as well, you could also recommend them within a newsletter post, and when people sign up through the post, you’ll also make money.
Affiliate Marketing
Another method to make money through a newsletter is affiliate marketing. All you have to do is recommend useful products that you know your audience will use and if they use the products, you’ll make a commission. You want to make sure you do this sparingly and only recommend good products because your audience will know when you are just looking for a sale. The best thing you could do is mention products that actually help you.
Sponsored Posts
This may take a while of building an audience, however, once your newsletter is big enough, you could get sponsored by different companies in your niche.
The amount you could charge will heavily rely on the amount of subscribers you have and the open rate of your newsletter. Also, different niches have different budgets. For example, if you have a lot of subscribers in the finance niche your subscribers will be worth more than most niches.
Finding sponsorship could be a challenge, however, with Passion Froot, you could easily connect with different businesses and streamline the sponsorship process.
The great part about Passion Froot is that it’s not only for newsletters. If you have a big audience on YouTube, X, Instagram, or TikTok you could easily get sponsorships for those channels as well.
Ads
Within Beehiiv, you could also get Ad opportunities. The thing about the ad opportunities on Beehiiv is they are CPC based. Meaning, you only get paid based on clicks to the ads. If you get a relevant ad, it could bring in a good amount of money.
If you want to sign up for Beehiiv, here’s a link for a 30 day free trial!
Writing Ads (copywriting)
Great ads take effective writing skills. Whether you’re creating ads for your own business, or for someone else’s you could make good money.
There’s a lot of money in writing copy for ads because of the fact that conversions make money. So although it’s not as much writing as a blog post would be, if you get really good at it you could make as much money for a short paragraph as you could for a 1000 word blog post.
If you want to learn copy, I’d suggest simply going on YouTube and learning through all the free videos available.
Starting a Blog
When it comes to writing, this is probably the most common income stream you hear about. To start a successful blog, you need to make sure you have a couple of things down pat.
First off, you need to choose a niche. Gone are the days where you could just write about your life and make money.
Secondly, you need to write completely about every topic in that niche. Google takes topical authority into consideration. So if you’re writing all over the place, you can’t expect your blog to grow.
For example, if you’re in the finance niche. You can’t write 3 posts about credit cards and then move on to saving money. You need to write all the posts you can about credit cards to cover the topic thoroughly, then move on.
Blogging is a long process and can take a while to make money.
Lastly, you don’t want to just start a blog, you want to build a brand. The key is to get traffic from as many sources as possible.
Write Books
If you have expertise in anything, consider writing a book.
With Amazon KDP, it’s extremely easy to publish a book on your own. While publishing is the easy part, finding topics to write about within your expertise may be hard.
However, I have a game plan for that (if you’re interested). Use Reddit. On Reddit you could find the pain points of your audience pretty easily. If you scan the posts of people looking for advice you’ll have plenty of pain points to cover for your book.
Reading through Reddit all day long could take up some time, so you may be wondering if there’s a more efficient way to do this. There is.
By using Gummy Search, a tool where you could find, organize, and search subreddits, you could quickly find pain points.
Here’s how it works. Once you enter in a keyword, it will compile a list of the biggest subreddits within that niche. Then, it uses AI in order to summarize aspects of the subreddits from pain points to solution requests.
I recently wrote my first Ebook based on feedback I got from Gummy Search.
YouTube Scripts
You can make money via YouTube scripts in a couple of different ways. First off, you could be a script writer for businesses that don’t have the time to do it themselves. Many businesses are looking to take their written content and turn them into videos, however, repurposing the script to fit the YouTube algorithm could be time consuming.
Here’s why a good script writer is important & can make a lot of money.
The game of YouTube is about attention. When you are good at writing scripts that start with a hook and transitions that keep people engaged you could make a whole lot of money.
It’s similar to how copywriting is valued highly. The higher the retention of a Youtubers audience, the more money they are likely to make.
YouTube scripts could be paired with some editing as well, if you’re good at that.
Being a Creator
If you want to make money as a creator, writing is crucial. Let’s use Alex Hormozi as an example.
He uses writing to validate ideas (and I don’t think he’s the only person that does this).
Here’s how. He writes X post after X post, only to see what sticks. When he notices something is validated through his audience, he then takes that writing and turns it into short and long form content.
This shows the true power of writing. The biggest crater in the world right now is as successful as he is because he’s able to get his ideas out and then translate them into various forms of content that appeal to a broad audience. His ability to adapt his writing into different mediums demonstrates the versatility and impact of good writing today.
Not to mention, not only will writing on X help with your other platforms, but they have revenue sharing now as well which you could monetize your writing with.
Ghostwriter
Above ties in with this next one, becoming a ghostwriter.
Ghost writing is when businesses or even individuals hire people to write engaging content on their X account (or other accounts) in order to get maximum engagement.
Usually, creators or businesses are doing things that actually move the needle. For example creators are busy filming long form content and sometimes it could be hard to be consistent posting on X.
That’s where ghost writers come in. Ghost writing is almost like copywriting except they are meant to build a following. If you know how to grow on X, this could be a great opportunity for you.
Freelance Writer
If you’re a good writer but don’t want to start a new project for yourself, freelance writing could also be a great idea.
I, myself, am a freelance writer and it contributes heavily to my monthly income.
Keep in mind, you have to have the nuances of SEO down so you could give your clients good results (which is not that hard to learn).
Consulting
There’s a lot of people out there that want to learn how to write. If you have the ability to teach them, more power to you. You could make a substantial amount of money by offering your expertise as a writing consultant.
Leveraging your experience as a freelance writer, you can guide others on various aspects of writing, from crafting compelling content to understanding the intricacies of different writing styles. Your ability to teach and share your knowledge can be highly valuable, especially to those just starting out or looking to enhance their writing skills.
If you’re a writer, I hope this article gave you some good ideas to consider. If you like the topic of income streams, and haven’t yet already signed up to our newsletter, sign up here: