Content Writing

If you are a decent writer who is competent in his or her native language there is money to be made by writing content for other people's websites and blogs. Sometimes blog owners will pay you to pen guest articles, however most of them are more likely simply to offer you a backlink as payment for your work. This is not to be scoffed at as the success of your own website depends to a large extent on its presence on the search engines, which in turn is largely dictated by the quantity and quality of the links that direct back to it. But in the short term this is not going to pay the bills.

If you can it is always best to seek out your own customers. These will be able to assess your work and agree a decent price with you for your efforts. Every one's a winner.

Many budding writers however will not have the resources or the contacts to enable them to do this. The other option therefore is to register with a freelancing site and then to place bids on writing job offers when they become available. There are a number of sites offering such a service, including Freelancer and Elance.

One strong word of advice would be set your own standards and stick with them. If you write good quality material, charge accordingly. One of the down sides of freelancing sites is that they are often populated with "writers" who are prepared to write 500 words of barely intelligible English peppered with a few "keywords" which are out of context and have barely any relevance to the article for a dollar a time. Don't get involved in an auction with these people. Any customer who would prefer their services to those of a quality content writer just to save a few pounds doesn't deserve your help. Wait your chance, some decent work will come your way you can be sure.