How to Earn from Your Blog While You Write That Novel

Today’s guest post is by award-winning blogger Carol Tice, an expert freelancer, with some great advice for aspiring (and established) novelists:

It’s hard work trying to write a novel these days, isn’t it?

Besides finding the time to write your masterpiece, you need to be “platform building,” which usually takes the form of blogging to build an audience ahead of selling your book.

Now you’re writing a book and a blog. When are you supposed to do anything that might put food on the table this week?

Luckily, if you have a blog, you can earn in a way you’d probably find fairly pleasant and easy—blogging for others for pay.

It doesn’t take a lot of marketing, to scare up those clients, either. Instead, you can turn that platform-building blog you’ve created into a writing sample that can get you paid blogging gigs from businesses and publications at $100 a post and more— if you know how.

Do some guest posts on more popular blogs and often, business owners and online magazine editors will trail back to your site to check you out. That’s your chance to impress them that you’re a talented blogger they could hire.

You’ve probably got the blog-post writing part down cold, since writing is your thang.

From there, all it takes is an understanding of the basics needed to make your blog into a strong writing sample that impresses paying prospects.

Here are the five most important things prospective blogging clients look for when they visit your blog:

1. Clean layout

Have you got three different sidebars stuffed full of widgets showing your Facebook comments and 90 different writers’ groups you belong to and a dozen sparkly ads? Twenty different navigation tabs with dropdown menus? Using three colors for text and two different fonts? That all makes a mess.

Visitors get a boggled and don’t know what action they should take. They don’t know what to look at. So they leave.

Take a critical look at your design. Is there too much going on? If so, prune it back. One sidebar ought to do it and one row of tabs. Make sure your header is clean and easy to read.

2. A defined niche

Speaking of reading that header, what’s it say? When new visitors read the headline and tagline, can they tell what the main topic is on your blog?

Defining a niche is important because prospects are mostly businesses with a particular thing they’d like blogged about—property management, or gourmet food, or whatever they sell. They’re looking for writers who understand that need to develop many topic ideas on a single theme.

If you’ve been running your blog like a personal diary/rant where you comment on whatever bugs you or makes you happy on any given day, know that’s going to send prospects away.

To tighten this up, look through your post headlines and see if a theme emerges. If you’ve got posts about homeschooling and crystal healing and organic food, see if you can pick one are or find a common thread that unites your topics.

If you can define and stick to a topic, you’ll impress business owners you could do that for them, too.  It may be fun to put up that occasional funny poster or YouTube video you saw, but the random stuff confuses prospects.

3. Informative blog post headlines

This is a place where a lot of writer sites fall short. I’ve reviewed hundreds of writers’ sites, and too often, when I scan through the headlines, I can’t tell what the posts are about. They’ve got headlines like “Did This Really Happen?” or “Ignore the Red Flags” or “Give to Get” (all real blog-post headlines I’ve seen).

Good blog headlines don’t leave the reader scratching her head. They have key words that clue readers in to your topic (and help Google send you more readers). They also advertise a benefit, where the reader can see at a glance what they’ll learn if I click on the post.

The headline of this post is an example—note the key words that alerted you I’d be talking about something of interest to novelists, and that you’d learn how to earn money if you read the post.

Take the time to improve your headlines, and they’ll help prospects find your blog, and demonstrate you understand niche blogging once they arrive to read the post.

4. A “Hire me” tab

Many bloggers seem to think prospects can divine telepathically that they could really use a paying gig to support their novel-writing dreams. But in reality, if you don’t spell out that you’re looking to get hired to write, prospects usually conclude you only want only to write your novel and your blog.

End the mystery and put a “hire me” tab on your blog. You can call it “Hire me to write” or “My writing services” or something like that, but don’t get too creative. Make it baldly obvious that yes, you are available to write for others.

What should be on that page? A nice photo of you, a quick explanation that you are available to blog for others and perhaps a few topics you have strong knowledge of, and contact information. If you don’t have a separate writer website you can link to, feel free to include any testimonials and portfolio links you’ve got right on this page, too.

I know more than one writer who got a nice-paying writing gig within a week of putting out the “hire me” shingle. Give it a try!

5. Engagement

Here’s the nub of it: businesses hire pro bloggers because they can’t figure out how to get anyone to read and comment on their posts. They don’t have time to learn to write a successful blog—they’re busy running a business. But they’ve figured out their blog won’t be successful unless it has really strong posts and those posts get comments and retweets.

So when they come on your blog, they’re looking to see if you’ve got that happening. It doesn’t have to be 1,000 retweets or 100 comments, but they want to see you getting and responding to comments, and see that people find your writing share-worthy.

Next thing you know, you’ll be getting emails and calls from prospects who’ll mention a popular post you did—and that they’d like to hire you to do that for them.

Most writers’ blogs are already doing some of these points right, but few hit them all on the head. It can be worth taking the time to tweak your blog to make it a great sample that stands out from the blog masses. After all, writing a few paid blog posts for clients beats having to stock shelves or drive a cab to support your novel-writing habit, right?

Carol Tice writes the Make a Living Writing blog and is coauthor of the new e-book, How to be a Well-Paid Freelance Blogger.

Featured Photo Credit: pedrosimoes7 via Compfight cc