MUST READ: Best Tips to Make Money Writing Online

After I made the post Work Online, Work on oDesk, I had a lot of users and comments asking me how
to make money writing? Some even asked me what they can do online in order to make money given that they had no professional skills. Well here is the answer to both questions. If you don’t have any professional skills but can write in good and readable English, then you can earn money by writing. What does this mean? This mean that you can simply become a freelance writer by offering your writing services to people in need. But it does not end there, and even though this question has already been answered I will still say it again here. You can offer your writing or any other services for that matter on platforms and websites like oDesk.com, Freelancer.com, Elance.com, OnlyFreelancer.com, etc. The most challenging is going to be for you to actually get the job. That is where the second part of this post comes in, to tell you how to apply and get a job on oDesk.com and the same method can also be used I believe on any of the above mention websites.
Tips on How to Earn Money Writing
1-Get an Account: To begin with, first things first you need to sign up to any of these websites oDesk.com, Freelancer.com, Elance.com, OnlyFreelancer.com etc or any other platform of your choice I personally recommend oDesk. After you sign up and confirm your account, the next thing you will want to do is to concentrate on putting up a good and convincing profile.
2-Set Up Your Profile: Your profile is your public image, it is what makes people want to hire you at a glance. And with a nice looking profile you are sure to land good jobs and with a bad profile well you will also get bad jobs or no jobs at all. So my advice is take your time, about three to four hours setting up your profile. Fill up each required filled very carefully and with your best English. In fact you can even get a dictionary by your side to make sure that there are no spelling mistakes, no grammatical errors and no lazy or simple typing errors. Nobody will hire a writer whose own profile is filled with errors.
For a starting I would advise you not to put up a picture at first(I know this point can be arguable) but my reason for that is simple. Even though the world has made a lot of progress in terms of race, skin color, etc tolerances, there are still people out there who will not hire you just because they see a black, white, Asiatic, etc face hanging above your profile. Also choose a simple to recall screen name or usually called sign in name. This is to make sure that everyone that comes across your profile can easily remember the name some other time and with a simple search on the website he or she can find you very easily. Fill up your experience and don’t forget to put at least six months as your writing experience, even if you don’t have any experience in writing at all. People tend to trust somebody who have already done the job before, and will hardly give their writing jobs to a newbie. And in the category fields, make sure to choose the main category of “Writing And Translation”, and the sub-categories Creative writing and Article writing.
3-Take some Tests: After you have finished filling up your profile and you are satisfied with what you see, the next is to take a some tests in order to let the employers know that you can actually write in English. To begin you will have to take the orientation test no matter which website you chose and this test is also free on all the websites. On oDesk successfully passing the test will increase your available applications or bids to 15. After and this is where the advantage of oDesk comes in because all the tests there is free unlike other websites where it cost $5 per test. You will need to take a some English tests. You can either take the US Basic English test, the UK Basic English test depending on what you are more comfortable with, the US English Spelling test, the English Vocabulary test, US Word Usage test, and the UK English Grammar test. For a start and make sure to score at least around 50 percentile or above. You should re-take the test as many times as possible till you have a good score.
4-Apply to Writing Jobs: Before applying to a job first you have to locate the jobs you wan to apply to. These can be found at the “Find Jobs & Contractors” tab on oDesk, pointing your mouse on it will display several options. Click on “Find Jobs”. Next click on writing and translation jobs. Since our focus is about writing jobs and in order to show your employers, so to speak that you know what you want, I would advice you to apply to only writing jobs in the beginning. This is because each employer has the ability to see the jobs you’ve already applied too on your profile. So if let’s say you apply to 10 different jobs which all have to do with writing, then they will definitely think that you really are a writer and not just somebody interested in making online. That also gives you more credibility and increases the chances of your bid being chosen. Also in order to increase the chances of your bid being chosen don’t forget to write a good cover letter specific to each job.