For most people, making a living as a writer is a far off dream in another world where they don’t have bills to pay and can live a life of leisure mulling over the perfect words to start their novel. However, good writers can make a good living with their skills—but it does mean giving up some of the fantasies you may have about what the writing life really is.

Some writers may believe that using their skills to make a living, and not just to create the next great American novel, is dirty or “selling out.” But writing is a marketable skill.

To a person who can’t write but needs to produce writing of some fashion, a good writer is just as valuable as an accountant is to a person who can’t manage the books. Taking a look at the reasons why writers supposedly shouldn’t sell out, such as making positive contributions to society, reveals something about why we think selling out is bad—and also shows that writing for hire still does many of these things. So how do you actually become a writer for hire?

Release notions of “creative” writing. Part of being a paid writer means you’re for hire—to just about anyone who will pay you. This equates to writing well about things you might know little about or care for even less. This also means you can’t writing leisurely when the fancy strikes. Concern yourself with things like billable hours and helping clients achieve their goals. Let your own goals run secondary to theirs in your writing.

Hone your craft.Writing well about any subject and doing so with correct grammar takes time to learn. Editing your own writing and looking for weaknesses or repetitive mistakes is the best way to improve. Using poor grammar will not keep clients happy or bring in more business. Take time to develop your professional writing skills and you’ll do better at making a living as a writer for hire. Selling your skills means being at the top of your game all the time, not just when you feel like it.

Don’t get lazy. Always take the time to edit every piece of writing you send out. Would you want a client to get an email from a reader that points out a stupid error you easily could have fixed? Remember that someone is paying you for your product and expect quality. Clients view your work the same way they view a chair they might buy for their office—they expect it to not fall apart underneath them.

Do it for the money. As a writer-for-hire don’t expect you probably won’t be writing a lot of socially important, world-changing content. Instead, you might be trying to craft appealing descriptions of frozen chicken nuggets. Remember the reasons why you’re writing for a living when you have trepidation about writing something with little value. Some of the best writers in history wrote copy for a living while burning the midnight oil on their novel—writing for money is a way to pay the bills while training yourself to be a better writer and serve your ultimate goals.

Kim Herrington, a graduate of Hendrix College, is a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive and lives in Arkansas. She writes on her personal blog, The Made Thing, about blogging and SEO, food, and life in Arkansas.

When asked about her views on women working in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry Rebecca Haden replies, “No client has ever said ‘I don’t know, I’m hesitant. After all, you’re girls!’”

Rebecca is the owner and creative director of Haden Interactive, a content marketing, SEO, and website building and management firm based in Fayetteville, Ark. I work as a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive.

Rebecca and I both are in a field in which few women work and even fewer are thought leaders. While this isn’t due to the fact that women aren’t capable of working in the Internet tech industry, Rebecca says, it’s because they seem to be interested in different things. Line up attendees at a local WordCamp conference, she tells me, and you’ll see all the women are mommy bloggers. It’s the men who do development and design.

Rebecca started out on the Internet as a writer for Rootsweb and the Arkansas Encyclopedia of History and Culture, doing a style of writing more similar to that of print publications than online outlets. She eventually became a hobbyist mommy blogger, just like the countless women who dominate the lifestyle blogging niche whom many young women aspiring to write for a living see as role models. But that’s where the similarities end between Rebecca and most women bloggers. Her path to owning her own firm has a lot more to do with her skills as a writer-for-hire and her technical knowledge of SEO than her ability to make photos “pinnable.”

Back in pre-crash days in 2006, Rebecca worked for a bookstore and was asked to manage their website. One day she commented aloud that she didn’t understand why their website wouldn’t come up on Google when she searched for it, one of the most common problems business owners face when dealing with the Internet, and her daughter’s boyfriend told her to look up the word SEO.  At the time, she didn’t even know what a server was and had a 1970s computer science skillset.

When the bookstore closed and she lost her job, Rebecca lamented that she would have to stop running the website but the owner urged her to try providing the same services for other business owners.

“He said ‘We couldn’t have done it without you’ and I scoffed at his comments that I should try to continue,” says Rebecca, a mother of four who had two kids in college at the time. She had a lot to lose. For the first two weeks after losing her job, Rebecca collected unemployment but quickly freelance writing gigs replaced unemployment. Every day Rebecca spent freelancing she thought would be the last and that she would have to take the most recent job offer and give up writing. After six months of turning down other less exciting job offers, Rebecca finally decided being a writer-for-hire was a real job with a real income on which she could rely.

Rebecca worried about her success a lot in the beginning, but you wouldn’t know it now with Rebecca’s confidence in her abilities and immense knowledge on the industry.

“There’s no such thing as a saturated market,” Rebecca now notes. “They need new words all the time.”

Writers who have knowledge in SEO, Rebecca believes, have ample opportunities to make a living writing online because of the huge demand for well-written material. After writing for the likes of the Kennedy Center and being featured in the Wall Street Journal, Rebecca is continuing to expand Haden Interactive into the consumer packaged goods industry, due to their proximity to Walmart’s Home Office in Bentonville.

Most days you’ll find Rebecca in her office in her Fayetteville home, two dogs at her feet, writing for a wide range of clients across the globe and managing her seven-employee business. She advises that women who want to break into the writer-for-hire market heed those basic tenants of writing we’ve all heard before—have real writing skills, always meet deadlines instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, pay attention to the needs of the audience, and constantly build technical knowledge for online writing.

Kim Herrington, a graduate of Hendrix College, is a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive and lives in Arkansas. She writes on her personal blog, The Made Thing, about blogging and SEO, food, and life in Arkansas.

As a professional blogger and link builder with Haden Interactive, I spend my days writing blog posts for clients and guest posts. I write well over 40 posts a week, between clients, my own blog, projects, and guest posts for an assortment of websites. From thought to finished product, it takes around 35 minutes for me to write a post, meaning there’s no time for writer’s block. There’s no time for struggling to find the resources I need or struggling to clarify my ideas.

When you write and manage this many posts, you need a good system to make sure you don’t miss deadlines and to make sure you’re creating a cohesive whole for your clients. Keeping everything in one easy-to-access place and maintaining strict time allowances for each post you write will keep you on track so you can enjoy your weekend, instead of being glued to your computer well after quitting time.

Keeping deadlines is a vital skill for professional writers and making sure you can manage your time to meet them is half the battle.

Paper Tools

While this might not work for you, a paper planner and steno pad are my two most valuable time management assets. I use a large planner with ample room for notes and a steno pad to manage my deadlines and to-do lists. This system has two fold benefits for me: visual cues and efficiency.

A paper planner enables me to look at all the schedules for all my blogs in one place, to plan ahead, and to maintain editorial calendars. A planner is also a great place to store lists I need constant access to as well as information about style guides and login information. If you’re a visual and tactile person like me, a physical planner might be a good solution and saves computer processing power for other things.

In the planner, I write down every post that’s due, check it off when it’s complete, and mark down personal appointments and meetings so I don’t miss those either while I’m striving not to miss deadlines.

Steno pads are great for storing ideas and to-do lists. I use a steno to make a weekly list of things to do and I know my workweek has ended when everything is crossed out. While having both my schedule in my planner and a steno book, I often have posts written in two places. While this does mean I spend marginally more time checking things off, it ensures that I don’t miss preparing any posts and that nothing’s missing the day it must post.

Digital Tools

Almost all of the things I write are in client WordPress websites, which can mean lots of time switching between different admin sites. The company I work for, Haden Interactive, uses ManageWP to manage all of our clients’ WordPress sites — from writing to updates to comment monitoring — all in one login. It’s a huge timesaver and only costs around a dollar per client per month, depending on your plan.

We also use the Edit Flow plugin inside all of our WordPress sites because it allows many people to manage a site’s content with different roles. As I’m the writer and am always followed by an editor, then possibly the client and a compliance officer on occasion, this tool allows us all to know what’s going on and manage an editorial calendar without having to send a ton of emails back and forth. Out of all of the plugins we use on a regular basis on our sites, this one is the most valuable for time management since emails can become so time consuming and break up productivity.

Overall Management Techniques for Any Writer

Determining how many hours per day or week you need to write and your average time to write a blog post is important to quoting and knowing how much work you can handle and subsequently charge for paid posts. I spend, on average, 35 minutes per post and I have a timer to alert me at thirty minutes so I know it’s time to polish and move on. Sometimes certain posts take longer, which means I have to shave off time from other posts to make up for a labor-intensive post. If I write one time-consuming post, I’ll follow up with an easy post and try to complete it before the next alert sounds. If I can fit both into the hour slot, then I’m on track.

All in all, it’s about planning and staying within time limits. Writer’s block isn’t an option for the professional writer and using these tools can help you stay on task, on time, and sane!

Kim Herrington is a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive and lives in Arkansas. She writes on her personal blog, The Made Thing, about blogging and SEO, food, and life in Arkansas.

By: Kim Herrington

In the world of blogging, getting your name out there is important, but getting backlinks is just as crucial for the success of your blog. Guest blogging serves both motivations and allows you to increase your portfolio and stature to get better writing jobs later. To successfully guest blog, however, you need to do more than just think about the audience. You need to think about things like effective pitches, link bait, bylines, and promotion.

The Pitch

Pitching to potential blogs and online magazines isn’t as difficult as people think. Sure, you’re not going to write for a top magazine’s website out of the gate, but starting small should help you get your foot in the door and your feet wet.

When looking for opportunities, be sure that the guest posts you want to do are related to your blog’s niche. If you’re a fashion blogger, certainly don’t write about fast food franchises to get a link. Make sure the post fits your niche and attracts the right people back to you. Doing this first will help you find a more valuable place to guest post than will writing to offers on guest blog boards.

Next, contact the appropriate decision maker with a short message about your post idea and why it’s valuable for the website’s audience. Don’t attach the guest post until you get a positive reply back because not everyone out there is honest and you open yourself to someone stealing your work.

The Linkback

Including links back to articles on your own website is why you guest post. Between redirecting human readers and search engines back to your website, you’re building authority at other reliable websites for both you personally and your website. Writing guest posts about keyword topics that you target on your blog will help your website gain authority for those keywords in the eyes of search engines. It also helps readers understand what they can find on your website and attract their attention.

Creating content to pair with your guest post that you can link back to will give a natural and valuable link to your website as well as keep people from thinking you’re a spam-style writer. No one likes random links on random words and people never click on those types of links. Links are like votes of confidence from websites and, in the most simplistic sense, the more you have the higher up your website will be viewed.

Bylines are a good way to link back if you’re not allowed to do so in the content of the post. Not all websites allow links in content so bylines are important for building authority. Always ensure that the brief description accompanying your name is original for each guest post, otherwise the post might look like duplicate content in the eyes of search engines. This is also an opportunity to build up your Google Authorship, if the website you’re writing for uses it.

The Promo

Even if you search out a wildly popular website and get thousands of views and clickthroughs from your guest article, you’re not getting the full potential if you’re not promoting it. And you’re also not doing your job as a guest blogger.

Reach out to your regular networks and share it on social media. Do whatever you’d normally do. Then do more. Blogs and websites allow guest posts because they provide valuable content, but also because they allow the website to reach a new audience. Pay back your host by doing all you can to drive traffic to your article. While it serves them, it’s also completely self-serving because it’s your article. You’ll be able to tout these successful guest posts in future pitches to other websites.

After some time has gone by, check in with your host and ask them how the article is doing and if they’d share any analytics. Not everyone will offer up this information, especially large websites that are very busy. But learning what you can from the stats as well as being able to quote great stats in future pitches will help you go further in guest blogging and building your authority.

All in all, guest blogging is a vital tool for increasing both your search engine rank as well as your authority as a writer in your own niche community. Always make sure to write an article that’s worthwhile to readers and you’ll get the most benefit. Focusing solely for search engine benefits when writing your guest posts can backfire for your reputation with humans, despite that it might help your rank first in Google. Ultimately, guest blogging is still useful, despite many proponents of the decreasing value of guest posts, when executed with both humans and machines in mind.

Kim Herrington is a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive and lives in Arkansas. She writes on her personal blog, The Made Thing, about blogging and SEO, food, and life in Arkansas.