How Beginner Writers can Make a Career from Writing in 2023
How to leverage other things beyond experience
Writing is an age-long tool that had served as a medium of lasting communication before visuals and audio began to survive time. As old as writing has been, beginner writers always wonder if they will ever make a living from writing. And wonder if they are good enough that people will someday appreciate their writing.
I understand this feeling a whole lot because my words just began giving me power. I want you to know that no matter how old writing has come, it will always be sought after. What might change (certainly will) is the style, type, and skill in writing.
Being a beginner writer does not mean you are not skilled enough — it just means your work has not yet been noticed by the right audience. And just a day of such awareness, you will leave the stage of beginner writer. And if you would ever ask if you can make a career through writing in 2023, I will answer you “yes!” At the top of my voice.
Over time, it is worth noting that a lot of changes and development had affected writing, beginning from scripting for movies or commercials, writing for newspapers, radio, or T.V stations, and academic journals, to a competing feat blogging and the game changer social media style of writing, came. All these seasons and times had come to affect the way we communicate in writing.
Writing is an impression your scribbled words leave on the reader. This places it as either good writing or bad.
For me, I decided I will be more intentional concerning my writing skills this year, and make a living writing. When I say “make a living,” it is not just about how I will make money writing. For me, it goes beyond that, it is more about the value my writing will give my audience and readers.
Enough of the stories, I am here to tell you how you can make a career as a writer. And for someone like me who finds writing as an expression of life, it is even more interesting when you build a life through writing.
The strategies I am sharing here for becoming an exceptional writer are part of the strategies I have begun applying myself and some I will still apply.
I began this year by self-publishing my second book and my first ‘self-help’ book 7 Red Flags To End That Relationship Now. The journey to writing this book was one of the ways I started healing from a broken relationship that had just happened to me. I wrote the book on my personal experience and personal recommendations for approaching toxic relationships.
More to writing this book through the last quarter of 2022, I have them available on Amazon, Selar, Gumroad, and Kobo platforms. And I will tell you why this single book is available on all these platforms as you read on.
I feel like I have started a big personal project and building a career path because of the writing. Yet, before you can successfully appreciate your writing enough, I would like you to also read You are Being too Creative That is Why Nobody Wants to Read Your Story to appreciate these other strategies I would be sharing.
Test the waters
Every writer who isn’t yet an authority should be able to explore their writing skills in different niches — that is what I refer to as ‘testing the waters’.
Good enough, Medium helps you achieve that without having to worry about ranking on Google’s first page or being overly concerned about SEO, just write as it comes, if it is educative enough, a lot more people would read it in Medium’s ecosystem. Tealfeed and Substack are other platforms you may like to explore.
More so, social media is also a place to be expressive without reservations. I will recommend you understand any platform you decide to use and how their algorithm works.
Doing this will help you discover your niche — you know what your audience resonates with more.
Aside from sharing posts in form of articles, explore writing e-mail copies, and social media campaign posts, write articles, and blog posts, answer questions on Quora and Reddit and build your profile there, and write free e-books if possible (as little as 10 pages is fine).
You are trying to explore yourself to know where you are a strong feat.
Pick a niche
The next thing you should do as someone who is gaining traction with your style of writing will be to choose a niche.
My recommendation will be that you decide to pick a niche, choosing a niche is like choosing an area of specialization in your profession.
Personally, I have decided that in addition to giving writing tips, I will also give love and relationship tips, because I have experience there. I understand what it means to enjoy love and what it feels like to be heartbroken.
They are people’s needs, they want a solution and I want to offer that.
Have a Writing Plan
Develop your writing plan — a template that works best for you.
Break this plan into topics you want to build on and their specific days. This is internet space and one way to build organic followers is by using the right keywords which people search for every day; proper optimization of your page and website. You can check these Google tools to help you do that.
Have days you want to write/publish on Medium, your website, days for your social handles, and days you wish to send newsletters.
This will help you as a beginner writer who probably does not have the funds to hire support yet. When your business grows, you will surely hire support.
Have workable plans on how you want to go about your writing skills, if you are good at more than one niche, you may also want to include that in your writing plan.
You can use Google Calendar to plan your schedule.
Target the right audience
Targeting the right audience is in two ways — positioning yourself to be found by those who need your writing, and looking for platforms where your type of writing is widely read.
One of the most underrated social media platforms is LinkedIn you can build your audience from there, one of my favourites is Twitter, but that doesn’t mean I ignore Facebook Pages and groups (especially). Likewise, you can create a Quora page and build it up.
The cheat sheet here is to first brand your profile to look like the solution you wish to offer. Use keywords in your profile. For instance, if you are so knowledgeable about ‘keto dieting,’ you can offer your writing service on the keto diet. Your profile could look this way:
“I write and recommend the best keto snacks to help your weight loss goals. I lost 300 pounds in 90 days using the same method I share.”
Freelance platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork can also help you offer your writing skills as a service and get paid. Look at how others prepare their profile, copy their format and tailor yours to suit the service you decide to render. More so, do more research on how they work and take a dive in.
Be intentional about your writing
You have to be intentional about your writing. You need to believe that writing can be a notable career. Then you have to do more about it.
If you need to take courses to improve your writing skills, do. Join a community of writers and invest in tools. Use the help of AIs to improve your efficiency and time of delivery. One tool that has come to change the narrative in recent times is ChatGPT (well, keep exploring it while you can).
Keep working on your strategies and also put yourself out there.
Above all, be cautious about putting out quantity over quality, and no matter what, always show up.
Build a community
When you start commanding some level of influence, think of building a community with your audience. In fact, that should be your utmost priority as an online writer.
Decide how you want to keep your audience glued to you. You can choose to create an e-mail list using any of the e-mail lists builders like ConvertKit, Systeme.io, MailChimp, and anyone you find convenient to use.
Other ways you can grow and build your community could be through WhatsApp community, Telegram and/or Facebook groups and pages.
These are the people who will eventually pay you royalties in the long run. Give them a reason to believe you and give them value for free. The value you give them will be a hook. Big brands are still in business because of revisiting customers.
Someday, you will sell what you once gave them for free, and they will gladly buy.
Engage other beginner writers
Reach out to other growing writers, I and my friend Prince Bright share some writing ideas and opportunities often. And we hope to work on some writing projects before the year ends.
It is easier to get the attention of writers who are just coming up. And you all can form a unique community that can expedite growth for everyone.
These writers should also be interested in the kind of things you are interested in.
Choose a big writer mentor
Find an influencer writer in your niche whose works inspire you and reach out to them.
If they own a blog, study the style of their blog posts and reach out to them to offer your service as a guest blogger on their blog, Ayodeji Awosika, and Sinem Günel are big shots on Medium space I hope to work with someday.
But you need to show what you have done all along, nobody would want to test you out if you have nothing to show yet.
Having the attention of these people is of great advantage for you, one recommendation of your work to their audience can change your growth pace. If you can work with them on some projects, please do. That should not be necessarily for the funds, but because of the direction that you are going. More to this is that they will give you a lot of premium information on how you can grow for free.
Write regularly
Just make sure you write down something every day, writing should be something you love doing whether it will pay you soon or not. Keep writing because you get better at it doing that.
Give yourself a personal goal-setting on how many words you wish to write per day. Just make sure you write down something daily, in as much as AIs are here, they can never take the place of original human creativity. That is why you have to still write something.
If you are a storyteller, you can write short stories daily, weekly, or monthly on a platform like Wattpad.
Be available in the space
One of the reasons I had to publish my book on different platforms is for the sake of visibility and availability. Learn how to be available in the internet space.
More to that is that this single product will be a source of different streams of income when purchased by people whose challenge lies in what my book addresses. That is a strategic way of doing work once and being paid in several ways for it.
You can make yourself available in marketplaces as I have mentioned earlier. Platforms like Fiverr and Upwork are always my best bet for freelance.
Optimize your LinkedIn profile to attract the right audience and dish out value regularly. This sure tells that you are a professional at what you do.
The whole idea is, “keep getting better at doing it.”
Writing is a big gain when you have strategically built yourself to become an authority in doing that. But I need to warn you, it doesn’t just happen overnight. Success comes from a slow and steady deliberate effort and the desire to dare.
I have started working out my path, and let’s take the challenge to make it a goal for 2023.
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