Have great writing skills - no ideas though

'Great writing skills....but no ideas?'

Forgive me....

I'm struggling to understand how those two go together

James,

With you branching out, and having writing chops, I would keep it simple.

• A Wordpress blog.
• Monetize with affiliate offers.
• Syndicate your articles.
• Focus on passive traffic models.

Once you get that business turning a profit:

• Grow traffic further.
• Outsource content (paid).
• Embrace user-submissions.
• Duplicate the business in other niches.

The last major element is audience collection.

• Email list.
• Social followers.
• YouTube subscribers.

That model will help you play to your strengths.

Cheers,

Tom

You could start by analyzing that 5-year body of work to see what markets any repeat customers are in - how have they been monetizing those articles? If they've been making regular profits from your writing, you could probably do the same. If you don't have access to customer information, check what writing topics have been most in demand. That's another clue about a potentially profitable direction.

Or pick a topic that has particulary excited or interested your partner over the years and either specialize as an industry freelancer or go with the business model suggested by Tom upthread. Presumably, your partner can maintain a regular(ish) income from any existing work while you set up the new business.

Create your own website (e.g. on WordPress platform) - Copywriting Agency, and promote your writing services. I believe this is the best way for high skilled writers.

Write short stories and sell on Amazon.

Write about things that interest you and publish on Amazon.

Amazon is a great place to publish a book. Just ask Ryan Biddulph. He has several books published and selling for $2.99 each.

I personally feel you should try reading more to gather ideas & concepts for your works.
Try Sci-fi writeups.
thanks

Seriously?

Come on! Just create a product on writing great articles and making money with it!

That's what you're doing, right? Seems like a no-brainer idea for a product to me.

Try picking an audience your apart of and start serving them with your words. Help them anyway you can while you practice your craft.

You could always create ebooks and sell them. Or start a blog in a particular niche and make money from affiliate programs.

Here's kind of a contrarian idea...

Pick a topic at random and research it.

For example, the Dewey decimal system has 10 major divisions. Use a random number generator (in a pinch, you can use a deck of cards with the face cards removed) and pick a section. Say you draw a 6. That's the 600's Now head to your local library and spend a few hours randomly scanning/reading books from that section.

If you have any kind of intellectual curiosity, you'll come away with a list of ideas and things to further research online.

If you already have a niche picked out, modify the exercise by skipping the random draw. Go to the section that covers your niche (and closely related niches - for example, vegan diets would be a subset of vegetarian diets, which itself is a subset of plant-based diets). Finish the exercise by picking random books as before.

Why not focus on the areas that you enjoy writing the most about and develop a product in that area that solves a real problem that people have?

I think that could be a way to enjoy more what you're doing and help others who are in need of a solution at the same time.

Great answers already provided here.

Writing for someone is indeed very different than writing for yourself to make passive income.

You can also try a membership website where you teach your expertise in technical writing and release exclusive content. That's recurring income right there.

Identify a niche according to your expertise and create an interactive website around it. Write a few good things, promote it and get traffic.

Once you have traffic, apply for ad sense and use affiliate marketing. You will soon earn.

Take your traffic to a level where other bloggers would be interested in publishing on your platform, earn through it as well.

You can also have clients for whom you write and publish on your blog at some cost.

Start Blogging If you are good writer and you have basic knowledge About SEO then You Must be a Achieve your goal in the content marketing field.

Toast.

Just having breakfast here.

Let me throw some more suggestions out (between bites of toast and marmalade).

Skills.

Your partner has writing experience to the tune of half a decade. Furthermore, they earn nice money at it. Problem is, it sounds like the money is a grind.

They take a holiday? No money.

So they obviously need to ease out of their current business model and into one where they're growing income that allows for the odd holiday.

I think that's a fair summary.

Ease Out.

I mention easing out above. I believe it's an imperative here. The last thing they want to risk is dropping the working business model in favour of something that may be entirely new to them; and, therefore, may not work for them.

Baby steps are my suggestion.

Your partner should consider the most ideal model (for them at the moment) and continue with their working model whilst chip-chip-chipping away at setting up and optimizing a second model - that we may as well call the Holiday Model.

Holiday Models.

1. Sell E-Books.

An immediately sensible idea seems to be leveraging their writing experience (and track record) by teaching other people how to do it in the form of e-books.

The advantage here is "holiday income."

Your partner works hard now (writing one or more books) and then devotes themselves to growing sales and growing their audience to generate future sales.

Kindle Publishing is ideal but you won't turn overnight profits due to the payment schedules on royalties. Still, it works well. What your friend may want to do is target low-competition micro-niches where they can apply their knowledge and have a chance at standing out (exposure) from the crowd. "How-to" books are great.

In conjunction, you can also consider more immediate income models for the digital books. I use PayHip (instant payments). Your partner may wish to sell books as WSOs here on WF and drive traffic with affiliates and other measures: both paid and organic traffic procedures. It works out well for me.

2. (Out of the Box) YouTube.

The second holiday approach is an out-of-the-box approach. Your friend uses their writing chops to put together videos on YouTube.

To the uninitiated, writing and videography hardly sound a match made in heaven, but my own experience is just the opposite.

What I am absolutely rubbish at is ad-libbing. If you've ever seen a gaming video, for instance, you'll have (probably) been watching the creator ad-lib.

I prefer to write scripts that I can deliver.

With your friend being a writer, most likely they'll take to the scripted approach like a duck to water.

The trick is to learn how to give a natural feel to your scripted videos.

Best.

Well, I've finished my toast. Hope I've given you some ideas.

All the best!

Cheers,

Tom

James,

At its very core, isn't this exactly what Internet business and marketing is all about - getting paid to help people overcome their problems?

Writing can be a pain and a drudgery if you don't enjoy doing it, especially in topics where you have no interest or knowledge.

So I would make a simple suggestion here: inventory your skills, your working history, knowledge, passion, education, hobbies, past life experiences, and things others would say you do very well. Make a list of all the things (topics) in these areas that you enjoy and can write about with some authority. These are topics that can keep your interest.

Them do some simple research into these topics to see where there is demand in the marketplace. Look for trends, news, and what authority sites in these topics are discussing. See what Google trends is saying.

Of course, the idea is to find topics that you enjoy and have some knowledge about . . . but also . . . topics that are current and on peoples' minds at present. Make lists of these topics then do some quick Google searching on the keyword phrases of these same topics and you should find lots of ideas for writing that are both currently in demand and in line with your own interests and knowledge.

You'll be a pro at finding great topics for your writing once you've been through this simple exercise a few times.

Good luck to you,

Steve

Use your skills in writing for others, marketers, most of them are in needed of good articles

James,

Try going to Upwork and offering your services. Another place would be Fiverr.

Chris

OP, you might want to filter the questions being asked on WF to help you find a product to create.

The fact that people keep asking the same narrow set of questions indicates there are tremendous opportunities waiting to be monetized

if you don't want to write some reviews for some people, i could suggest you to create your own website and provide some good contents about some topics. This way, if you generate some good traffic, you could promote some good offers over there, or sell some positions on your website to some publishers, and make some good money out of it!

1 identify what subject matters you are passionate about
2 Tell your story and tell it well
3 always give value regardless of subjects you choose to write about

read Garry V's latest article on How to tell a story on social media.

TFW people don't read the OP and throw out some advice just to get a post in!


OP,
I share your partner's pain. Sometimes I get incredibly burned out on writing content for other people. Recently I've been dabbling and seriously considering diving full-on into fiction, at least for a while, as a break if nothing else.

I'm not sure if you've done any research on KDP at all, but there are people out there making good money publishing fiction. KDP is an interesting market because the digital format means that you can actually do pretty well publishing novellas and short stories, as people seem to be more willing to drop a buck or two for short-form works.

Now that being said, there are also a crapton of people publishing entire series of full-length novels and making peanuts, so..., there's that too. But if your partner can turn a good phrase and also has some marketing savvy, there could be some opportunity there.

Likewise, something I've considered before, and may do in the future, is a course on writing productivity and efficiency. It's difficult to teach someone to write, but it's not nearly as difficult to teach them to write faster.

Unfortunately, everything in the online content world seems to be all about word count these days, and I do believe there is a market out there, albeit maybe not an enormous one, for material teaching people to up their writing efficiency.

Just a couple of quick thoughts. Best of luck