Newbies - Offline Opportunities

I am a writer. I have wanted to make a living as a writer ever since I won a statewide writing contest in eighth grade.

I know about social media, SEO, building websites, and a lot of other things - and I have helped businesses with all of these issues - but I always come back to writing because it's my first true love.

The wonderful thing about writing is that there are so many opportunities for writers in the off-line market.

If you can't write or don't want to - you can always outsource it.

Let me give you a few examples of what I have done for off-line businesses. I hope it gives you some ideas.

1. Press releases - any business that has an event is a candidate for press release. There are a whole bunch of other reasons why businesses can use a press release, but wanting to have an event publicized is something that any business owner will grasp very quickly.

There are several places where you can learn about upcoming events in your area - EventBrite.com is one. You can also Google "[your city] event."

Even if you don't find out about an event until after the fact, you can always find out when the next event is going to happen and write press releases for those.

If you want to make it a monthly, recurring income, offer packages for a certain number of press releases done each month for a certain fee.

Prices: I typically charge around $97 just for press release, and then I charge additional fees if they want me to also submit it to the local news outlets.

2. Newsletters - Anyone who has an autoresponder needs to have content written for it. There was a thread along time back about offline gold - and it talk about setting up auto-responders for businesses.

But that is just the beginning. These businesses need to have content written on a regular basis, and one of the easiest concepts to get across to them is the idea of a monthly newsletter.

Most of the businesses that I wrote for had information about new products, sales or specials that they are running, etc. it was a simple process to find out what sales were going on and what information was posted on the newsletter, and then writing it.

I would charge anywhere from $100 and up - topping off at around $500 - depending on how difficult the newsletter was to write. If they wanted some kind of informational articles and not just information about their sales and stuff, then I would charge more. Certain specialties you can charge more, as well.

Service businesses do well with this - veterinarians, dentists, etc. Bars and restaurants are a good candidate as well.

3. Emails - instead of just a once a month newsletter, you can also sell a certain number of e-mails a month. If you are going to sell e-mail writing services to businesses, I recommend selling them in batches of five or more - they will want to have at least one per week going out.

If they want less than that, go with the newsletter model.

Better yet, sell a package of both - a newsletter that runs around four pages plus a series of e-mails each month.

I generally charged $100 per e-mail.

4. Vanity publishing - I'm not going to kid you: this isn't as simple as the other three ideas, but there is a huge market for it.

If you have a business owner in a competitive field and they would like to distinguish themselves as an authority in their field, you can interview them via e-mail or by Skype (or in person, if you are local). Take the interview and turn it into a physical book with CreateSpace.

You can outsource this - I pay my transcribers 30 bucks an hour - and you can have different levels of packages to offer the business owners that make paying your transcribers that much money to keep them happy and to keep them very willing to put your orders at the top of their lists very worthwhile.

My absolute lowest package starts at $497 - and that is with no bells or whistles or anything - and my highest pay package goes up to $5000.

You can also have recurring income by helping them promote their book, helping them promote the website that goes along with the book ( if they decide to get that package), and a host of other things.

Hope this helps you.