Take the Free out of Freelance: Using Ecommerce to Get Paid for Your Writing

A Home Business Article Contributed by K. Anne Brauer

ECommerce and Free Freelancing

Are you a freelance writer who's shied away from ECommerce because most sites want free content and you need to get paid? Would you like to know more but you don't know where to start, overwhelmed by all the options? Or have you been happily swimming in the ECommerce tides for some time? Whether or not you've embraced ECommerce, it's definitely changed the landscape for freelance writers, but whether that's good or bad isn't always clear.

Many writers have long considered tracking down successful opportunities for paid publication the toughest part of their job, and the contraction of the publishing industry hasn't made the situation any rosier in the last few years. Many writers are discouraged by this, feeling like going freelance often leaves them feeling like a plain old free writer? There is a silver lining to this seemingly dark cloud.

While print media has seen a slump, some of this can be attributed to migration from print to online publishing. This shift has minuses and pluses for the freelance writer who doesn't want to write for free (at least forever).

ECommerce Minuses for the Freelance Writer Who Doesn't Want to Write for Free

ECommerce in its loosest sense is simply any transaction that takes place electronically between seller and purchaser. In the area of writing and media, this can take hundreds of different forms. Readers can subscribe to online forums packed with information supplied by those on the selling or production end of the endeavor. ECommerce websites can contract information from content providers, books can be bought and sold online as a form of ECommerce, magazines have online memberships available instead of or in addition to their regular print subscriptions. That qualifies as ECommerce, too.

All this variety means steep competition for content providers of all sorts. While the cost of a print run for books or magazines used to provide a barrier to entry to the media arena, the cost of setting up and maintaining a website can be surprisingly low, especially if the cost of labor is not a factor and the founder has the time to put their own sweat equity into the endeavor.

This means that hundreds or thousands of magazines have blossomed into hundreds of thousands of websites, all jockeying for the attention of readers and viewers. Many need to hold costs low, and most don't have the market or content clout to charge steep subscription fees. Translation, please? Writers, your content may be scintillating and in great demand, but there are very few venues paying top dollar for your work, and those that do pay are no less competitive than their print brethren.

ECommerce Pluses for the Freelance Writer with a Little Free Time

Having said that, this explosion of online sites that require content, and exchange this content in any sort of eCommerce transaction with viewers, means that the places you can submit your work are virtually (no pun intended) endless. Sure, you may have to churn out content for free for a while, or you may draft reams and reams of exquisite articles and shudder to accept such low pay for them.

But the opportunities to build a resume and gain valuable real experience are unparalleled in print media. Swallow your pride, hit the net, and search out places that seek the kind of writing you do. And then write, write, and write some more. Write even when you are writing for free, free, free.

Bite the bullet and develop a killer resume, and by the time you move on from writing for free and start to cash paychecks that make you blush with pride instead of faint embarrassment your consistency of output will have been better training in discipline and output than you could get in any school program.