There are so many ways to make money from home using words. Truly. I’ve dabbled in most of the ways now over the past three years, so I want to share the basics of each with you now.

Print Magazine Articles Pros and Cons

While there are those who will tell you the economy over the past year means that print jobs are impossible to find, especially for beginners, I do not believe them. And I’ll tell you why. Because up until last September I had never sent out a single article query at all. I sent five out in September, hugely pregnant and about to give birth. Of those five queries I sold two articles, and got two rejections. I’ve since sold one of the rejecting articles elsewhere, although the other is still looking for a home.

One of the articles I sold was to a trade magazine. In the follow-up after the printing of the first article, I pitched another idea to the editor. By the time that article had printed I was also given an article on assignment and encouraged to submit additional article ideas! This magazine, at least, is interested in my writing. I think that print magazine jobs are available, and available to beginners, however I believe that the queries will have to be sharp, and the articles submitted will need to be spot on. When competition is fierce, the quality must be stellar.

The benefits are that the payoffs are usually much larger than the one-time payoffs you see with web writing. The downside is that the payoffs come after querying, sometimes writing on speculation (ie for free with no guarantee of a sale) and sometimes payment doesn’t come until after the article is published….months later.

Pros and Cons of Web Content Writing

There are SO MANY web content sites just waiting to pay you to put words down into cyberspace. You create the sentences, and they publish them and give you money. Sometimes. Hopefully. There are many, many sites on the web and not all of them pay, pay well, or allow you to keep the rights to your work. I’ve highlighted a few of the sites I am personally familiar with on my website so far, and will be posting additional posts in the coming weeks.

The benefits of web content production is that your job is usually fairly simple. Write the words. No managing, no technical crap to deal with, no registration, domain, server, traffic, etc issues. You write. You get paid. It usually is just that simple.

The downside is of course that you are not getting paid the full amount. If your article is making that website $10 per year, you will probably only be getting paid a small fraction of that. Sometimes frightfully small, but sometimes generous – each site is different. And therein comes the other consideration – if you are producing web content for someone else you must play by their rules. That is, you have to write the topics they allow, in the style they allow. Sometimes it is a good fit, and sometimes it isn’t.

Writing a Personal Blog or Website

Some people may decide they do not want to want articles or blog posts for someone else but would rather write on their OWN blog or website. The benefits are obvious – you get to write whatever you want, however you want, and whenever you want. And every nickel that comes in to the website as a result is yours to keep.

However, you may not know how to write in a way that will bring in readers because search engines do not tend to pick up on creative analogies or witty titles. Writing for a website that teaches beginning web writers can be a huge benefit, especially to someone starting out. Also keep in mind that many large web content sites bring in thousands, or millions, of readers each month and your article may get ten times the traffic there as it would on your personal blog. 40% of a hundred ad clicks is more than 100% of ten clicks, isn’t it? Still, there is something immensely satisfying, though more than-a-little scary, about writing for yourself.

So there you have it – the three main ways to make money writing from home. Do you have a preference? Do you dabble in all the forms like I do? Which do you find the most profitable for you?