If the daily commute gets you down – and let’s face it with the average commuter travelling 8,000 miles a year it’s no wonder – or you find yourself spending more money on travelling to and from work each week than you do on food then the current trend of working from home may be right up your street. Working from home, freelancing, telecommuting – whatever you call it, the fact is more and more people are either taking their day jobs from the office to the comfort of their own homes or looking for jobs which give them a lot more freedom. And it’s not just for parents with young children or for executives. Content writing can be broken down into two main areas of opportunity: freelance writing and becoming a content affiliate.

Freelance Writing
With more and more companies either trading solely online or having strong online business links, coupled with the fact more are becoming online-dependent on a daily basis, many of the jobs which were once office-bound have been set free – as long as you’ve got a laptop and a good internet connection. Consequently, freelancing is the way that many industries are heading and one key role in the development of online business, for example, is content writing.

If you’re a passionate writer and have a working knowledge of specific areas of expertise, be it health, beauty, psychology or steam locomotives then you could be putting those skills to good use and making yourself some hard-earned cash. With so many new websites and blogs springing up every day the need to get good quality content on them can sometimes exceed the limited teams set up to run the sites, or the lowly blogger themselves. Many companies also believe it’s better to pay someone classed as an expert than to get an in-house staff member to write about a subject they know very little about. This is where content writers come in.

The blogger or editor will source out experts in the fields that are relevant to their site and ask them to produce articles and features on subjects of their choice. The content writer will be given a brief to follow and the writer and publisher will agree a fee either per article or per word. There are even companies whose sole job is to act as the middle man; matching writers, from a registered pool, to relevant publishers.

Writers may become regular contributors to certain sites, or a group of sites so are guaranteed a steadier stream of income. They are classed as content writing affiliates because both sides benefit – the publisher gets good quality content and the writer gets paid.

Why is outsourcing content writing the future?
Online business as a whole is booming thanks to a demand from more online consumers. Many businesses are looking for ways to cut back on overheads and costs too, which not only explains the trend towards online-only businesses but also the need to only recruit staff as and when they’re needed. Full-time staff receive benefits such as annual leave and in some cases, pensions too which all add to the costs per employee, so freelancers can work out to be more cost effective.

Why should I become a content affiliate?
The benefits of being a content writer or indeed a content affiliate include being able to fit the job in around your lifestyle and earn extra cash for special occasions, emergencies or just for your nest egg. Plus no dreaded commute or having to deal with traffic on the way to the office. Some content writers thus decide to go that extra mile and get a site up. In producing rich content, they attract links from other sites (possibly augmented by a linking campaign) which, in turn, drives natural search rankings and thus traffic. They then monetise this traffic via the traditional affiliate routes of relevant affiliate product links via the affiliate networks and data feeds and perhaps via Google AdSense and other advertising networks.

With the search engines becoming ever more focused on rich content and merchants becoming ever more prescriptive with regard to PPC keywords, many believe that being a content affiliate is likely to be one of the few STABLE ways in which to drive affiliate revenues over the next few years. The days of ‘thin’ affiliates and arbitrage may be numbered but for those who are prepared to go that extra mile, the potential rewards are significant.

If you love writing, have a subject you are particularly passionate about and want to make some money then you needn’t look anywhere else, content writing is a great opportunity for you.

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