How I Make Money From Home

The writer Barbara Kingsolver once said something like her muse wears his baseball cap backwards and stands over her chair with a bat. I can totally relate. Working from home has its benefits, including the age-old favorite of not having to get properly dressed in the morning. That's a pretty big one for me, but it also creates its own problems: by the end of the day, I look and haggard and tired. I look old. Maybe if I got up every morning, brushed my damn hair, washed my face and put on a spot of makeup, I wouldn't feel so yucky about myself around 4 o'clock, when I finally get around to looking in a mirror.

Anyway, the hardest part of working from home for me is actually working. Some days I've got a cluttered house that clutters my mind, and I can't focus on writing. Other days, it's 72 and sunny outside and a perfect day to write some songs on the back patio or weed the neglected flower beds. I'll just work extra hard tomorrow, I think. But then I remind myself of the reality: if I don't work, the bills don't get paid. It's always impossible to make up a whole day of work without a lot of anxiety and misery. So I sit down and Barbara's muse comes to stand over me, and I work.

So what, exactly, do I do? I write web content. It mostly pays okay, sometimes very, very well. I work primarily for two companies: Zerys and Constant Content.

Zerys provides titles of articles they need written. I write the titles I like and that have higher pay. When the article is accepted by the client or by Zerys editors, they credit my account for the appropriate amount. Twice a month, my earnings are deposited into my PayPal account. The more articles I write, the more I make. The typical article I write fetches 3.2 cents per word, or about $11 for 350 words.

Constant Content works a little differently. I write articles about whatever I feel like writing about, then upload them to the database. Clients looking for content that matches what I've written are given the option to buy my articles. The more I write, the more I sell, so I try to upload as many articles a week as I can. I set my own prices, generally at the industry standard of 10 cents per word. So for a 500 word article, I charge about $50, of which I get $32.50. Not bad for the short amount of time it takes to write most of the articles.

Both of these companies are strictly legitimate, and I highly recommend either or both to anyone who wants to make extra money from home or who wants to make a living at writing content. It's not always fun, but that's what my blog is for. I like to keep in touch with my love of writing, and since I don't have time to get cracking on a novel, I write here instead when the mood strikes.