Writing Work at Home Jobs - 

A great way to get your foot in the online door!

My initial writing work at home jobs were my first successful forays into the world of making money online, so I have a great love for these particular types of work at home jobs. If you're looking to get your first fiction book published, this work will probably fall into the 'underwhelming' on the experience range. However, if you're looking to learn how to work remotely, break into the online workforce and gain a firm grasp of how websites and the internet work this can be a great place to start.

As the internet continues to grow, so will the need for eloquent, skilled writers - the majority of the internet is (at least at this point) made up of text. Some one has to write all that text! Lucky for freelancers, many great business persons aren't the best or speediest writers (or they have better things to do with their time).

As businesses get more and more competitive at ranking for keywords, they will need increasingly skilled and creative writers to create high-quality content. If you are willing to write about some boring stuff (Tile Grout anyone?) and if you can throw in a bit of unique and catchy personality into the writing as well as know some SEO writing basics, you'll be set for finding plenty of quality writing jobs.

If you can deliver on-time, maintain good client relationships, and if you can bring a bit of social media traffic building skills to the table, you'll be well positioned to gain enough clients to keep yourself fully employed.

Understanding what you're getting yourself into:

First of all, not all writing work at home jobs are created equal. There are TONS of jobs out there because everyone needs content. Many of these are scams, pay too little, or aren't worth signing your name to. You need to be disciplined and skilled when applying to jobs and you need to hold the jobs you take to equally high standards.

Deborah Ng, a fellow freelance writer, saw the overabundance of bad writing work at home jobs on the job boards and created Freelance Writing Gigs to help skilled freelance writers find good online jobs. That of course brings us to our next point - you have to know how to write reasonably well to make a living at it! You need not have an English degree, but you do need to know how to convey your thoughts in words.

For example, if you don't know how to use a semi-colon correctly or if you don't know which version of "there" is appropriate to the occasion, you should do a bit of brushing up on your skills before you start applying to writing work at home jobs.

Online gigs have either no editors or very over-burdened editors and you'll be expected to present fully-edited work ready for publication. Showing that you can do this from the beginning is a great way to get your foot in the door. When I was starting out and didn't have a large portfolio of published work, I'd often show my skills by including a brief mention of a typo or two that I found in the job board posting (there's almost always at least one) in my email cover letter.

Once you get the job, be prepared to deliver on time (or ahead of time to make your editors and employers love you extra-much) and to over-deliver in terms of quality and content.

The drawback to work at home jobs is that you're automatically mistrusted by employers. They don't see you every day walk into the office so even if they have completely outsourced teams and are used to working with remote contractors, they still don't trust you automatically. You have to prove that you're not just as good as an in-house writer, and that, actually, you're better.

How to get Writing Work at Home Jobs

Deborah's site is really the best place out there to look for writing work at home jobs. You can also check CraigsList if you like, but she checks those ones. Finding writing work at home jobs isn't the hard part - getting your foot in the door is.

There are several things you can do to set yourself apart from the hundreds of applications that flood the hiring manager's inbox the second she post a job description. Here are my top 10 tips for getting the job:

• Create a website to host your resume, portfolio and links to examples of your published writing. Use a link to this in your initial email cover letter instead of attaching your resume so that you won't get stuck in a spam filter because of an attachment.
• If you're brand-new, start a blog and write a bunch of articles for it so you have some online examples of your blogging skills.
• Treat your initial email like a cover-letter, but a bit less formal. Sound real, approachable and trustworthy. I've found that a LOT of online hiring happens because of personality, not skills. When you're 2,000 miles away the manager needs to feel they can trust you.
• Apply FAST. Deborah posts at 8am EST each morning. Be one of the first with your foot through the door and you'll be more likely to be seen.
• Speed counts for a lot, but only if you also have accuracy. Make sure that you have no grammatical or spelling mistakes in any of your submissions. Follow all the application instructions that are in the job posting to the T.
• Follow-up on your applications. I usually give it 24-48 hours and then send a brief email to follow up. This makes sure they got your information, lets them know you're a real person (not an automated system) and shows your reliability.
• If the company indicated themselves in any way in the posting, you can send a follow up to the HR department (found on the company website) as well. Plus, you can also include company specifics in your initial cover letter.
• Apply to everything you could possibly conceive of yourself doing. When you're starting, anything is a good first step. Once you've got a bit of a portfolio going, you can be more selective.
• Track your applications on a spreadsheet along with your follow-ups and responses. You'll probably be doing 5-10 applications per day, and it's easy for follow-ups to slip through the cracks.
• While you're applying for writing work at home jobs, continue to improve and build your writing skills even if you're still in an office every day. Deborah's site is full of these sorts of resources so I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here, but make sure that you're writing as much as you can every day - on your own blog if no where else- so that you're continuing to improve your skills.