Making Money As a Post-Panda Online Writer

This post goes out to those writers who, like me, found it pretty easy to scrape together a decent living as a writer before Panda slapped down the sites that paid reliably.

I can't say I have all the answers about how to recover, but I have made a couple of observations.

My first observation is, the paying work is still out there, but it takes longer and more effort to earn decent wages. Gone, at least for me, are the 15 minute = $15 articles. (Those were rare for me anyway because I am admittedly a slow and usually contemplative writer, except for when I'm blogging.) Now I end up spending a whole hour, or longer, on the same articles I casually breezed through in the pre-panda days.

My next observation is, the SEO information I spent hours upon hours upon hours learning, means very little right now, at least to the content sites that used to beg for lots of SEO - oops - I should have written keyword stuffing not lots of SEO.

I resisted taking on private clients for a long time, mainly because the work for content mills was there - well, everywhere - and it was so easy.

I suspect, for right now, private clients and business writing is the way to go for writers who want to jump back up to pre-panda earnings. Feel free to check out the job board here on this site, there are also some great Yahoo groups for freelance writers, with job leads shared regularly via some of the groups.