Freelance Writing for Money - the 3 Most Lucrative Fields for Freelance Writers

Making a living as a freelance writer can be difficult. Especially for the beginner, where online content and article writing is the easiest place to break in, but as such they also tend to pay peanuts until you can establish yourself.

Assuming you're in for the long haul and are serious about becoming a freelance writer, then the first thing you need to do is figure out which direction you want to go. There are some very lucrative freelance writing gigs as a professional ghost writer (especially for celebs) or as a feature writer for popular magazines, but you need a very extensive portfolio and some very good connections to consistently land that level of gigs.

Those areas also have fierce levels of competition for a limited amount of work, and if the field has several professional experts, then you're just out of luck. For the rest of us, there are three specific types of writing that are the most consistently lucrative and accessible:

1) Business Writing

2) Copy Writing (also known as Sales Page/Sales Writing)

3) Technical Writing

These three areas consistently pay more money to rank and file writers than any other area of freelance writing. This makes sense because all three of these types of writing have you working for businesses and/or corporations, meaning you're writing for clients with large amounts of money who need a job done, and are willing to pay to get it done right. But now more about each:

Business Writing: This can be for press releases, white papers, business reports, prepared speeches, articles, pamphlets, advertising, or any other type of needed writing. Business writers can plan on making a very good hourly rate, and even entry level freelance business writers can often charge $15-$20 an hour while building a business relationship.

Copy Writing: This is perhaps the most lucrative writing if you're good at it. Copy writing is writing sales pages for web sites, e-books, or other products. Even moderate level copy writers can make $60,000 or more a year, and the best in the business make millions because they not only charge huge for jobs, but they also get a percentage of everything that sells.