Online Writing - Why a Blog Helps You Build Credibility As a Writer

If you are planning on becoming an online writer, you should be planning to have a blog as well.

Now I know you might be wondering why you should write for nothing when you can be paid by clients to write for them instead. But the truth is that you WILL be paid for writing your blog - it just won't happen in quite the same way.

Let's look into this a bit more closely so you can understand what I mean. It must be eighteen months now since I started my blog. For the first year or so I honestly felt like I was blogging out there on my own. I had the odd - very odd - comment that someone would leave, but for the most part I just got out there and blogged for the love of it. I didn't really worry too much about traffic or building a readership.

Then I finally decided to make the leap to my own domain name and self hosted Wordpress blog. To begin with everything felt pretty much the same - I was blogging quite happily and hoping to start building up a readership.

And that's exactly what started to happen. The thing was though, I started getting comments and emails from people who had been following my old free blog (quietly it would seem!) for months. But now they were starting to say thank you for the information and advice I had given them.

My idea has always been to make it easier for other people to get started in online writing than it was for me. And I didn't exactly find it too difficult to get going in that respect. But I did it on my own, through sheer hard work. No advice and no support in that sense either.

I haven't mentioned money yet though. And yet other things have occurred through my perseverance with my blog too. I've had clients contact me out of the blue - via my blog - asking me if I could do some work for them. And as I am starting to make more and more connections with people and commenting on their blogs in return, so I am finding that the pay off from my blog is starting to happen.

For the record I don't have any AdSense on my blog at the moment. I have a couple of affiliate links - literally two I think - and that's about it. They have brought in a trickle of money. But by far the best result of all has been to actually find new clients through it.

And of course, I can also apply for jobs and point them towards my blog to show them what I can do. I have several month's worth of posts on there now and I hope it gives people a good feel for my writing style.

It certainly seems to have helped with my online writing job applications. I applied for a dozen in the last week and all but one have come through for me. It can be a busy time ahead when you have a blog behind you to support you.