The explosive growth in demand for the written word on the Internet continues to create opportunities there. The Net is a huge writers’ market, growing with every new person connecting and every new website built. And there are tens of thousands of new websites going online daily. It’s a good time to get paid to write.

You don’t have to be an accomplished writer with a portfolio full of credits to work online. You just need to be able to write in clear, easily understandable English at the 5th to 9th grade level. You get paid to write for clarity of text and speed of delivery, not for grammatical, academic or literary excellence.

Most of the writing work is done by freelancers. Almost all of these operate their own freelance writing businesses. You don’t need to set up a formal business or have a website to get paid to write and make money writing online. You can just work on contract directly from meeting sites like elance.com or guru.com.

But whether you just contract directly under your own name or “build a brand” as you work from a website, you still want to build a client list. The usual practice is to try and develop a list of repeat clients. Having a list of repeat clients means that you can contract with these directly and keep your schedule fully booked.

If elance.com and guru.com are like “dating services” to bring writers and buyers together, then having your own list of buying clients or freelance writers is like “going steady”!

Both those who get paid to write and the users who hire and pay them prefer to work with people they know. Buyers prefer known quality, history of on-time delivery shown by their own writer contacts to lower prices from unknowns. Writers prefer to work for buyers whose needs, quality standards and on-time pay history are known.

If you want to get paid to write for the Internet, it is important to understand how the writers marketplace works. (It is fairly highly evolved, with its own peculiarities and rules.) As any other field, the freelance writing business has its rules, taboos, pitfalls as well as its viable routes to success.

To learn the details of how things work, it is best to first pick up a couple of guidebooks. There are good ones available, written by successful current freelance writing business operators. Almost anyone can get paid to write on the Internet. But you need to know what you are doing to get paid regularly and well.

For more details on starting a freelance writing business, for good sources of additional information about how to get paid to write on the Internet, just follow the links below…