By Michael Dolen
Freelance writing is something I have done since my late teen years. I’ve dabbled in everything from reality TV to healthcare copywriting, but at the end of the day the niche that was most lucrative for me was personal finance. Here’s why:
Plenty of workMortgages, credit cards, retirement, banking, investing… there are plenty of subsets to focus on.
Possible above-average payThe famed bank-robber Willie Sutton is rumored to have said the reason he chose banks was “because that’s where the money is!” Well, Mr. Sutton has a good point – it’s an industry that usually has a lot of money and in turn, it can be a very lucrative industry to write for.
After writing for others, I eventually founded a site in this niche – CreditCardForum.com. I guess you could say I have come full circle – from writing for others, to seeking out others to write for me. The latter of which hasn’t been going so well, because it’s hard to find good personal finance writers. So if you are looking for work within this niche, here are some tips on what clients like to see:
- Avoid the “basic 101” type articles. If the client is dedicated to one specific niche in personal finance (i.e. credit cards) you can bet they really dive into the nitty-gritty with it. So the last thing they want to see is beginner-type articles that only contain very basic information most people already know.
If you want to stand out from the crowd, write about some very unique aspect that demonstrates your knowledge in that niche. For example, instead of choosing a generic topic like “How To Pick a Credit Card,” write about a relatively obscure credit card benefit or feature, such as the American Express Return Protection Plan. If a writer submitted an in-depth article like that on a topic that wasn’t covered elsewhere, I would definitely be impressed! - Never rewrite another site’s work. If you want to write for a personal finance blog, please be aware that it’s a pretty small world and many of us know each other. That means taking shortcuts and doing a rewrite of an article you saw elsewhere is definitely asking for trouble.
Recently, I wrote an article titled How To Get a Credit Card Without a Social Security Number. Shortly after publishing it, two other big competitors in my niche came out with the same articles (even the titles were identical). Believe it or not, one of them actually re-wrote my entire article almost word for word, too. The owner of that site may have been too careless to catch what his writer was doing, but I wasn’t.
Obviously that is an extreme example of plagiarizing and I know readers of The Urban Muse would never do something like that in a million years, but the point I am trying to make is that if you damage your reputation with one finance blog owner, there’s a good chance the word will spread to others in the niche, too. So when you are doing research for an article, just try and be careful to not step on another blogger’s unique research for that topic, because doing so could offend one or both parties. - Go for quality over quantity. As we all know, it’s easy to write 500 or 1,000 words of filler on a given topic. Of course, there are some sites (like content mills) that actually don’t mind writers that do that. But more often than not, most website owners in the personal finance field would choose quality over quantity any day. This is even more true nowadays, since Google’s Panda update, which is good at detecting (and demoting) fluff-filled content.
Michael is the President of Category Media, LLC, which is the parent company of CreditCardForum.com. Founded in 2008, the site is best known for its reviews of the best cash back cards. If you are a credit card fanatic like he is and are looking for a writing gig, feel free to shoot him a message through the site’s “Contact” page.
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Flickr photo courtesy of Robert Scoble