Starting a Writing Outsourcing Business

I’ve made a lot of money from the internet in the last few years, and there’s nothing to stop you doing the same.

If you have good writing skills, you can use these skills to find work writing for websites.

If you want to earn money writing on the web, you could start at the cheap end on something like fiverr. You can pitch for higher rates on sites like odesk. Even on odesk, I’d suggest you start by offering your services cheaply. Build a good reputation, and then you’ll have employers inviting you to work for them, even when you begin pushing your hourly or contract rates up.

I’d call this sort of work self-employed. If you work hard at it you will be able to make a living as a self-employed writer, but why stop there? Why not employ people, turn what you do into a real business and make more money than you could ever possibly make if you did all the writing yourself?

You will find a lot of people pitching for work on odesk from countries where wages are really low. I’ve found that $2 an hour is higher than the average wage in the Philippines and some other Asian countries. I’ve employed people from the Philippines and other countries to do work for me that doesn’t rely on their language skills – creating artwork for example.

For written work, I’ve not been able to find non-native speakers to do work I’m happy with. (In fact, even paying more and employing people whose first language is English can be a less than satisfactory experience. Most people like me who employ writers find they spend more time than they would like to rewriting work to get it right.)

Deadlines are a pain in any language

To get the best out of freelance sites, I find it best to use the skills people have, and then add further value myself. That’s what I’m suggesting you can do. People whose first language is not English can do research. They can write a report or article for you. It will be clear from what they write that English isn’t their first language. The facts and ideas you need will be there, they’ll just need tidied up a little.

That’s where you come in. If English is your first language and you have a reasonably good grasp of grammar, you can take work you’ve paid a little for and add value to it, turning it into perfect, native English. Then you can sell it for a bit more.

For example, you might be looking at jobs offered on odesk and find someone who needs content written for their website. Over the next ten weeks they’ll need two articles a week about European cities. They’re offering $10 per article. If you have a strong profile as a writer, you can pitch for the contract and have a good chance of getting it. If you do get it, you can assign the work to one of your odesk employees at a rate of $5 per article. When you receive it, rewrite it in perfect native English before passing it on to the person you’re doing the work for.

It’s a perfect business. In fact, there are a few people I know in Asia whose English is perfect, and they are running businesses along similar lines.

A few people I’ve talked to about this business model have described it as unethical. I like to think my own ethics are good, so I’ll explain why I think it’s perfectly ethical.

• Firstly, every employer in the world offers work to people at pay rates which allow the employer to make a profit. This idea is no different.

• Secondly, you are not exploiting people in poorer countries. People with non-native English wouldn’t have got the work in the first place. You are enabling them to get work they wouldn’t have got, and probably paying them more than they could earn in the country they live in.

• Thirdly you will earn more money running a business than you would as a self-employed writer. You’re going to spend some of that money in your own community, helping your local economy.

p.s. A quick end note to say that nothing on this website has been outsourced.