Whether you’re a college student focused on your educational career or a full-time employee, a side hustle paying extra money seems tempting always.
There are several ways to earn through side jobs; copywriting is one of them. Should you be pursuing copywriting as your side hustle?
As a full-time employee or a student, your working hours are occupied, and it’s hard to take out time for any freelance writing gigs. But it’s still a doable job when you learn the right skills that get you quick and easy money.
As a copywriter, you will face variable tasks and workload. There is definitely room for you to fit in, but you should be careful when selecting the job type since your working hours are limited.
Let’s talk about the skills you should go for when selecting a copywriting career as a side hustle.
How to Choose Copywriting Skills as a Side Hustle?
Being a copywriter, you’ll be offered numerous jobs to work on. You should assess whether to work on them or not based on some general criteria:
Easily Learnable
If the job requires no or less learning, you will save your time by doing the job quickly. For example, if you are an engineering student, and get a freelance gig writing engineering blog, you will probably require less time to research and write the content.
It will be hard to fit in an online course or training in your busy schedule that requires hours of your time. Even if the freelance writing job pays well, your full-time work will suffer in the long run.
In-Demand
How would you get paid for a skill that isn’t in demand? Freelance gigs are just like any other job that should have a market segment dedicated to their abilities.
Companies that need similar services to what you offer are your best prospects for employment.
Sometimes, freelance writers niche down their skills to specific subjects in order to become an authority in that field. It’s completely okay unless the market segment becomes too small that there isn’t much work to fill your plate.
Not Requiring Many Revisions
It’s okay to revise writing pieces for reasonable concerns. But to revise the whole word count from A to Z shouldn’t even be a choice. Many freelance writers get stuck in providing revisions to their clients. This occupies extra time while giving no extra money.
Avoid such clients who require a high number of revisions and find the ones who respect your hard work and time. Otherwise, you will remain busy handling your past projects without earning a dime.
In order to do this, you need to be sure that you are providing high quality text from the first delivery.
Large Projects
Avoid running after small writing gigs just because they consume less time. If you really want to get to 4 digit earnings, you will have to focus on bigger projects.
Juggling between too many writing gigs is itself a time-consuming process and dealing with multiple clients, communicating with them, delivering work, getting instructions, and writing content can significantly take up a whole lot of your time.
Make sure that your projects pay you well even if you’re working on them as a part-time job.
Long-Term Gigs
Long term writing projects save your time in such a way that you don’t have to keep finding new jobs. As a freelance writer, your primary focus should be on writing for freelance projects, not on ‘finding’ freelance projects.
Shorter gigs might pay well, but consistently finding new projects will be a headache ultimately.
What Copywriting Projects Are Perfect as a Side Hustle?
You would be excited to know what jobs you can potentially work on. I will talk about a few jobs that are very much in-demand, require less time to complete, and pay well. Here are some questions you should ask yourself before finding a writing gig:
- How much time would it require to complete?
- How much can you earn by doing them?
- What will be the hourly rate?
- What’s the future scope of that copywriting skill?
Based on these questions, find a suitable niche for yourself from the options mentioned below:
1. Email Writing
Freelance writers are always the first choice for email writing projects as the gigs are short, require less time to complete and are often considered as a long-term opportunity.
Be it a monthly newsletter, Christmas sale offer, or a clearance sale notice; freelance writers are always in action for these gigs.
Crafting an email with a perfect sales pitch and structuring the headline and bylines barely takes up half an hour. The employee can hire you on a monthly, weekly or daily contract depending on the nature of the job. And you can make more than $1000 working part-time as an email writer.
2. Blog Writing
Blog writing is another way to show your skills for making money online. Writing a medium-sized blog post requires an hour or two.
The pay rate mostly depends on the word count so you can charge a decent amount of money depending on the client’s budget and your writing capabilities. In this sense, Spanish texts are cheaper than English ones, so if you work in Spanish it is more difficult to reach that level.
However, some private bloggers don’t have an excessive budget to put much into it, so don’t expect the same earnings as you would get for writing a landing page or an email.
3. Website Content Writing
Although copywriting isn’t limited to website content, most people think of it as the only type of copywriting. It’s the best job in terms of workload and pay rate. However, you might face some revisions if the client isn’t satisfied with your initial work.
Website content writing is difficult — Let’s face it.
You will need a handful of experience to offer your skills in the digital marketing world. Clients always look for top-notch website copywriting services. Make sure you are offering them the best quality out of your work.
Conclusion
My verdict for ‘copywriting as a side hustle’ is a big YES.
Do you know the best part of copywriting? It can be done in any language. Many clients are waiting to hire your services, whether you’re a Spanish copywriter or a native German.
