Bylines, bylines, bylines.
If you’re a freelance writer your badge of honor often lies in how many bylines you can obtain. If you’re reading this and have no idea what a byline is, it’s literally a line in a newspaper, magazine or website naming the writer of an article.
While bylines are great and in many ways a legitimacy booster when trying to obtain clients, bylines are not everything. Additionally, bylines don’t always equate more money or even any money at all.
For example, I often share my early experiences at Huffington Post. While I am thankful for the opportunities that were provided to me by Arianne Huffington, I worked for FREE for years. Yes, free. So while it looked good that I had the byline, it didn’t equate to anything financially for me but to many outsiders looking in, I was getting paid the big bucks as a freelancer.
Now the question at hand is, how do you get paid without bylines? There are several ways and here are 2:
1. Start Your Own Blog
I always suggest that if you are getting lots of rejections, start your own blog and then figure out ways to monetize. If you have a fair amount of traffic to your site, shoot me an email. For this month only I will walk you step by step FOR FREE on how to start getting paid with your blog today.
2. Ghost Writing
I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing clients over the last few years and despite how amazing they are, so many people will never know I wrote even half the content that I have written. Why? Because I was ghost writing. Ghost writing means you’re giving up your intellectual property and allowing someone else to claim it but guess what? You’ll still get paid to do it!