Many writers do not understand that the online writing business is very different from the offline writing world. The economics are totally different and no amount of lobbying and noise will change that.
Sadly, because of this reason, many good writers have stayed away from the online writing business while others have priced themselves out of lucrative assignments from websites, simply because they want the offline world to be automatically transferred online.
In the bricks and mortar world of writing, top freelance writers are accustomed to single writing assignments paying them $300 at the very minimum. Rates for leading magazines can go up to $3,000 or even much higher.
Thinking that you can push a webmaster to pay you $3000 for your writing is just plain day dreaming. The realities online are very different. For starters, in the offline writing market there are a few thousand publications paying good rates to freelancer writers. In the online world there are millions of potential writing markets (and constantly growing even as you read this). The challenge in the old world is finding a way to beat other writers to assignments. In the new online writing business, the challenge is being able to handle enough clients and to do enough writing daily to make a good income.
Online writing business will tend to come in volumes and for you to make money you will need to be a fast writer. There are some techniques to speed up the writing process (which I deal with in my free short online writing business course available by sending an email to writertips at freeautobot.com) but these technique will only help to speed up a writer who already has a good speed.
Indications are that as the number of websites and blogs continue to grow at the current rate, the economics will swing in favor of the online writing business entrepreneur and rates should go up as the demand for good writers continues to far outstrip the supply. Still it is unlikely that a rate of $3000 per article will be common in the foreseeable future.
So the best thing to do is to find a way to make a good steady income from your online writing business with the current rates and the current state of affairs. Actually this is not too difficult. I know online writers who comfortably make $4,000 on a monthly basis, without too much effort and that is by getting paid less than $11 on average for their articles.
The online writing business will favor the kind of writer who leans more towards novel writing rather than the short story or article writer. This is because a novel writer thrives on writing every day and trying to increase their daily output. This is in contrast to the short story writer who waits for inspiration to write his brief piece at virtually one sitting. Or the professional freelance article writer who will tend to spend more time doing research and sending queries to publications rather than the actual writing work.
The huge advantage that the online writing business entrepreneur has is that they can use the power of the internet to guarantee a steady and constant flow of writing jobs which will leave them with lots of time to do what every writer should enjoy doing the most - writing.
Christopher Kyalo earns a living writing for various online clients. Visit his blog http://100grandonlinewriters.blogspot.com to read the following article; How to get lots of business writing online articles. He can be reached at strongwallafrica at yahoo.com