7 Ways To Make Money Online As A Writer In 2025

Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen

“If content is king, marketing it has become imperative for brands everywhere,” Statista analysts noted in their 2024 report of the content marketing industry.

Their report also revealed that the top two spending areas of investment for marketing budgets globally are: video content, and thought leadership material.

Writing thought leadership content is viewed as a critical investment for marketing purposes, for several reasons, including boosting credibility and trust amongst customers, standing out from the competition in the industry, and becoming known as the go-to source of information in a specific field, which naturally translates to more opportunities to interweave upselling and promotion of products/services.

The opportunities for freelancers are clear: highly-skilled professionals can capitalize on the demand for quality thought leadership expertise, and make money from their writing skills, providing in-demand services for other businesses while also monetizing their writing skills and industry expertise as a side hustle in itself.

Seven ways you can make money from writing online, and how you can easily turn your domain knowledge (the skills, knowledge, and experience gained form the job(s) you’ve worked in, into passive income as a writer.

Let’s say, for example, you have a background in software development or engineering, and want to monetize your skills outside of your 9-5. Here’s how you can do this through writing:

1. Offer your services as a technical writer.
2. Write for B2B SaaS companies on productivity, AI, and work tools.
3. Write (and film) content for an online course on how to start your career in tech/engineering.
4. Get freelance contracts to write as a contributor to industry-leading publications in your field.
5. Start a paid newsletter subscription on Substack for aspiring engineers, tech students, or other tech enthusiasts.
6. Create a LinkedIn newsletter and monetize it after gaining traction and building up a loyal audience, through offering sponsored ad places to companies/individuals in your field, and/or affiliate marketing. Receiving sponsorships and doing affiliate marketing/brand ambassadorships allows you to build passive income because you don’t have to actively do anything every day to make money from your writing–other than continue to write.
7. Provide a ghost-writing service for writing white papers, LinkedIn content for other thought leaders and experts, etc.

Contrary to what you might think, you don’t need strong writing experience, or have a degree in journalism or communications to succeed as a freelance writer. What you do need, however, are these ingredients to successfully land your first client:  

Build a portfolio of writing samples by writing a blog, offering your services at dicounted rate and create mock writing projects to display to your portfolio.  Develop your niche.  And pitch to the potential clients on Upwork; find B2B service and SaaS providers on LinkedIn and look for freelance writing gig and project opportunities posted online.

show less