Writing is a Hot Career?!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this article on yahoo ranks the career of "Writing" at #3 for hot occupations! This agrees with the premise of this blog that writing in general has turned a page very recently, really more like a web page.

SEO, SEM, Blogging, Podcasting, and a variety of other niche content is exploding everywhere in different directions. For those lucky enough to have earned a bachelor's degree, or even an associates in the field of English or Journalism, they already have a leg up on their competitors. Competition may be fierce, but sheer skills will sort out who gets the better high paying jobs.

Realistically, it is possible to earn six figures simply handling the web content for one or several websites. However, this often means you'll need to know more than Search Engine Optimization, or how to write well. The skills you'll really need are of two main varieties.

1) Result Oriented - The best clients out there won't compromise. If they can't see results right away, then you'd better have someone else's results to show them instead. If you can't produce some evidence that you've improved a site's search ranking by tailoring a complete SEO campaign, then you will lose them to another SEO company or writer. The business pays in variety of ways, and juicy freelance jobs are few and far between to those who don't have some proven experience and software capability to show real results.

2) Technical - The SEO big boys make up to 500 dollars an hour because they have an entire fleet of technical skills to go along with their SEO knowledge. This means everything from custom blog templates, to website creation, to coding such as HTML, Flash, PHP, Java, and others. Having some knowledge of premium software comes along with all these skills as well. The more technical, or analytical knowledge you can demonstrate, the more unique and valuable you will become. Then it's just a matter of deciding which jobs you can handle and which of them are the most worth it.

Writing is a hot career right now because entrepreneurs are snatching up good writers and making them useful to their websites. Because websites are becoming the front feature of many businesses, writers are going along for the ride. Where print media has died off, the skill of writing even at amateur levels has new values and opportunities on the internet...

more to come...