New to this.

I signed up to this forum a long time ago, and have only recently come back after again finding myself trawling the web for ways to make a few extra dollars in a day. I have no massive goal to reach $100 a day, because i've found i'm no good at most of the things that allow you to do that. However, i have realised i am good at one thing; writing.

So, i realised i can actually make money selling my writing skills, but i have no idea how to go about it. I mean, can i only take on projects i have specialist knowledge in, or can i do research and find out about the areas i am required to write about?

Not to mention the fact i have no idea where to start, would anybody mind pointing me in the right direction? I couldn't find any beginner thread. :/

My initial goal is going to be $20 a week from writing articles.

Check out fiverr.com for a good start. Also any other freelance type sites like odesk.com

I hear textbroker.com is also good.

Hello and welcome buddy. I am or, umm, was in your same predicament. Textbroker is the article site that I went with. If your writing is up to par they will give you an "initial" writer rating of 4 stars. The higher your rating is, the more money you will be paid per article.

I made $18 dollars my first day writing for them. This was done by writing 3 articles. You are giving a long list of assignments with instructions. Accept them if you think you can handle the project. If the subject is foreign to you simply do some research on the topic and gather the important facts. Then use your gift of writing and pump out quality articles.

You can hit your $18 dollar a week goal in ONE DAY lol

Alright, well i signed up to fiverr and it doesn't look like i'll make anything from that, there's just too many people offering exactly the same thing on there!

I can't use textbroker because i'm from the UK :L

You can sign up at the various sites, but you can also wing it as a freelancer just from the FL sections of IM boards. Start memberships at 5-10 IM forums and start answering 2-3 posts on each by PM, email or chat. Take some simple, quick jobs at first, and request i-trader points for each job completed. After that you will have the cred to get more ambitious. One post a few weeks back suggested posting an offer open to the first ten people with heavy rep/post counts to write 5-10 articles each for them for free, in exchange for a i-trader or testimonial at the end from them. This will build your reputation quick on a forum, once others see that the heavier people were pleased with your work. Follow-up work assignments should roll in afterwards.

As for content expertise and specialty writing knowledge, you don't need it. To get background for any article, just use a tabbed browser, and open 4-5 tabs including Ezine articles, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Google News, and Amazon. Put the keyword in each seach bar, and you should get enough info from the search results to write 4-5 new paragraphs in your own words. Scraping software is also available, of course, but this 4-5 tab approach is simpler to set-up and easier to control for writing unique content with that won't read like gibberish.

can u provide some sites where i can work as a free lancer and they are not scam