How nervous do publisher e-mails make you?

Yesterday, I received an e-mail message from the publisher of one of my top print-magazine clients. I shudder when these arrive these days. Often, they're an announcement that the publisher can no longer afford to hire freelance writers.

Sure enough, this particular e-mail message was bad news: The publisher wasn't firing his freelancers. He was asking them to take a voluntary pay cut on all their stories. I agreed to the cut. What else was there to do? I need all the clients I can get these days.

For writers, the end to this recession can't come soon enough. It's getting a bit depressing to see so many great magazines -- both consumer and trade -- go out of business. And what's happening to the newspaper industry is even more frightening. Again, some truly good newspapers are no more thanks to declining ad revenue. And my hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, is a shell of its former self.

This turned out be a depressing post. Oh, well. It's that kind of day, I suppose.

Blogging for businesses: The most money I've made online

Last year, I began ghostwriting blog posts for a local real estate agent. The agent's a bit of a pain. He likes to make some fairly odd requests. Sometimes he gets on me for being too negative. Then next week, he'll wonder why I'm being overly positive when the housing market is in the toilet.

I sigh -- not when I'm talking to him by phone, of course, but after I hang up -- make his changes and send my posts back in.

Like I said, he's a bit of a pain. But he pays me $400 month to provide him with 12 blog posts of 200 to 300 words each. That comes out to about $33 a post. Not bad in the world of online content writing.

I also blog for an international real estate company that's trying to get a foothold in the U.S. market. That company pays me $12 a post in Euros to write about residential real estate. Thanks to the exchange rate, I usually make more like $18 or so in U.S. money for each post.

These are my two most lucrative online writing jobs right now. I also write for an insurance salesman who runs his own Web site. He pays me $105 a month. Not as good, but at least it's slow and steady.

I'm hoping to grow this portion of my business. That's why I'm in discussions now with a local community newspaper chain to blog for their online real estate section. (Real estate is a specialty of mine. And, yes, this was a better specialty to have about two years ago.) Blogging for businesses pays better than does writing for sites such as Associated Content or Suite 101 or blogging for networks such as b5 Media or Today.com.

I'd recommend that every freelance writer out there concentrate not only on the better known content sites such as Demand Studios and the like. Look at the businesses in your own communities. Many of them have blogs. And many have blogs that they're struggling to update and maintain. Approach them with a reasonable rate. Who knows what kind of business you might get out of them?