The web is stuffed with ways to make cash. Just do a quick search on relevant keywords on the search engines to find every mad-cap money-making scheme in the book. The fact is most of them will be hyped-up scams where the single thing you will earn is a bad back from sitting hunched over the laptop clicking ads all day.
But the internet is not all bad.
There are legitimate ways to make real money on it, even ways to make a good monthly salary, including traditional work that the internet has made easier to find or deliver.
Everyone has read those readers' true stories, haven't they? You know the kind:
• My Partner is a Cross Dresser
• I Won the Lottery and Spent it All!
• My Boss is the Devil!
The stories can be absolutely tragic; true tales of heartbreak or parental bereavement. Sometimes they are triumphant tales of courage or endurance and sometimes they are tales of recovery or victory, but they all share one thing - true stories touch the reader in ways that fiction cannot.
But Nothing Ever Happens To Me!
Many people reading this will scoff and say 'But nothing exciting ever happens to me! My life is so boring, who would be interested in my story?', and yet everybody has their own unique experiences to share.
Were you bullied at school? Have you lost a ton of weight? Did you have to deal with a stressful /romantic/scary situation at work? You have lived through several events in your life that have affected you deeply or changed you in some way.
Selling Your Real Life Story
Publications each have their own policy for accepting real life stories. Some offer a fee to everybody who has a half-way decent tale to tell irrespective of the significance or uniqueness of the situation. For example a story about surviving a catastrophic event might be paid the same as a story about a holiday romance.
However entertaining the romantic tale is, it could not match the story of survival for excitement factor and suspense. It does not seem fair that both stories should be offered the same payment.
Other magazines have a representative who is responsible for sourcing real life tales. The disadvantage is that these people have a spending budget and their job is as much about getting your story for as little amount of money as possible as it is sourcing new material.
So how do you sell your story?
Your best bet, whether you have a true story, featured article or even a celebrity tip or photograph to sell is to get in touch with a content agency. Having experience in the media business, the content agencies have friends and contacts in the editorial division of hundreds of publications. They know precisely what type of story sells and who will pay the most for it. As their agency fee is commission based, it is in the agency's best interests to get you the best possible deal for your unique narrative and what is more, they will have professional writers on staff to help you get the words down.
Sell Your Story
