And every one of those products needs copy writing. Whether it’s a new doctor offering the miracle cure, or a pharmaceutical solution to years of yo-yo dieting, they all need someone to write their copy.

You don’t necessarily have to have a degree in nutrition to grab a slice of the $6 Billion fat-free pie. You just have to be able to take available research and turn it into compelling sales copy.

If you do happen to have some medical bona fides, you are an excellent candidate to ghostwrite celebrity diet books. What? You thought they wrote their own? Most of ‘em can’t read, let alone write a million-seller.

Fact is, like everything else, health and nutrition is an industry. Keep it in mind, along with other industries that don’t always spring to mind:

• Cleaning services
• Undertaking/cemetery
• Taxi companies

If you have personal experience in the weight loss area – perhaps you lost a great deal of weight yourself – you could even start your own weight loss website. There’s plenty of ad revenue to be shared in the diet arena. Set up a website, get some articles up there, put up Google and AdBrite ads, use SEO tactics, and you’ll have a nice steady stream of money trickling in. Yes, trickling. Don’t believe the hype that you can make hundreds of dollars a day via PPC ads. But a trickle is good.

Add to that some free reports that lead to pay reports, and you have a nice little home business going. Help others beat the bulge (hey, it’s bikini season), and make a nice tidy profit. It’s a win-win.

If you need help setting up a diet website, check this out.

That said, the climate, the environment and Global Warming™ are big business. Al Gore won and Oscar and a Nobel Prize in the same year, for heaven’s sake! Eco-fear, like other marketing, is a multi-billion-dollar industry. And what do freelance writers do? They write marketing copy!

Fear sells. If you can write copy that a) scares the hell out of people, b) makes them feel insanely guilty and then c) tells them how they can alleviate the guilt and sleep better at night, you are going to make a mint.

One of the first (and one of the best) copy writing jobs I had was for a company that provides an environmentally safe and efficient way to clean up oil spills. I was like a kid in a candy store writing copy for that. Big Oil™, that much maligned boogeyman, has a lot to atone for. What better way to atone than by using a clean bio-fuel source to clean up their nasty fossil fuel messes? (as an interesting aside, the company also sells a private-label version of their product to the Israeli military and police for cleaning up blood in bomb blast zones. seriously.) By tossing the “green” label around for this product, the business increased sales. And by purchasing the product, companies could say they were doing something positive and responsible for the environment.

It’s a win-win.

Going in, I didn’t know a thing about the product or its environmental benefits. What I did know is what I said earlier: Fear sells. So I began there and fleshed out page after page of glorious marketing prose. As I reviewed company documentation, I also saw there was a cost-benefit to the product, too. That way, the rare person (such as myself) who doesn’t self-flagellate daily over the destruction of the yellow-breasted-tit nesting habitat could still see the benefit in purchasing product from this company.

Whatever your writing niche – be it medical or cosmetics or coupon clipping – find a way to slap a green label on it and you will generate more income. And somewhere out there, you’ll be helping an anxiety-ridden person sleep better. How cool is that?

No paper was used in the writing of this blog post. This story is 100% recycled, as I told it at a dinner party last month.