Freelance Writing Jobs: Big and Small Pay
I get asked a lot about the size and pay of each of my freelance writing jobs. Even though my workload changes from month to month, there are some generalizations that I can make when it comes to the size of my freelance writing jobs.
During my first six months as a freelance writer, I would consider all of my jobs small. They were not paying a lot of money, and were more or less keyword or SEO articles of 500 words or so. While there is nothing wrong with these jobs, you have to put in a lot of work to make a decent income. Obviously, this is not something that freelance writers strive for. But of course, any job with any pay is better than none at all.
Soon enough, I began to move onto jobs that did not take as much work but paid more money. For instance, one of my biggest clients pays me about $1,500 month. The only thing that I have to do for them is write one or two articles per day on the topic of my choice. To make this even better, the article only has to be 300 words or so. This may sound like a small job due to the size of the articles, but it works out to big pay in the end.
In my opinion, there is no job too big or too small to take on. In other words, if you are presented an opportunity to do work, and you have the time, you should consider accepting. Of course, if the job does not meet your requirements in areas such as pay, you will want to pass. Again, this all depends on what career stage you are at.
Keep this in mind while you are shaping your freelance writing career: search for jobs that do not take a lot of time to complete, but pay the most money. Are these jobs easy to find? No way! But there are tens of thousands of them out there. It is jobs like this that have allowed me to make a good freelance writing income without having to work much more than four to five hours per day.
November 12th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Amen. I’ve been freelance writing for a long time and those promising revenue sharing or paying you in the future never end up making good on their promises. Another good point is that if you get signed on with a nice publication that gets acquired, you just landed yourself a nice job at a new company!
The hardest part is finding these freelance jobs, as the good paying ones are usually unadvertised. Here’s my methodology:
http://www.makescratch.com/how-to-find-freelance-writing-jobs/
Using Google and those search terms makes finding good freelance writing jobs much easier, I’ve found.
November 12th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Excellent points; though for me, right now, finding a job with ANY pay would be lovely
I will definitely give Justin’s method a try…
November 13th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Another point to add is that the best kind of jobs might be related to some strength you have, or something you did earlier that took a lot of research. I see things like this as a programmer - for some reason there’s not a lot of competition but with the knowledge I have and the resources I can bring in to a new project it pays well for the time it takes. Others might consider them difficult but because of my experience they’re easy to do.