Your Biggest Freelance Writing Project
If you are like most freelance writers, almost every project is different from the next. This holds true with the project itself, as well as the income that you will earn. After looking over my stats from last year, I noticed that I completed a wide variety of jobs. They ranged from short descriptions that paid no more than $5 for 50 words to longer feature articles that paid in excess of $1,000, as well as many others. While it would be nice to only dabble in the larger freelance writing projects, we all know that this is not always possible.
There are two ways that you can categorize your “biggest” freelance writing projects. First off, you can do so by the actual size. For instance, a project that requires you to write 1,000 SEO articles would obviously be bigger than one feature of 500 words. On the other side of things, you can categorize projects by how much you will get paid by the client. For me, it is important to keep both the size and payment in mind. This allows me to make sure that I am getting paid enough money for the size of the project that I am taking on. You may think that $1,000 is a nice sized payment, but it is quite small if you have to write 500 articles to get the money.
So you are probably wondering what my biggest project of 2007 looked like, right? For me, it was work that I did for a large insurance company. It consisted of writing several press releases, a few SEO articles, and some miscellaneous content here and there. Not only was this my biggest job of the year in terms of income, but it was also one of the most enjoyable. This was the case because I enjoy writing about insurance, and the client was a treat to work with. In the end, this one project earned me a little more than $3,000 via PayPal. As you can imagine, the PayPal fee on this project was huge!
What was your biggest freelance writing project of 2007? You don’t have to give exact figures or data, but any information is sure to be useful to all of us.
January 4th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
My largest single project, in terms of time, profile, and income, (and also the most fun) was working as media coordinator for a big, three-day paintball event in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I earned a sizeable amount of cash, plus airline fare, hotels, and meals for myself and my spouse AND the opportunity to take part in one of the most unique paintball events ever.
I put in a few hours a day, everyday, for a month leading up to the event, and then three days non-stop at the event. If I worked out my hourly wage, it was probably lower than i would normally accept, but well worth it!
I’m looking forward to doing it again this year, although, since the company restructured, I may not receive as much money for it. It will still be worth it.
January 4th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
I had a similarly large programming project earlier in the year - unfortunately it was on rentacoder and I received the payment through paypal. I lost 15% to rentacoder, the paypal fee, and a couple percent more for currency conversion (the buyer was in the same country as me).
Since then I’ve done full projects with a smaller scope and a lot of things under $500 - it looks like I can land a consistent stream of small projects at very good rates using another site so that might be an alternative to tring to sell people on large projects all the time. On the other hand there’s always overhead in finding new projects and time management is more difficult…
January 6th, 2008 at 6:34 am
It’s been about a month since I started freelance writing my largest has come from my first client. A few weeks ago he had mentioned that he asked me whether I was interested in doing additional work for him. I told him yes. He said no more about it yesterday he came back to me with an offer. He asked me whether I thought that was a good price. He pays very well, and he is willing to pay more if I don’t think it’s a fair price. I like that.
Yesterday I received an email from a potential client. They want to hire me for blog postings. What’s a reasonable rate? I’ve been searching online but haven’t found too much on the subject?