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.
When it comes to my freelance writing career, I very rarely seek out the help of others. This is not to say that I can do everything on my own, but I am not the type to outsource my work. If I were to do this, I would be putting my good name on the line because clients believe that they are working directly with me. But on the other side of things, when it comes to blogging, hiring help is what I do. Since I am only good at writing content, I often times hire people to help with design work, coding, and much more.
At this time, ChrisBlogging is achieving more success than I thought it would. This success has not come in a monetary sense, but more in the way that I am helping aspiring freelance writers.
No matter what field you are working in, keep this in mind: do what you are good at, and hire somebody else to do the rest. Sure, you can attempt to learn on your own as well, but in order to keep things moving forward hiring help is always a good idea. I have read conflicting opinions on this, but I strongly believe in concentrating on your core competency and then getting help for everything else.
In many cases, you may even be able to trade your services with somebody else. In the past, I have written website copy for clients who have in turn designed a new website for me. This way, neither one of us has to pay in cash.
With my new theme on the way (hopefully within the next two days), there is one last thing that I need help with to take ChrisBlogging to the next level; that being search engine optimization. I am getting a decent amount of direct traffic each day, but my search engine numbers are lagging behind.
That leads me to this question: are there any SEO professionals out there? I would much rather work with a loyal reader than anybody else. If so, send me a quick email and we’ll chat.
In the meantime, keep doing what you do best; anything else you need help with can be outsourced.
Earlier today I made a post about freelance writing deadline do’s and don’ts. Shortly thereafter, I spoke with a past client about a rush job that they need help with. In this case, the word rush really meant rush. They wanted me to complete a batch of SEO articles for them by tomorrow night. As you can imagine, this means that I would have to work a lot of the day today, as well as some of tomorrow.
Should you take on weekend deadlines? In the case outlined above, I said yes. There are a couple of reasons that I did this. First off, I was able to negotiate a higher price since they wanted the work done on a rush, weekend basis. Additionally, they have been good to me in the past, so it will definitely work out to my advantage in the future.
When accepting a new project and discussing a deadline with a client, make sure that you are aware of the weekends. There is nothing worse than agreeing on a delivery date, and then finding out that it lies on a Saturday or Sunday. You may not have any problems with working the weekend, but this is not something that a lot of people like to do.
Although I had no plans on working long hours this weekend, you never know what will change when you are a freelance writer. In the end, it will be nice to receive the extra money!
