Real Words

I recently wrote a post here on the site called How Raising Freelance Rates Boosts Creativity. In it, I mentioned that I used to write 500-word keyword articles for $5 each. That drew a lot of emails from people who couldn’t believe that I would accept  such low rates for my work. However, I didn’t really think of them as low at the time.  I could easily write three or four articles per hour which meant that I was making between $15 and $20 per hour. That’s not a rate that I would work at now but this was when I was living in Tucson, Arizona and still in college; that kind of pay wasn’t even possible anywhere else in the city at the time.

Even today, when I post job links on the site here on the weekends, I try to post only those links which are going to lead to lucrative jobs. I ignore anything that looks to be lower than $5 per post but I leave it fairly open after that. I really think that how much you can make depends on a lot of factors other than just the price-per-article that you’re getting paid.

The first thing that I try to figure out when determining whether a job is worth the stated pay is what amount of research is going to be required. You can’t always tell this off the bat but there are some pretty good clues as to whether something is going to take you a long time or not. First, consider whether this is a topic that you know through and through and have some strong opinions on or a topic that you’re going to need to read a lot about. Second, consider what the point of the article is; keyword articles can typically be pretty basic articles off of the top of your head whereas a magazine article is going to need to really interest the readers of that magazine and will take more time and editing.

The next thing I think about is how much extra work is going to need to be done other than just writing the article. Am I expected to promote it through social bookmarking sites to continually gain traffic. Is it a blog post that requires me to respond to comments that are posted after I’ve written an article? Do I need to include links to anything in the article? Do I have to use a certain number of really difficult keyword phrases in the article? All of these things add up to more time. There’s a big difference in the number of 500 word articles that you can write if you’re just writing them and emailing them as a chunk as compared to when you have to write,format, link, and promote them.

Finally, I’ll look at the amount of work total that I’m going to be receiving from this client. I still have one job that is a really low-paying job if you look at it from a “per post” price. However, it requires that I write over forty articles per week which means that I’ve gotten to know the topics and format through-and-through. I know where my research is coming from; I know what my opinions are on the issues. And because of that, it doesn’t take me all that long to write the articles so the hourly rate works out to be good even though the “per post” rate isn’t. There’s a big difference in the amount of time a job takes when you first start it and learning all of the ins and outs as compared to when it’s a steady job that you’ve done for awhile. And there’s also something to be said about workflow when you have a steady job that you just know you’re going to be doing all of the time. I factor that all in because the regularity of the paycheck is worth it to me.

In the end, it boils down to an hourly rate for me. I have a basic minimum hourly rate that I won’t work below and I have a target minimum hourly rate that I aim for on each new job. Because I’ve been doing this for awhile, I’m usually able to fairly accurately assess the amount of time that a project will take and have it pay me accordingly. Of course, there are times when I’m wrong and the work takes more time than I thought. In some cases, I’ll just suck it up and cut my losses. But there have also been times when I brought it up with the client and said that I needed to either terminate the job or get a higher pay rate. I have almost always gotten the pay I needed to keep the job.

Question of the Day: How do you determine what you should be paid for a freelance writing job?

Related link: How to Steadily Increase Your Freelance Income

[Tags] writing, writer, freelance, rates [/Tags]