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]

I’m by no means someone who is rich. But I am someone who manages to afford to live in a nice apartment in the North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco, pay my bills on time and accumulate very little debt between paychecks. For someone who works entirely doing freelance, that’s an accomplishment. Although there are many different reasons that I’ve been able to achieve this sort of steady income, one of the biggest ones is that I continually work to increase the amount of money that I am earning. The main way of doing this is through a job ranking system (described below) but there are also other tricks I implement to make sure that I’m regularly raising my income.

Here are some writing tips that you can follow to steadily increase your own freelance income:

• Aim to make the majority of your income steady income. It takes up a lot of time to hunt down new freelance writing jobs, learn the specifications of those jobs and start earning an income from them. Although one-shot jobs are great for additional freelance income, you should be actively seeking out jobs that are going to provide you with a steady stream of work and a regular paycheck. With a handful of steady jobs, you can organize your time better and get more done which means that you are going to be earning more hourly after just a short period of time has passed.
• Always keep an eye out for other opportunities. Even when you have a steady set of gigs, you should be spending a certain chunk of time each week looking for new freelance jobs. These may be steady or they may be one-shot jobs but either way, they’re out there. You don’t have to apply to everything you see. The goal is to find those jobs that are really going to add benefits to the working situation that you already have.
• Know what you make hourly. You’d be surprised by how many freelance writers who get paid by post or by article or by word don’t know what they earn hourly. You need to work out the math and find out what you earn so that you can set goals towards increasing that hourly rate. You should aim to increase that rate every six months. So, if you currently earn $10 per hour, you want to set a goal to be earning $11 or $12 per hour within six months. This is a measurable goal that will allow you to easily see whether or not you’re achieving success in increasing your freelance income.
• Rank your jobs. Once you have those steady jobs and you know what you earn hourly on each of them, you can rank those jobs. The way that I do it is through a 20 point system. The first category is a 1-10 scale of how much I enjoy doing the job. The second category is a 1-5 scale of how much I get paid hourly for the job. The third is a 1-5 scale regarding how well I can count on that income. For example, if I have a job that I really enjoy doing, I might assign it a 10 on the enjoyment scale. However, if it’s my lowest paying hourly job, it might get a 1 in the second category. And if I can not only count on the paycheck to come on time every month but am also fairly sure that the job isn’t going to be terminated unexpectedly, then I’ll assign it a5 on the third scale. So even though it’s a lower paying job, it ends up with a rank of 16. Once each job is ranked, put them in order from highest to lowest. What you’re going to start doing is eliminating one job at a time from the bottom of the list and replacing it with a job that’s likely to rank towards the top of the list.
• Raise rates on clients. You shouldn’t be earning the same hourly wage today as you were a year ago and your clients should be aware of that. If you have some jobs on the list that you like but that don’t pay enough, see if you can’t move them up the ranks by raising the rates on your clients. The worst thing that is going to happen is that they’re going to say they can’t pay you more and then you can decide if you want to do the work anyway or move on.

In the “real world”, people expect to get raises on a regular basis. They get an annual raise and something get raises even more regularly than that. If you take yourself seriously as a professional freelancer, you’ll demand the same thing for yourself. It’s a little harder when you can’t just go into a boss and ask for a raise but it’s possible to regularly raise your monthly income in order to achieve this for yourself. Sure, there are going to be times when a job unexpectedly ends or you experience a lull in the new jobs that you’re getting. But you can combat these times by actively engaging in the ongoing process of forwarding your own career.

Question of the Day: What else can you recommend for increasing your freelance income on a regular basis?

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