Tips for Successful Freelancing #11: Picking and Choosing

Depending on where you work, there may come a time when you find the need to seek some different clients. A lot of new media (most notably websites) offer a good work package for part-timers and people who are just looking for supplemental income. They offer flexibility in assignments (most let you choose your own topics), quick turnaround time and a monthly paycheck. The downside is that their rate per word is, in a word, terrible. While you might consider the work decent for the time involved and the other benefits (the aforementioned flexibility in assignments, quick turnaround time and the guaranteed monthly paycheck), these types of clients are usually unviable as a source of primary income.

Consider this: you write 500-word articles for a website. Your payment is $10 each (fairly standard), you can write about 50 of them in a month (some people can write more, but this is a good ballpark) and it takes you a grand total of around 60 hours/month. Per hour, that's around $8.33; a pretty bad wage. Considering the low rate per article and the number of articles you can crank out in a month (and many of these clients will either have a limited number of articles you can write or dole out topics based on a calendar system, which does not guarantee you any articles in a given month), you're pretty much better off with your day job, even if you work retail (minimum wage in California is $8/hour. Less per hour, but consider that even if you work part-time, you will still make more money per month.) Consider that $10 for a 500-word article equals 2 cents/word. That SUCKS unless you're getting paid by the word an are writing a document longer than 200,000 words. And if you write >500 words/article, the rate gets even worse!

Should you find yourself relying on quick-content clients for a primary source of income, it's time to seek other employment. Now, I'm not telling you to avoid these clients; far from it. They are an excellent source of quick income and in the world of freelance writing, a monthly paycheck is a wonderful thing indeed. I'm just saying that they are not the best source of income for the full-time freelancer. If you can afford to freelance full-time, you can afford to find a better gig that pays a lot more per word.