How much money can you earn by working full-time as a freelance writer? This is a question that most aspiring freelancers ask time and time again. But unlike some jobs that have set salary ranges, this is far from the truth when it comes to freelance writing. The fact of the matter is that earnings change from person to person, and are based on everything from writing skills to marketing prowess.
To give you a better idea of what type of money you can make as a freelance writer, I am going to detail some of the projects that I work on each month. They range from high paying gigs that I located on journalismjobs.com to lower paying website content articles. Although everybody would like the high paying jobs, even full-time freelance writers have to give in from time to time.
First off, let’s take a look at one of my highest paying jobs. Generally speaking, this job entails writing at least one article per day. That sounds easy enough, right? Well it gets even better. The article can be on any topic I want, and it is up to me to determine the length and direction. What does a gig like this pay? This particular one gives me $.10/word. As you can imagine, this is a nice deal because for a 500 word article I can pull in $50. And since it only takes me 15 to 20 minutes to complete these, I make out just fine in the end.
On the other side of things, there are some jobs that I take on that do not offer nearly as much in the area of finances. But of course, there are a couple of reasons that I stick with these jobs. There are two requirements that I consider before taking on a low paying job. The first one is ongoing, steady work. As long as the client is always sending work, the small pay will add up in the end. The other requirement is that I must feel that the articles can be written at a highly fair rate of speed. After all, I am not going to work for $5/hour or so.
One example of this is a client that pays me $.012/word. Does this sound like a rip-off to you? If so, I don’t blame you. But even though this is far from being the best pay, it usually works out to right around $50/hour in the long run.
As you can see, you will have the ability to make up your mind on which freelance writing jobs to accept. Remember, the faster you write, the more you can write. And in turn, you can increase your average hourly rate. But of course, you should never give up delivering quality work just so you can make more money. If you do, your clients will see through this, and your job will be gone before you can blink an eye.
Determining how much money you will make as a freelance writer is not possible. In fact, it is not even possible for me and I have been doing this for quite some time. There are some months that I earn nearly $10,000 and others that are around $5,000. My goal is to get as close to $10k a month as I can, without having to sacrifice more time. No matter who you are, you should have earning goals in mind for your freelance writing career.
Over the past few hours I have found out that planning a blog contest is not an easy task. In fact, it is downright difficult to say the least. I have been slaving over every last detail this afternoon, and to be truthful, I have yet to make any progress. Sure, I have some ideas floating around in my head, but no definite direction has separated from the pack as of yet.
So what troubles have I run into thus far? Here are two of the biggest:
1. As you can imagine, for a blog contest to be successful you need to give away something that readers will want. Should I offer a hot item such as a Nintendo Wii? Or should I stick to a service that will not cost me any money? Right now, I am leaning towards a tangible object; something that readers will crave.
2. What should the entrance requirements look like? It would be easy enough to allow readers to enter by leaving a comment, but at the same time it could be more beneficial to require a backlink or something of the sort. Obviously, asking for something like a backlink could scare some people away.
So for now, I have yet to come up with the final details of my first blog contest. But if all goes well, it is on its way soon enough. Stay posted, and maybe you will be the big winner; no matter what prize I decide on!
I must warn you before moving on; I did not submit nearly as many articles this past month. The main reason for this was that I picked up three new blogging jobs that have turned into big money makers. And of course, I wanted to make sure that I devoted enough time to them so they would get off to a good start.
Here are the statistics from June 15 to July 14:
Articles submitted: 20
Article accepted for payment: 17
Waiting for acceptance: 1
Total acceptance rate: 85%
Total payment received: $93.61
Highest offer: $7
Lowest offer: $4.25
Average offer: $5.50
As you can see, the articles submitted category was not the only one that suffered this month. Whereas last month my acceptance rate was 100%, I had three articles denied for payment this last time around. This does not bother me too bad because the topics were quite general, and I probably should have known better than to write about them.
My highest offer was down by $1.50, and my lowest offer was up by $.25. But the thing I am a bit perplexed about is the average offer. It is down $.97 this month. There could be many reasons for this, but I figured that the average would begin to increase as I continued to submit. After all, this helps to raise my page views which will in turn affect my clout. The average offer statistic is the one that I will be keeping the closest eye on during the next month.
So there you have it! Another month’s worth of Associated Content stats. It will be interesting to see if the downward trend continues, or if I simply had an off month.
