The Freelance Writer Journey - are you up to it?

One of the most interesting things I've discovered running Article Writers Australia is that many online marketing specialists never consider using cheap content writing services. It seems that if they do, they end up wasting a great deal of time correcting poorly written content or re-writing articles to improve them before they can add it to their clients' websites - so paying a lousy $10-15 per article ends up costing them several times that amount and causing a major delay on the project. They prefer to pay more for quality content in the beginning, avoid the stress and the risk of losing a client.

The situation is similar for owners of multiple websites, particularly high quality sites - they can't afford to put visitors off with low quality content. Many do understand that if they pay peanuts they get monkeys - and are likely to end up re-writing the content themselves or having to pay a second writing service to edit the articles.

So if you've been looking with disappointment at the rates you see people offering to pay for articles and blog postings, take heart! If you have good content writing skills there is well paid work out there for you. If you market your services online, the clients who require high quality content will find you.

It's quite amusing to realise that the "churn and burn" content writing services that offer low rates to attract high volume work are actually losing jobs and presumably making less profit than they would if they provided a quality product and service.

Are you a university educated writer in Australia? Perhaps you have interests in creative writing or film but need some income to keep you going - and like many writers, you'd love to be able have a job that's flexible and can be done from home at any hour of the day or night - so you have time to work on your creative projects when you feel inclined.

If you're a quick typist with a creative mind and ideas that flow fast and furiously, you just might enjoy writing online content material. Article Writers Australia continues to grow and I'll be needing additional writers in the not so distant future. If you're interested, drop me a line and send me a resume.

Anyone interested can contact me through Article Writers Australia.

I'm fascinated by Internet marketing, blogs, and SEO writing. That, and I'm a compulsive writer! Writing is fun.


Picture by cambodia4kidsorg. Courtesy of Flickr.

It's not often you get a free eBook that's worth the time it takes to download, but there are three free eBooks on the Ezine Articles website training page. Here is the link:-

Ezine Articles Training Page

Peter Nisbet of Article Services has some fabulous resources for you. Peter is one of those kind individuals who sells some of his knowledge to make a living but shares a huge amount for free.

Peter sells a 137 page eBook called "Article Czar". It's packed full of amazingly useful information about writing and using articles to make money. I've read it and can happily recommend it to aspiring article writers and affiliate marketers.

Peter's give aways include a free SEO course and "Squidoo Guide" which is to help you get the most out of Squidoo.

If you would like to learn about HTML Peter offers a 14 video course for just $17.

Article Czar is excellent value. The information he gives away is probably worth the same if not more - and you don't have to purchase anything at all to get his freebies. You will have to give him your email but I doubt you'll ever receive anything from him that isn't extremely useful!

Here are three links. Happy learning freelance writers!

Peter's Free SEO course

Article Czar product

Peter's Article Services website

If you're an aspiring affiliate marketer like me but don't quite have the technical expertise (yet) to be developing your own sites, you really will want to see Niche Content Stores. For a very low cost they will provide the site and products for you and they have the content to back it up.

If you're a freelance writer and you want "in" on the affiliate marketing scene, once you get there, skip over to their sister site Niche Content. There is a separate affiliate program. It's absolutely perfect if you have a freelance writing site or even a Squidoo Lens. I kid you not, I made a sale within 12 hours!

- articles for web content
- blog postings
- marketing material
- scripts & concepts for video advertisements
- e-Book content

I'm currently putting together an eBook about the different ways people sell and make an income online. The eBook is targeted at those who find the whole thing confusing and complicated and just want someone to tell them what it all means - preferably in good old fashioned English!

If you are one of those people and there's something you would like to know about, contact me and let me know. I'll tell you what I can and will send you a free copy of the eBook when it's finished.

Photo by miguelb. Courtesy of Flickr.

If you're just starting out as an article writer you'll have to be keen! If you've had a browse at the sites offering work to freelance writers you would have been horrified to see rates of $5-10 per 600-800 word article. When I first saw this I nearly fell off my chair laughing. I mean really, what writer with any decent skill would accept that? It doesn't pay for the time it takes you to turn your computer on, sit down and open up a blank document! However, there is no shortage of people bidding for those jobs - many of them from countries where English isn't the first language. If a company is only offering $1-9 per article, I would let it go. If you're a student or you need to work from home and you still need to earn money, you might find article writing above that rate suits you. You can work from home without the cost of travel and are essentially your own boss.

Don't despair too early about the low rates. Keep looking. There is a good amount of work available at $10-20 per article and website owners who have lofty goals and want a high quality site, will pay much more for good quality articles. Blog postings can pay anywhere from a lousy $2 to $50 for a high quality site. Explore the options and be patient. While you're waiting for the better paying items to come along, do some of the cheapies. It will give you something for your online writing resume and some practice at writing quickly.

Don't dismiss the $10 articles either. There's a trick to doing it that you can probably master - write them quickly. Now, if you're a person who diligently researches an unfamiliar topic before putting pen to paper, you'll find it difficult at first to write an article in less than a few hours. You would normally spend a good hour or two researching - which will clearly make writing a $10 article very unviable. Stop it! Research time - 5 minutes.

Here's what to do -

1. Use your personal knowledge, however scant it is on the topic. Note down ideas that come to mind - quickly! 1-2 minutes.

2. Google the topic. In just 2-3 minutes you'll have 3 or 4 facts around which you can write a paragraph or two.

3. Start typing! Get up to your word count as quickly as you can and don't stop to revise as you go. You'll find that 600 - 800 words isn't long at all.

4. Now revise - quickly. Forget being your usual pedantic self. Don't do the "is there a better word I can use there?" thing for half an hour. Just do the 'spelling & grammar' check and proofread for the types of errors that it won't pick up. Fix errors and anything that sounds so awful you'd be embarrassed to submit it. Make sure you've followed any instructions about keywords, headings, fonts etc.

5. Don't worry about the entire article being simplistic and thinly researched. You're only getting $10 for it and your name isn't going to be on it! Your employer isn't worried about that - they simply want an article that is readable, correct and contains keywords that will bring traffic to their website.

With a little practice, you can rattle off a 600 word article in 20-30 minutes. It doesn't make the $10 a good rate but it will certainly be less painful knowing you're earning $30 an hour than if you procrastinate over it for 4 hours and spend the rest of your day feeling annoyed because you've only earned $2.50 an hour.

The great thing for writers is that there is a huge amount of this work available now. If you need to work from home, are unemployed, or simply need to top up your daytime income by $100-200 a week, you can access a consistent stream of work. If the desire is there and you apply yourself there's no reason you can't build up a full time income over a relatively short period of time. Even at $10 per article, if you did 10 a day, 5 days a week, you'd have a small but decent income of $500 a week.

Keep looking for the better paying work. If you can bring in a couple of clients at $20-30 per article, your income will improve significantly - and your practice on the $10 articles will have served you well. You can now potentially earn $40-90 per hour.

Keep your good clients very happy. If you submit your items on time and they don't have to send them back to you for corrections, you'll get more work and possibly, down the track, a better rate.

For the Aussies out there, if you pick up US writing jobs there are two things you should know:

a) The exchange rate will work in your favour! US$10 an article is currently about AU$18 - a substantial difference!

b) Check for tax implications. Depending on the terms of your engagement, you may have to fill out US tax forms and therefore pay both US and Australian tax - which might render the project unviable for you.

Photo by orphanjones, courtesy of Flickr.

Recycling can save you time and money. If you're writing for a number of clients it's likely that at some stage, something you have written is not quite what they wanted and you'll have to produce another article or blog post. Perhaps your article or blog post was more academic than they had in mind, or your opinion on the matter differed from their opinion. That doesn't mean the article or blog posting you've written should go to waste.

Set up a folder on your computer for these items and any half-baked ideas and articles you may have lost interest in temporarily! These items will come in handy at some stage. If you're asked for an article on a particular topic and you already have 300 words on it in your half-baked ideas folder, recycling it into the requested article will save you time!

My personal screenwriting website contains scene samples and a short script that earned me a nomination at our state screenwriting awards two years ago.There are sample scripts on the site, a little poetry, and a few other ramblings.

http://www.leoniegeorge.com


Photo by Danilo Prates, courtesy of Flickr.

If you simply enjoy writing, Squidoo is a wonderful place to fill in some hours and little by little you can work your way towards a little extra income. I've neglected my Squidoo lenses for the past few months but unexpectedly receiving a $9 payment recently for lens earnings has tempted me back! After reading some of the great lenses on here about Squidoo, and thinking about the possibilities, I'm quite sure it is possible to establish a nice little income from Squidoo if one puts in a good regular effort.

As a result of all that thinking and reading I now have a new plan to regularly create new lenses and add content to the existing ones. I'm not aiming to make a fortune - but a couple of hundred dollars a month just for having some great Squidoo lenses would be a nice bit of extra spending money.

I'm going to share my strategy - whether I stick to it or not is an entirely different matter! Here's the plan:

1.Regularly look over the best ranking Squidoo lenses and think about why they rank so well;
2.Spend at least one hour per day (on average...some days might miss out entirely) adding new content to my existing lenses;
3.Jot down ideas for new lenses and aim to create two new lenses each month;
4.Choose niche topics and be more specific with the content;

Do you have a plan? I haven't read any books on making money on Squidoo yet, but it's on my 'to do' list...along with a lot of other things! You might like to check out the books below for inspiration.

If you're working for yourself as a content writer, and you haven't already noticed, there are two types of clients that tend to take up much more of your time than they're paying for; and their little jobs can go on and on, well past the date you expected them to be finished. Avoid them like the plague if you can recognise them before it's too late.

1. The client who expects you to choose exactly the same words that they would choose. This is a person who really should do their own writing. Have you had a client who makes little unecessary changes over the top of your work? Or one who emails you ten times to suggest replacing one word with another when they both mean the same thing? Some even turn correctly structured sentences into a mess and insist on keeping it that way so that in the end you wonder why they are bothering to pay for a professional writer at all. It's a bit hard to spot these ones up front - but sometimes they will mention that they've tried several other writers and had no joy. That is sometimes, but certainly not always, a red flag.

2. The client with multiple bosses. This can be a problem with website pages in particular. If the client is a large company, the person you are dealing with may not be the person who has to approve the work. The problem really occurs when there are several people who have to approve the work and they all have different ideas and requirements. This can be a nightmare as you write and rewrite, receiving conflicting comments from any number of people that are often contrary to the original instructions. You may also have to wait to receive that feedback if some of those who have input are away or busy. I had a two day job that took over 6 months to be finalised - although I suspect it was because they could not afford to pay the balance of their bill.

How to avoid these scenarios? You can limit the number of rewrites that are included when you quote. I generally ask for payment in advance and if I do accept a deposit with the balance to be paid on completion, I point out that copyright doesn't pass to them until the balance is paid - that (in theory) prevents clients from uploading your work until they've paid the bill.

Apart from Squidoo, I've only recently started to look at some of the other adsense revenue sharing sites out there. There are a few most of us have heard of like Hub Pages and Xomba, but there's actually many more of them. Another one I stumbled onto today was SheToldMe and I've started the sign up process for that one too. I found it of interest because it allows you to post quite small items linking to your other articles, and the links are 'do follow' ones - so posting on the site can give you backlinks.

Quite a few of the adsense revenue sharing sites seem to have a condition that earnings cannot be posted on the Internet, so it's a case of having to sign up and see how it works out. I've come across posts that suggest writers can earn a couple of dollars per article on the site every month - which would mean that if you worked hard and uploaded 1000 articles, you could sit pretty. But alas, I don't think it works that way for everyone. Earning even a modest amount of money on an article requires not only traffic to your article, but people to actually click on the ads displayed. Often. Writing all those articles and generating all that trafic is likely to be way too much work over a lengthy period of time for most writers. And some expertise is involved - you'd need to be quite good at social bookmarking, picking the popular topics and selecting keywords that worked - but I'm sure there are a few clever and persistent writers out there who do make a reasonable living out of it.

If only they would offer their services as a mentor to the rest of us, we could all sit back and write just what we want to write for adsense revenue sharing sites all day!

Freelance writers often sign up for revenue sharing sites. Some freelancers upload hundreds of articles hoping to eventually generate a passive income online. You read an occasional success story, but for every one of those there must be hundreds who give up. Can it be worth the effort?

I've recently been checking out revenue sharing sites for their potential for long term passive income. I've signed up for a few and submitted articles and I've noticed something quite interesting - the statistics don't always add up. Here's what I mean -

Let's take for example, a site that seems to be offering you 80% Adsense revenue share. Check the wording of this on their promotion. Are they offering to give you 80% of the revenue your articles generate, or to diplay ads with your code 80% of time, and their code 20% of the time? Yes, there's a difference and it's a huge one! What is the time frame for the income split?

What prompts me to ask this question is that for one site, my ad impressions total less than 30% of the views listed on the actual site - a long way from the 80% mark. How can this be? Quite easily if you think about it - if your ads are being diplayed 80% of the time, which 80% of the time is that? It could be that their 20% of the time is during the peak traffic period and yours is during the hours when the site statistics suggest it is least likely to be visited. That's one theory. Of course, if that's the case then your share of the revenue isn't going to be 80% at all. Would anyone sign up if they offered only a 30% share?

Even at an 80% revenue split the income is likely to be quite small. At 30% it's likely to be a complete waste of time.I think I'll stick with Squidoo - at least they have a definite income earning model based on actual revenue split and according to lens rank - along with other benefits.