Archive for July, 2011

Freelance Content Writing Jobs Sites: Navigating the Sites that Hire You to Write

Freelance Writing, Is it for You?

I’d like to welcome Nicole, our Guest Blogger from PrettyOpiniated.com!  Women over 45, are you looking for an alternative career?  Nicole’s agreed to inform us about the various sites that she has tried  for Freelance Writing.  These writing assignments are often used on other’s blogs. I am sure you will agree, Nicole has a clear clean no-nonsense style that gives you THE FACTS!

Nicole’s Bio:
Nicole is a freelance writer and owner/author of Pretty Opinionated (http://www.prettyopinionated.com), a book and product review blog. She lives in the Poconos with her vivacious six-year-old son, her tech-savvy mom, and a menagerie of pets, including a parrot that thinks she’s his girlfriend.

Freelance Writing Sites to Try

I’ve been writing most of my life, but only started trying to make a living with it about two years ago, when I was way down on my luck and couldn’t find a job outside my home. I stumbled across a site looking for content writers, figured “I can do that!” and was on my way to earning money. Not big bucks, mind you, but enough to help me survive in tough times. The internet is over-flowing with content writing gigs, some of which actually pay okay money, while others practically want a novel out of you for less than the price of a cup of coffee. Content writing is not glamorous,  and usually not even fun, but if you need to make some extra money and you have decent writing skills, it can mean the difference between settling for generic mac and cheese and the good stuff.

• Demand Media

• which owns eHow, LiveStrong, Cracked, and a few other sites, pays the best rates per article of all the other sites I’ve worked with. The average 400-word article will net you $15-25, depending on which site you write for. They pay twice a week and usually have upwards of 60,000 article titles or more in the database. On the down side, many of those titles are nearly impossible to write, and the content editor has almost a god-like status when it comes to deciding if your article is worthy of publication. You only get one shot at a rewrite, and if another editor with a different idea picks up your second draft, they can reject it, which means you don’t get paid. Most of the editors are helpful, but the few bad apples always left me reaching for the Xanax every time I hit the “submit” button. Still, it’s a good gig if you’re not too thin skinned and can handle feeling like you’re still in high school with their “article rating” system.

• WiseGeek

•  pays about $10 per 400-word article and you get your own dedicated copy editor. My personal copy editor rocks. She is always helpful, never unkind when she needs to critique something, and extremely patient when I over-explain my choice of direction for the piece. The writer’s dashboard usually has only about 500 articles from which to choose, but the writing pool is smaller, so I never have difficulty finding decent titles. The major downside is that you need to have five articles in the editing queue before your editor even knows they’re there, and you have to word every paragraph super careful to avoid what they call “similar flow.”

• Bright Hub

• used to rock. They were one of my favorite sites to write for until Google rolled out their new algorithm and everyone went ballistic. After that, Bright Hub started yanking articles with no warning and turning them back to the writers for unspecified changes, then taking weeks to get them back up, which hurts when you’re earning revenue on those articles.  The pay went from $10 for 500 words to $15 for 750 words, and the opportunities dropped down to almost nothing. I pulled out when the changes happened because it was impossible to get any work and I didn’t want to double my word count for just 50% more pay.

• Writing for Private Clients is the Best Freelance Writing Gig

• If possible, your best bet is to writing for private clients. They are a lot more flexible and easier to work with, pay a little better, and don’t usually don’t incite a fight-or-flight response when you submit an article to them. I check freelancewritinggigs.com daily because it cull all the ads for writers from several different locations.One last word of warning- don’t sell yourself short. Don’t farm out your writing talents to sites that will only pay you a penny per word or less. Yes, $10 per article is still peanuts when you know deep down that you have the skills to write the next great American novel, but at least it’s more than minimum wage. Writing for peanut dust, however,  will just leave you frustrated and miserable with the whole experience, and it devalues freelance writers as a whole.

Freelance Writing Warnings and Advice

One last word of warning- don’t sell yourself short. Don’t farm out your writing talents to sites that will only pay you a penny per word or less. Yes, $10 per article is still peanuts when you know deep down that you have the skills to write the next great American novel, but at least it’s more than minimum wage. Writing for peanut dust, however,  will just leave you frustrated and miserable with the whole experience, and it devalues freelance writers as a whole.

Thanks Nicole for giving us this great guest post!  I know many people wonder if Freelance Writing is for them.  We really appreciate knowing the current prices as well.

We’d like to update this article with other freelance Content Writing Jobs sites,  do you have any to offer?