Canadian Freelance Writing Jobs

After some e-mails and comments in our forum on the issue of how to fix the problem in the industry of people charging too little for their writing and buyers expecting to pay next to nothing for it, I’ve decided to write a few posts on the subject at the rate of one or two a week. Dann Alexander mentioned that education is the best medicine for this ailment and I completely agree.

Reason #1 – You are Always Worth More

People and companies who are soliciting content are willing to pay for it. Like everyone else, they are going to try to get a bargain. As any economics major will tell you, some will purchase for a higher price, some will abandon the project if they can’t get content for under five cents a word. In any case, I can tell you from putting together this site that you are a commodity. If you can write reasonably well and research equally well, your writing is worth far, far more than $1.00 an article.

Those who are advertising for writers for free or low wages know exactly what they are doing. They are not going to change their minds if you write them a nice letter. They know that the going rate for a writer is much higher than what they want to pay; they are just hoping to find a sucker with low self-esteem that wants to get published or get internet famous. Neither should be goals of yours if you are approaching writing as a career.

To determine whether or not a job is “worth it”, divide the number of estimated project hours by the fee offered. Some light content or SEO articles only take an hour to write and some writers are fine with $15.00 an hour. Writers who have been around for longer would argue that is still too low, but until you have a portfolio that is somewhat weighty under your belt this may be just be what you have to deal with until you get it built up.

Once you’ve got that portfolio, stop taking the $15.00 an hour jobs and move up the scale into $20.00, $25.00, $50.00 and so on. The only problem, if you could call it that, with this method is that your old clients still want the $15.00/hr jobs. At some point, you have to start saying “no”. That can hurt, but it is part of the process.

We’ll keep going with this series. If you have reasons that you would like to see in this series, hit me up in the comments or through the contact form and I’ll make sure that they go in. I have a feeling this topic will never be exhausted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.