People expect you to write for peanuts
I was curious to see much people were offering for content-writing jobs, so I left some forum posts around the Internet offering my writing services and waited for a response from people. I got a LOT of messages, which proves straight up that there is demand for content writers.
The problem, however, is that people expect so much for so little. Compare the job of a writer with that of a designer. There is a guy on Digital Point who makes web 2.0 logos. He made my logo and a dozens of others around the web that you will have seen.
This guy charges $10 for these logos. He does a great job and he can turn one around in less than the time it would take for me to write 300 words of content. It’s no effort on his part, but his time is valued more than that of a decent writer.
I had offers of $70 for 100 posts and $3 for a 500-word article. As well as offers like this, you have people making posts questioning why the Internet content writers they employ suck. Here’s why: people are offering peanuts.
I would not write an article (about 300 words) for anything less than $10. When you look at magazine works that pays at least three times more in Thailand and even more in other countries, you have to put it in perspective.
If you are going to go down the content-writing route, don’t sell yourself short with dud offers. Compare to a ppc program that pays $0.01 per click. Sure, you could make money online, but it’s not going to happen any time soon.
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5 Responses to “People expect you to write for peanuts”
I guess the reason is that content writing is seen as much easier than design work. You wouldn’t get offers of $3 per 500 words, if there weren’t other writers offering to work at close to this price. Most of the cheap writing is very low quality, but for 1-2 cents a word you can actually find some real writers, too. The reason is simply that there’s too much competition for them to charge decent prices.
I guess it’s like comparing Van Gough with Dickens.
Is it just me or is Google spelt all over that last paragraph?
Google is everywhere.
I’ve just got an offer to write a minimum 200 words post for USD15 with a view to increasing the rate after a month. Looks quite a good deal to me