Work at home Moms exploited by MFA moguls

I've got to say this is a very interesting thread.

Many people who are self employed fail to realize there are two sectors of the marketplace.

1. Those that want/or have to have certain products or services for the cheapest they can get, regardless of quality.
2. And those who will pay top dollar for quality products and services.

As a provider of goods or services, you should realize which sector is your target market and price your products/services accordingly.

The problem arises with those who don't understand this and try to please both sectors.

I've bought many $3 articles for my content sites. Some are better quality than others. I've also bought my share of $25 articles for other sites. Again, the quality varied. Some of the $25 articles were not better than the $3. Some of the $3 should have been $25!

Where I use cheap content, as opposed to print quality content, depends on my target market that my website is geared toward.

I'm not sure how long it takes you to write a 500 word article, but on general topics I can sit down, pull the subject up on Google if I'm not familiar with it, and write a 500 word article that solves a problem or answers a question in 10 to 15 minutes. I'm certainly not the fastest typer and I'm sure as hell not a great wordsmith.

Many of those WAHM's can probably write as quick or quicker than that. That's in the neighborhood of $10 to $12 per hour. Even at $6 per hour, that's as much or more than they'd make with minimum wage. Plus at a minimum wage job they'd probably have to find a babysitter and pay for gas/insurance/upkeep on their vehicle.

Depending on where they live, many of these $3 article moms may be some of the highest paid people around!

Another important thing to realize is that most Internet browsers are skim readers. They don't come on the Internet to read great literary (sp?) works. The come to get information quickly. As a content publisher, why would I go and overpay for a product that my customers are not going to use or appreciate?

My point is. There is a market for $3 articles and a market for $25. However, many of you guy/gals wanting $25 per article are trying to sell them to those of us who need the $3 articles. Many of you do not understand that there is a difference and you get bent out of shape when content publishers such as myself buy cheap content.

Again, my customers want quick and easy solutions to their problems. They don't care if the content is in perfect English or not, they just want to find solutions. Truth be told, they probably would not know the difference if they saw it.

This is why there is such a market for $3 articles. If every website had to be written in perfect English, then I'd say the average price of a 500 word article would be around $50.

TxDon

 

I think that the aspect of being a WAHM has gotten a bad rep. I am a WAHM. I have a writing business that I do from home and I make more than double what I made from my last "job" when I was away from my family more than I wanted to be. I worked in the criminal justice system and besides the toll that it takes on your psychological well-being, it also takes too much time away from families, at least it did for me.

Back to the subject at hand, being a WAHM does not necessarily mean being unprofessional. I think that the aspect of a mom who works from home lends people to imagine housewives who simply do not work. I work and I work very hard. I have the experience and education to back up what I do and I do it very well for the most part.

I agree that there are many WAHMs who simply do not know where to start. For myself, I started at below the bottom level and worked my way up. There are those who actually don't know where the bottom is and anything that they find that is remotely related to what they want to do is what they will take. Jobs that pay pittance are gobbled up like twinkies at a Weight Watcher's meeting merely because some people do not know enough about the correct way to find writing jobs.

I'm not saying that we should feel sorry for these moms and I'm not saying that we should stone them either. There is alot of information out there for the taking, it's just that sometimes they don't know how to find the information

 

Wrong.

Even if they are making 10 or 12 dollars per hour, that's not what they'll end up getting once you factor in everything self-employed people must pay for out of pocket.

Freelancers are responsible for paying all of their business expenses, as well as self-employment taxes. Our taxes are not taken out of the money we earn, so we are responsible for paying double the amount at tax time.

When you break it down, $10/hour isn't the same for a self employed person as it would be for an employee because we are required to pay additional taxes and expenses.

 

Denise is right TxDon. But to even expand upon what she said...

When a freelancer charges $10 / hr to clients, that's actually HALF of what they'd be earning at that same rate from an employer (a little less actually). Here's why:

1. Freelancers can't bill out all of their hours. There are working hours, and there are billable hours. Freelancers that are running their career in an even remotely professional way will very often be spending nearly (if not more than) half of their working hours on marketing, administrative work, finances / bookkeeping, etc. That's just the way it is. So to earn the equivalent of $10 per hour at a normal job, in general, they'd have to be billing out at $20 per hour as a freelancer. If they're nowhere near the half and half rule, they're most likely neglecting their marketing or ignoring admin work to some degree (in most cases, thinking about new writers - in some cases we can bill out more hours b/c we have a steady base of regular clients and don't need to market quite as heavily... although the marketing commitment shouldn't ever stop).

2. As Denise said, we pay more taxes (based on US freelancers). An employee pays a portion of their social security and medicare taxes, while their employer pays the other half. As a freelancer, we pay for it all out of our own pockets - more taxes than an employee b/c we serve both roles.

3. As Denise also said, we have more expenses. You can NEVER realistically compare a freelancer's yearly earnings to an employee's similar earnings. Instead, you have to compare a freelancer's earnings to the employee's ACTUAL COST TO THE EMPLOYER (which includes the salary, their portion of the taxes, their contributions to benefits like retirement savings and health insurance, bonuses, business and office expenses etc.) Someone making $30,000 per year as an employee may actually be costing their employer $50,000 per year. The latter number is how much a freelancer has to make to be in a comparable living situation (same take home pay, same basic supplies to do their job, same benefits, etc.).

 

You can't MAKE someone understand the quality of good content, credibility and target market position. You can't MAKE someone appreciate fine wine over that which comes in a box. Some will always look for cheap. It's also a difference in how you look at things overall.

Some want to throw out that product with a short shelf life for quick gain. Others like to build equity and get the steady stream and build on something and earn the equity.

I personally don't feel like putting out fires all the time but I'm not going to be successful selling the long-term strategy to someone who is still chasing "get rich quick schemes" and throwing darts at clouds trying to get the pot at the end of the rainbbow. Sometimes they just have to fall flat on their faces a few times before they start thinking the long-term way. Sometimes they never do.

Meanwhile the rest of us pull ahead and they wonder why they are still two feet from the starting line and working their butts off.

 

$3 an article is not a slave wage, though. Many people can do 3 or 4 per hour and the money is not claimed to the Gov't.

It's the .03 cents a word which is a ripoff.

 

You're so dead wrong it's not even funny here... yes, the money is claimed by the government. If you don't pay taxes on that freelance income, you're breaking the law. End of story.

 

I'm a WAHM, too. There is a huge spectrum of what falls under "WAHM." Mary Kay ladies can be WAHMs, so are the software design engineers that telecommute on a daily basis. When I think of WAHM, I think of my friends and I who have all left "power" careers, at least temporarily, and made ourselves a smaller version of that career so that we're home with our kids.

Being a WAHM does have a bad rep. I don't think anyone who hasn't chased a toddler and taken care of an infant all day can understand how hard it is to parent. And then to get to the end of that grueling (and dirty) day, only to flip on the computer and work like a dog for another 3-4 hours is truly exhausting. But that is the life of this WAHM and there is no other way for me to be with my kids as much as I'd like. I figure I'll just watch TV, see movies, fold laundry, blow dry my hair, and eat my bon-bons when I go back to work in a year or so - that's when I'll have time again.

You're right that some people simply don't have the information, and you're right again that there are always people scrabbling for hand-outs. It's easier to take what's offered than to carve your own way. It's just a shame in this case especially since I've been to the forum in question. There were at least five or six threads trying to let everyone know what was happening, but some of the writers STILL were chasing these jobs. I'm not sure what to do to help them after that...

 

I hate to say this, being a WAHM myself, but I agree. Like some of the other posters here mentioned, there's such a lot of information out there about finding better paying jobs. There's really no excuse for stay at home Moms to whine about these low paying gigs.

Finding the better paying gigs requires some effort.

Marketing your skills as a writer requires some effort.

Setting up a website to market your skills, blogging, networking - all of these require a huge amount of effort, and frankly I am getting a little sick of these women whining about their $3 gigs when they seem to simply lack the ambition or drive to better their "careers" (for want of a better term).

Even these forums where they bawl, have some of the best WAHMs in the business like Deb Ng turning up to give them advice, but if they refuse to listen, I really think we should leave them to their sorry fate, and move on.