I had a bit of a shock at work today, and I was called into a meeting with my boss at very short notice. While this was a false alarm, and my job is safe (for now) I realise that there is something quite awry with my redundancy planning. My freelance writing is not scalable. I have a niche (personal finance) and a few good clients, but I need something scalable. I need access to a content mill. I can't churn out hundreds of articles at the moment, but I need the ability to churn them out the next time I get called into the meeting room with no explanation. Currently Text Brokers and Demand Studios insist on US writers. Is there any similar site that will allow for up front payment and UK writers? I don't want to advertise on DP or any other forums until I increase my capacity.
Why not take the time you have now to start building a platform, visibility, and demand so if you do lose your job down the road you'll have better paying clients than content mills already available to you?
Thanks Jenn. I don't see it as an either/or situation really. The reason I'd like to be able to get to something like Demand Studios is as a fall back to pay the bills, nothing more than that. I can turn out good quality articles in the personal finance niche quickly enough to be able to keep the wolf from the door. The demand and presence for an adequate income is not going to come overnight. Although I agree that it's the only long term way to build up a comfortable give-up-the-day-job income, it's big downfall is it's not scalable. The shock of the (non) job loss made me realise that what I was doing was far too slow. A content mill will simply provide enough income to give me a breathing space, together with the income from my wife's credit crunched business. By getting into some content mill at least I'll be able to know that I've got this safety net, no matter how badly the twine cuts into the skin. I suppose that I want to have my cake and eat it. But I'm English and we've always been like that. (By the way your blog had a really interesting post about Elance last Friday.)
You'd be surprised how quickly it can come. Within just 3 months of working on my own platform I had a steady stream of clients to the point where I'm constantly turning them down and referring work elsewhere. One of the writers for my main freelance writing blog recently told a story of how she was able to land great gigs even quicker than that by getting away from the content mills and focusing on private clients (was the author of that Elance post actually). The key is to push for it really hard in the beginning, especially while you have another income stream to keep you going in the meantime. Unfortunately what happens is that a lot of content mill writers find themselves stuck there. That's because you'll have to write so much for them to get by that you won't have any extra time to market yourself and pursue better paying work. I'd just hate to see someone else fall into that trap if they have a chance to do something better. I guess you could try Suite101 (residual pay), but honestly I recommend all writers stay away from them and sites like them. It sounds like you're in a specialty area that pays pretty well with private clients (I constantly see finance writer jobs advertised, and considering the bulk of great gigs aren't advertised at all that's an especially good thing -- I believe there's a good one Clint posted on my blog just this morning). So even if you settle for content mill work, just know up front that it's a rut a lot of people can't get out of until they quit completely and essentially start over. As long as you're prepared for that possibility, you'll have a better chance of working through it to a more sustainable full-time freelance writing income.
Thanks Jenn. It really seems that there are no content mills that will offer up front pay to UK writers, so this is all moot. I'm surprised that there are no US people recruiting Brits and Australians to write content and put it to the content mills under their own names.