I see people mentioning a portfolio, but if you're already working for the webmaster market and earning $5/article (or less,) your portfolio will not help you earn more money. If you have nothing but a bunch of clips you wrote for $5, an editor of a larger publication or website will not take you seriously.
Quality is the name of the game. Unless you have quality work hosted on the website there is no hope! It will help you better in case you have presented your skills in an appealing manner spicing it with dollops of wit and Humour!
There's hope for writers, even if they don't necessarily have a huge portfolio to showcase. Once you're writing gobs of articles for webmasters at less than pennies per word however, you tend to get stuck in a rut that's extremely difficult to get out of.
To dwell on what Denise already mentioned - a brilliant portfolio means a set of high quality articles sold at a reasonable price. Otherwise, editors will simply ignore your work and bin it, which I find to be very unfortunate way for things to go.
Yep, and really, it only takes one strong client to land much better gigs. That's why, despite the low up front money, I almost always tell people to look into writing for large content networks like About.com or Suite101.com. What they don't pay in money in the beginning, they more than make up for in other benefits: the two best being amazing networking opportunities and the fact that they're backed by strong companies. Portfolio pieces there will earn you more gigs if you put them to work for you. That's even how I made my jump from print writing to Web writing, and went almost immediately to making a few hundred dollars per article (after being with a network only about 3 months). If you don't have one really strong, recognizable client yet, try that. Or do it voluntarily for a branch of a large nonprofit organization. Recognizable clients = more, higher paying work down the road. Think of everything else as "filler work."
How can anyone look at a portfolio and tell how much a person was paid for a certain piece? And why would getting paid a low rate for a piece keep someone from getting a higher paying job? If I wrote a high-quailty piece for $5, or free even, the quality should speak for itself, not how much I got paid to write it.
Because those $5 gigs are very very rarely quality content. They're most often SEO writing gigs, which can be spotted rather easily, and aren't taken seriously by larger publishers who pay a great deal. If you sent me a portfolio piece to consider hiring you, I'd expect you to tell me where it's been published... not just the content itself. Hiring publishers don't want to see generic samples. They want to know where you've been published, and by looking at your clients, they'll get a very good idea of what kinds of rates you earn. If you're not in their level, you'll be ignored. Most want writers who not only can write, but who are familiar with the publishing and editorial process of larger publications / websites. Taking DP gigs and the like simply doesn't demonstrate that.
Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense. So it's not necessarily the fact that a writer was only paid $5 that keeps them in the rut, it's the caliber of their writing and the hiring publication that keeps them in the rut. So, hypothetically speaking, I could be paid $100/article to write crappy content for an unknown publication and still not move above the lower rungs.
Yep. It's not so much "unknown", but rather the quality of the publication. It's very easy to tell when most websites pay very little for their content, b/c quality simply isn't on par with larger publishers. If you submit a clip from an unknown publisher, but the hiring publisher notices that all of their work seems to be of high quality, it can make a difference. Obviously, names don't hurt though. In many cases, you'd be much better off starting your own niche content site, and submitting those pieces as samples rather than $5 gig pieces. At least that shows more ambition, and also shows them whether or not you understand anything about online publishing (your Web writing style, can you effectively write for a target market, etc.).
Hello Everyone, This only I want to know that who are those publishers who will pay me high and where will I find them. Please help me. Thank You
You have to search just like everybody else does. You have to have nearly perfect English to get into high-paying English publications. Just search for "writers markets" or "writers guidelines" and you'll find plenty.
As Jenn mentioned, if you are looking to target high paying English publications you must work on your English skills before they would even consider anything you write. That's not to offend you, it's simply to let you know the facts.