Should I go into Content Writing?

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I must say you all have made this thread very informative. Thanks for the valuable info.......

Jacob

 

helpful therads n informative too

 

I have several writers in my group that make their sole living off online writing, and they're as professional as you can get. They also supplement their income with offline writing as well. The trick to making any kind of living online, writing, or not is a constant influx of jobs. How well you market your services goes towards your success or failure of your financial expectations.

I started AA with the intent to produce website articles only, because I found a niche that needed to be filled. With over 80+ writers today, including several VERY accomplished offline writers and copyeditors, we're handling everything from a single 400 word article on a gulf stream jet, to large 400 article orders, white papers, ebooks, press releases, manuals, etc encompassing various subjects that cover the gamut.

There's still room in online copy writing to do well, you just need to build a solid reputation of creating great content for an affordable price. Or, produce "perceived" high end content that goes for a premium.

 

If I can interject here . There are professional writers out there that do OK. I beleive many of them have either unique skills or have very narrow niche's that they're expert in - in other words they're success is in their field.

In terms of just doing contracts for writing content on every topic under the sun, I think the possibility of earning a living doing that is miniscule. The simple fact is that most people are looking for dirt cheap - and dirt cheap is readily available. The bulk of the online writing market are these churned out $5 articles. That's what you're competing against, and it's what people want.

Sure there are exceptions, but the vast majority, it's a commodity market. Same goes for doing HTML work, or banner design. Geesh, I paid $80 for like 5 banners here a week ago. Yes, I've paid $200 for one before and the work was a bit better, not not $80 vs. $1000. So the $80/five banners got the money and not the $200/one banner folks.

Personally I believe a lot of this is due to globalization. The market is evening out because we can go to the cheapest/hungriest provider. Years ago I paid $150US per hour for perl programmers that were pretty good. Now I can get pretty good php programmers for $20 an hour - and a heck of a lot less than that if I want to offshore it.

If I was a good content writer today, I'd be looking at doing something where I write for my own purposes or websites. Start doing affiliate work or something. Then you can write all day and make money directly from your work. In fact, I am a reasonably good writer in my niche (life insurance) and I write a fair bit - far better than the $5 articles. But I use my writing for my own purposes, I don't write for others.

 

Excellent thread.

I have just completed my first paid writing job and it feels good, infact I feel a little guilty as it seems too easy. The work was 500 words for $6 and whilst I realise it is way too low I figure I need to get get my fingers dirty.

My thing is that I already earn a good income from my blogs but need extra cash quick. From what I can pick up from the posts here is that it is best to pick a sector and specialise, preferably a sector in keeping with present knowledge.

Writing for others I feel will help focus and motivate my own writing whilst making some cash and broadening my experience.

I wonder how other people came to chose their sectors if they have one.

 

You can make more than $6 by just writing something quickly on a topic you feel like writing on, and submitting it to www.associatedcontent.com. I only use them when I have some nonexclusive stuff laying around that I have no more important use for, but plenty of people use them for a quick buck here and there. I know they pay more for exclusive content though. If that's what you want to do, it might be an option. At least you can still access all of your work together too, and almost use it like a portfolio.

I chose my sectors because they're related to my expertise. I write about marketing and public relations, because I hold my degree in Public Relations (specialized form of marketing). I write on small business, because I'm a small business owner. I write on consulting and freelance issues, because through my firm, I do PR consulting and on the side I'm a freelance writer and editor. I write on independent music, because my firm began exclusively as a music publicity firm, and still has a heavy focus on it. Just use your background, education, and experience to decide what area(s) you're qualified to write on.

Jenn

 

Thanks Jenn,

I have now completed work for $18 for 500 words which is getting to what I think I should be paid for which is $25 for 500 words.

I now have an order book for ten further articles.

This is down to the postive and realistic advice from people in this thread.

Thanks

BTW associatedcontent.com as far as I understand associatedcontent.com only deal with US writers, I am now on the lookout for a service that will deal with the UK as well.

 

Sorry. I didn't even look at your location before I suggested it.

Congrats on getting closer to your goal for payments.

Jenn

 

Anyone knows a site with cheap professional content writers?

 

Search in the Services forums and you will find a few good content and article writers.
We deal with submission of articles, But no writing

 

One thing people need to keep in mind is the field of publishing has undergone a drastic change in the last 10 years and it is only going to change more going ahead.

In the past the big print entities had a strangle-hold on what got into print so what they said went. Now pretty much anyone can publish something and some people with very unorthodoxed writing are making good incomes writing on the internet. The key for that segment is writing for yourself though. You will never make it far selling it off. You can do that to fill in gaps and help support yourself in the short-term, but if you want to make money long-term publishing on the internet, the real money will come from capitalizing on your own content and writing, as opposed to selling it to others.

I see some good advice here, and some that is maybe not as applicable depending on what people want to do. Someone mentioned reading The Economist or the New Yorker to see how people write. I guess that is okay if you choose to write that way. Others may actually prefer that people actually enjoy reading what they write.

The reality is the landscape has changed significantly and the door is wide-open. The rules and regulations are basically out the window. If you can gain an audience for your writing and make it work for you then you are succesful, regardless of it meeting some formatic guidelines or grammar checker.

 

Darn. If you only had a Journalism degree, you would be perfect.

Sorry, I could not resist.

Writing about what you know is a good start. Rather than try to write about everything under the sun and get known as the master of nothing, try to hone in on a market or perhaps two. This will help you should you venture into magazine writing.

 

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but I'm assuming that was targeted at me (the bit about knowing a market). In my case, as PR applies to magazine writing, a primary focus of public relations is studying all types of media outlets and a variety of journalists, whether it be writing for them, broadcasting, or essentially making them care about what you want them to care about. I work heavily with journalists, as well as working within a few larger online media outlets as one myself. People in my field have an intimate knowledge of the media, so I'm not sure what your point is. Also, in my own case, I do only write about my own specialties (marketing / PR due to my business and my education, consulting / freelance because I do PR "consulting" as well as working as a freelance writer and editor on the side, small business because I'm a small business owner and also have educational background in business, and independent music because I started my PR firm initially exclusively in music publicity, and it's still a strong focus). So sorry again if I'm getting defensive for no reason, but since I couldn't quite tell if that last part was directed at me or not, I figured I might as well.

Other than that, I completely agree with you, and I tell writers the same thing here all the time... if they want to make serious money writing, they need to focus on at least one niche that they have education, experience, or both in... enough that they can write about something the client couldn't cover themselves, and that they can write better about than just a random content writer assembling various other sources' information.

Jenn

 

It was a joke (journalists v. PR people). I know PR fairly well. I went the Journalism route though.

The second part of my post was simply agreeing with what's been said and adding a little info on magazine writing.

 

OK. See, that's why I apologized beforehand just in case.

So that means you're the type we PR folks are supposed to be out there "manipulating" huh? j/k I have to say, I've never really dealt with the journalists v. PR people issue, from either side of the fence. I guess because I receive so many press releases from people wanting something from me, I've been able to understand their perspective, so I try to be nice and do what I can for them. And on the other side, because I know it annoys me to be bombarded with them, when I'm doing manual distributions I try to be as nice and respectful of their deadlines and editorial calendars as possible. So far it's been a decent philosophy. I tend to worry more about the Lawyers v. PR people issue... doing what saves the company money in a lawsuit (ie covering things up) versus doing what saves the company's image. Fortunately, it hasn't come up yet.

Jenn

 

My first week of freelancing I earned a touch under $500 writing dirt cheap content. The trick was to cotton on to the fact that the client didn't care about the quality of the content - only in making it good enough to fool the search engines into thinking that it was valuable content. A halfway competent writer can bang out an acceptable 400 word article in a little under ten minutes. At $5 dollars a pop, let's say 4 articles an hour for 8 hours a day that's $800 a week. Most people can comfortably live on that income.

The day I got tired of whoring myself for pennies, dumb luck got me a copywriting contract that paid $800 for 5 days of interesting work - more than twice what I earned when I had a 'real' job - and I now earn a decent living in copywriting, and have just set up a content service that's geared towards high quality content at premium rates. That should hopefully bring in a comfortable income.

The point it - yes, it's possible to make a living writing high volumes of poor-quality content, but would you want to? After a few weeks writing 9 hours a day about credit scoring and HDTVs your fingers hurt like a b*tch and you're unable to uncross your eyes.

Instead, hone your craft to the point at which you can market yourself as an artisan of words, not a keyword-generating monkey at a typewriter.

 

Nice post. It brings up the nice points of getting burned out and quality differences.

Once you start getting paid 50 cents to $2 per word for your writing, 1-2 cents simply won't do.

The field of potential clients willing to accept anything semi-decent for content food is enormous—and growing daily. If you are willing to write for 1-2 cents per word and can at least not make a fool of yourself, the money is out there.

Just make sure you don't go around telling people you write well, because you will end up with clients throwing the content back in your face when it's not in-depth enough. Writing well goes far beyond grammar—it dives into the depths of complete coverage.

 

I'm not quite there yet. I'm still at the stage of cutting my rates because I feel guilty about charging so much. I'm sure that, at least subconsciously, it's because I don't feel I deserve to make a lot of money for doing a job I love so much. I still wake up every morning (well, every afternoon - I work nights) and pinch myself. I can't believe I'm allowed to do this for a living.

Still, even though I cut my rates I'm not exactly cutting coupons. As long as the bills get paid and I can buy nice things I'm happy to write copy for 20 cents a word.

 

Keith,

You might want to try splitting up your service in two. One site (service) offers rates at where you are at. The second caters to a more demanding crowd at a higher price.

As your second level grows, you can pick and choose what you want to do from the first level. In a perfect world, your second level will end up becoming the main level you write at.

 

You could be, right, market. I'll make some changes when I can get around to it. In the meantime, the ding just went on my pizza. By the end of the month I'm going to look like Brando in his later years. Frozen pizza, lots of caffeine and 3 hours sleep a night.

Still, it's my own fault for taking on too much work