Freelance writing

[joe]

Anyone here ever do it? How did you go about finding clients? I am looking into it to make some extra money. Any writers in here?

[LJJ]

:roll:

[joe]

:roll:

Lol, what is so funny little johnny jewel?

[DeuceWallaces]

I can just imagine you coming up with essays filled with your convoluted right wing and libertarian talking points on how the world works from your parents basement and trying to sell them freelance.

[DukeDelonte13]

what is your education background?

What was your GPA in college?

What is/was your work exp?

[joe]

I can just imagine you coming up with essays filled with your convoluted right wing and libertarian talking points on how the world works from your parents basement and trying to sell them freelance.
Honestly I've taken a big step back from my passion for all of those topics

[joe]

what is your education background?

What was your GPA in college?

What is/was your work exp?

A lot of the writing opportunities I see aren't dependent on those, people just want to see if you have the writing capability. I have 3 years of college, honors and high GPA. My work experience is nothing I care to write about.

[DukeDelonte13]

A lot of the writing opportunities I see aren't dependent on those, people just want to see if you have the writing capability. I have 3 years of college, honors and high GPA. My work experience is nothing I care to write about.
well i need somebody to write content for my business website and you just failed the interview.

I wouldn't feel comfortable hiring a freelance writer to write for me that didn't finish college. Work exp. is important even if its not directly related to the field in which you are looking for work. I can probably find grad students to write for me for like 10-15 bucks an hour.

[joe]

well i need somebody to write content for my business website and you just failed the interview.

I wouldn't feel comfortable hiring a freelance writer to write for me that didn't finish college. Work exp. is important even if its not directly related to the field in which you are looking for work. I can probably find grad students to write for me for like 10-15 bucks an hour.

I wasn't interviewing for you. You are quite pretencious. There are plenty of freelancers who haven't finished college. Personally I thought (and still think) the debt wasn't worth it for me. To each his own.

[DeuceWallaces]

I wasn't interviewing for you. You are quite pretencious. There are plenty of freelancers who haven't finished college. Personally I thought (and still think) the debt wasn't worth it for me. To each his own.

Step 1: Learn to spell.

[GimmeThat]

How would you like to build your reputation?

You can write about what you want for free and gather an audience and see whether someone would be interested in putting you on projects that have a specific message your client wants you to express (negate your own personal interest totally in this case)


Or you can write for clients for free, until you get signed to periodically publich your piece I suppose.

[DukeDelonte13]

what's a reasonable flat fee on a 1k to 2k word count piece?

[Akrazotile]

well i need somebody to write content for my business website and you just failed the interview.

I wouldn't feel comfortable hiring a freelance writer to write for me that didn't finish college. Work exp. is important even if its not directly related to the field in which you are looking for work. I can probably find grad students to write for me for like 10-15 bucks an hour.


This attitude is one of the major problems with America.

You don't know what good writing is, apparently. Nor do you know useful skills when you see them, apparently. You need some nutty professor who's on tenure and half senile handing out diplomas to anyone willing to go into enough debt for them to tell you who's a good employee and who's not??


You wouldn't hire Bill Gates or Mark Cuban or Mark Zuckerberg and countless other people who are literally hundreds of times more qualified than you to do anything.


Hey, that's your prerogative. Just don't complain about the economy or the system or anything else if your business fails. Point that finger inward because you take a very close minded and archaic approach to business. You're fighting an uphill battle because you aren't relying on your own vision, just an outdated blueprint that doesn't take into account the way the terrain looks today.

[DukeDelonte13]

This attitude is one of the major problems with America.

You don't know what good writing is, apparently. Nor do you know useful skills when you see them, apparently. You need some nutty professor who's on tenure and half senile handing out diplomas to anyone willing to go into enough debt for them to tell you who's a good employee and who's not??


You wouldn't hire Bill Gates or Mark Cuban or Mark Zuckerberg and countless other people who are literally hundreds of times more qualified than you to do anything.


Hey, that's your prerogative. Just don't complain about the economy or the system or anything else if your business fails. Point that finger inward because you take a very close minded and archaic approach to business. You're fighting an uphill battle because you aren't relying on your own vision, just an outdated blueprint that doesn't take into account the way the terrain looks today.


i don't wanna hire a quitter.

Bill Gates and Mark Cuban are exceptions to the rule.

I'm a first gen college student. My grandparents were illiterate and never even went to elementary school. I of all people know that formal education doesn't equate to intelligence or talent, but in this day in age in the united states, if you are trying to work an academic job like writing papers, you should at the very least have a bachelor's which are kind of a joke to get.

[DukeDelonte13]

It really depends on what you're looking for. Fluff piece stuff, fiction, non-fiction, or denser manual type things. Obviously the more important stuff will be on the higher side of the pricing spectrum.

PM me your email address, and we could shoot a few back and forth if you're serious.


somewhere between non-fiction and "denser" materials. Probably isn't even worth it for me to hire somebody, i can probably knock out the pieces I need an hour or two.. if i hire a grad student in my field they get the exp. bonus and i can get away with not spending too much money. Hiring a straight up pro will probably be to cost prohibitive for what i'm looking to do.

[ace23]

I wasn't interviewing for you. You are quite pretencious. There are plenty of freelancers who haven't finished college. Personally I thought (and still think) the debt wasn't worth it for me. To each his own.
Dam

[rufuspaul]

An old college buddy of mine does freelance work and has published articles for Al Jazeera, Salon, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and a few others. He still has to do other jobs to make ends meet.

[joe]

Step 1: Learn to spell.

Pretentious*

[Dresta]

This attitude is one of the major problems with America.

You don't know what good writing is, apparently. Nor do you know useful skills when you see them, apparently. You need some nutty professor who's on tenure and half senile handing out diplomas to anyone willing to go into enough debt for them to tell you who's a good employee and who's not??


You wouldn't hire Bill Gates or Mark Cuban or Mark Zuckerberg and countless other people who are literally hundreds of times more qualified than you to do anything.


Hey, that's your prerogative. Just don't complain about the economy or the system or anything else if your business fails. Point that finger inward because you take a very close minded and archaic approach to business. You're fighting an uphill battle because you aren't relying on your own vision, just an outdated blueprint that doesn't take into account the way the terrain looks today.
Amen: many brilliant writers never went to college, some never even finished high school. Having completed postgrad studies myself, i can say with some certainty that rather than improving one's ability to write, the formal nature of academic writing exercises a stultifying influence on a young writer, making his work more rigid and structured, but less interesting, more tedious, less natural and flowing, and more uniform. It's why most academic journals in the social sciences and humanities are so dry and uninteresting.

If you can really write college isn't going to help you. And if you can't write at all it probably won't help much either. If you're an average writer then it may help you with structure and organisation, tedious and incessant signposting et cetera, but little else.

[joe]

And yes, I'm a contributor to many major sites

Is there any tips you'd be willing to give for someone in my position? I've always had a passion for writing. I just feel overwhelmed, because there's so much advice out there for beginners. I've been looking at textbroker.com as a potential starting point. What was your path?

[joe]

Each situation is different. For me there would have been no difficulty in getting a bachelors. Leaving school was a conscious choice to not take on anymore debt. My only regret is I didn't leave a year earlier (my first two years of college were paid for).

I had some college teachers who helped refine my writing. I enjoyed the hell out of my academic experience, actually. But not enough to justify 25K a year.

[sundizz]

The answer depends primarily on what your end goal is.

If you'd simply like to make some extra cash there are many places online to sell your services. The amount of money you make really depends on how involved and the effort you go toward producing quality pieces. Generally, you'll work a lot and be poor with this method though. Writing is a passion and if you are always writing content about areas you aren't interested in I can't imagine it to be very fun.

However, if you do think of this as a career and want to make a lot of money I would suggest you develop a website. It's ridiculously easy to develop a website nowadays and you can have a very professional looking place to show off your talent. I'd sign up for Google+ and get authorship (it's easy). Then, use your site to put up a new, very well thought out and researched piece every 4 days.

Drive traffic toward your website. This can easily be accomplished through signing up for a place like freelancer.com and bidding on SEO/content writing projects. Mostly, that site has piss poor quality writers on there and there are many people that need good content. Websites from around the world hire on there. Don't offer ridiculously low rates though. If you do quality work, don't take super low-quality jobs. Additionally, you could offer your services in exchange for a small fee, and a "backlink". Backlinks are what make a website trustworthy to search engines. Do this often + produce content on your website and there is a decent chance that you can rank highly on Google search for "content and SEO writer for the apparel industry" or other similar terms. Then, free traffic = lots of jobs.

The above requires a lot of dedication, writing, and desire to make this a career. Honestly, doing all that, you probably will still make under 100k. There are just so many writers out there that simply being a reasonably good writer is not enough to make a lot of money.

Your best bet is to take on freelance jobs (through freelancer, textbroker, etc) sites and to develop relationships with companies. In 2014+ content is a big deal for search engine rankings. Companies will spend a lot more money to hold on to a great writer. If you can become that indispensable traffic driver for an ecommerce (or similar) company you can write less, write better, and get paid much more.

Or, you could come work with me =) I just launched/went live with our education company/website. I'm looking for 2-3 writers that are willing to do a 3 month "internship" for free. I'd actually prefer to pay writers, but we just launched and are pre-revenue. In about 3 months we'll know what our revenue model will be. At that time, once we implement our revenue model, of course it'd become a paid position.

If you are interested (or anyone else on this thread), pm me. Either way, this discussion is interesting to me because I've spent a lot of time researching the topic this year. I'd like to write our blog articles myself, but am stretched too thin with the tech/video/marketing/etc sides already.

[Akrazotile]

Amen: many brilliant writers never went to college, some never even finished high school. Having completed postgrad studies myself, i can say with some certainty that rather than improving one's ability to write, the formal nature of academic writing exercises a stultifying influence on a young writer, making his work more rigid and structured, but less interesting, more tedious, less natural and flowing, and more uniform. It's why most academic journals in the social sciences and humanities are so dry and uninteresting.

If you can really write college isn't going to help you. And if you can't write at all it probably won't help much either. If you're an average writer then it may help you with structure and organisation, tedious and incessant signposting et cetera, but little else.


Yup, IMO it's no different than something like basketball. Playing college ball isn't going to make you a more gifted basketball player. You might be better in the NBA at 20 with two years of college than you would have been at 18, but that's because you've had an extra 2 years to mature and hone your skills. It's not because college magically gave you any abilities you didn't previously have. A lot of smart people graduate college, and so do a lot of morons. And same goes for non-graduates. In the end, people will fall in line according to ability.

The reason the cost of tuition has gone up so radically is because, well obviously the demand, but the reason for the demand is that employers these days just use the presence of a degree as a crutch to skirt the necessity of using real effort and intuition to weed out candidates. They've farmed out that process to for-profit institutions that literally don't GAF whether their students have a clue, as long as the tuition payments are made on time. As a result, the employee prospect pool has suffered.

[JEFFERSON MONEY]

LOL LJJ did not just laugh at dis nikkas honest request.

I could imagine that happening in real life.

Joe walks in raises his hand half-heartedly.. then kind of waddles it then finally the teacher calls on him.

"Yes Joe"
"Anybody ever do freelance writing?"

And then some Dutch guy bursts out laughing at the ludicrous notion.