Does it seem like the impossible dream to move up and get good-paying writing clients?
If you’re a newbie, you can’t land bigger businesses that have ongoing work at great rates, right? That’s all sewn up by the established freelance writers.
If that’s what you think…today I’d like to give you a peek through the looking glass.
I got a reach-out recently from a website editor, who told me about her experience trying to hire bloggers for $50-$100 a post.
Given that most blogging ads seem to offer $5-$20 a post, you’d think it’d be easy to find quality writers who’d turn in awesome stuff just ready to publish.
But…it’s actually not easy to find a good writer
Even at decent rates.
This editor related to me that she had placed an ad on one of the big paid job boards for bloggers online, with a description of the gig along these lines:
Need regular writers to contribute content relating to the tech/cloud-database industry, worker productivity, worker empowerment, etc. We are looking to pay around $50 an article, and would like to have some regular contributors that can write articles weekly around these topics.
Well! You’d think given that the majority of blogging gigs seem to pay $20 a post or less, there would be a crowd of solid writers lining up for this gig.
The editor hired 20 writers…
The editor dug through the resume stack and chose 20 writers to try out, based mostly on who submitted the best headlines. She assigned each a $50 article as a trial run.
OK, so maybe they weren’t all going to turn out to be awesome. But surely some of those writers turned in stellar work, yes?
No.
There was a lot of English-as-a-second-language stuff. Mostly, everything I’ve gotten is like a poorly put together Wikipedia article.
I feel terrible turning all of these people away, but it’s just too much. I’m not sure what to do with all these messy pieces of writing.
I figured I would at least get usable posts. Boy was I wrong!
This editor’s quandary? She couldn’t decide whether to attempt to rewrite the 20 junk blog posts herself, or to reject all the posts and start over again trying to hire writers.
Either way, it was a big mess, and it was putting her behind schedule for launching her site.
And one thing was for sure — none of these writers was getting a second assignment.
Mediocrity is common
Yes, there seem to be a million writers out there. But there aren’t a million good ones.
I know, because I’ve been the writer called in to mop up messes like the one above. To rewrite everything into something that could be published.
These kind of writing-assignment train wrecks happen all the time.
What’s really keeping you from good pay
Now that you know there’s plenty of opportunity for you to poach gigs from mediocre “pro” writers…all you need to know is how you’re going to identify great clients who’re a fit for you, contact them, and convince them to hire you.
When I ask most writers what they’re doing to market their writing business, the most common answer is: nothing.
To earn more, you’ll need to change that.
