Freelancing Basics: One Way Not to Start Freelancing

We introduce another regular guest blogger today, Ruth E. Thaler-Carter. Ruth will be blogging monthly on various topics in the area of freelancing. Look for her posts under the main title of “Freelancing Basics.”

Conversations (often downright arguments) about the value of writing for content mills are legion these days, in LinkedIn groups and organizational discussion lists, at meetings, and wherever freelancers come together to learn from each other about what makes sense when starting out. One side says it’s worth doing as a way of getting started, the other says it’s a rip-off and also brings down the rates freelancers can command overall.

Content mills, for those new to the concept, are websites that pay peanuts for articles or blog posts in return for the promise of exposure and better-paying writing (primarily; sometimes editing) work in the future as a result. The sites sell the freelancers’ work to clients, sometimes by making articles available for bidding purposes and sometimes by assigning topics clients have asked for. Many of their writers are overseas, where the cost of living might be low enough to justify rates like $8 for a 250- to 300-word post. Their U.S. writers are often retired or previously unpublished, and willing to work for ridiculously low rates just to be published or have a platform for their opinions—they’re writing for fun, not for a living.

Some of these sites sell their writers’ work to clients; for an article that might earn you $8, a client has paid the site, say, $80.

Some of these sites are aggregators—they take your carefully (one hopes) crafted article and run it through programs that scramble the text and send out the results to various other sites to build up keyword exposure and increase search engine optimization (SEO).

There are content mills that let their writers have bylines and others that don’t give writers bylines (so much for that promise of exposure). Some have writers compete to write about specific topics, while others assign topics. Some have editing services, some don’t.

What this all comes down to is the concept that writing for content mills supposedly will be good for your freelance efforts, especially if you’re just starting to try your freelance wings. Please, please, please don’t go there! STC members should have sufficient experience and skill to go after freelance work that pays well and provides genuine visibility that really will lead to more freelance work.

Stop and think about how much work it takes to research and write a well-crafted article, even a short one of fewer than 500 words (not even two double-spaced pages). Then think about getting paid not even $10 for that effort. Then think about how much work it would take to churn out enough of these gems to pay a grocery bill, much less the rent. Don’t go there!

If you value your skills and experience, you can do far better than freelancing for content mills. You can make far more than $8 or $10 per article. It may take some effort to find the clients and projects that pay what you deserve to receive, but the results will be worth your efforts.

We’ll talk more about when it makes sense to write for free or close to it, and about finding those better-paying freelance projects, in another post.

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter is a long-time, successful freelance writer/editor who has made presentations for STC about freelancing at the Summit, a local chapter conference, and through STC webinars. She is the author/publisher of Get Paid to Write! Getting Started as a Freelance Writer and author of Freelancing 101: Launching Your Editorial Business for the Editorial Freelancers Association.