Useless Skills Gained From Freelance Writing

There are of course a number of useful and lucrative skills you gain by writing full time. These aren’t those skills:

Word Count Guessing: I can now glance at my page and approximate, within about 20 words, how many words are on the page. I can’t, however, cook rice. Priorities.

Useless Knowledge: Do you know what causes hemorrhoids? I do. I also know the intimate workings of every type of vacuum cleaner known to humans, where to visit if you ever go to Burkina Faso and what to feed your llamas. All of this completely useless knowledge came from various freelancing gigs and all of it is now lodged permanently in my brain.

Solving Other People’s Problems: Thanks to near-constant article writing, I can now solve everyone’s problems, and not just with this. Need a new vacuum? I know the one you need- I wrote articles about them last year. Want plastic surgery? Don't worry, I know what kind you need. Have back pain? I know just how to solve it. Need to go on a diet? Let me tell you about all the latest studies... Going to Trinidad and need to know where the best beaches are? I’ve got it covered.

More Newspaper Layoffs

Here's the world we live in- gossip blogs are multiplying like those gross mice with the red eyes, but newspapers are constantly going under. Hardly a city has more than one paper anymore, and now the cities that do are severely downsizing their newsrooms. Sadly, cutting 14 percent of the newsroom doesn't surprise me in the least. What does surprise me is that Reuters, writing about a Chicago paper, apparently used AP style. Yeah, I'm a nerd.

Is Cold Calling Really Necessary?

Cold Calls- Calling some random company and telling them that they should pay you to do something that they never asked you to do and might not even need done.

Is this really necessary? According to the big dogs on the block, it's essential to make cold calls to get new clients coming in and to get work that pays a fair rate. The big dogs, of course, being this guy, this guy and another guy whose blog I read.

I think that the whole cold calling concept is necessary for specific types of copywriting if you don't know anyone in the industry and don't have any samples to show anyone. In that respect, it's a carryover from when print copywriting roamed the Earth unchallenged by the digital gods that later came to power.

Nowadays, I don't see any reason that anyone would have to make cold calls. Yes, it's probably necessary if you want to go after the big names to get something impressive for the old resume. It's probably necessary if you want to get away from Web writing but don't actually want to work for just one company. If neither of these is your goal, cold calling is never necessary for a few reasons, namely:

People online rarely want to see a resume anyway. They mainly just want to see writing samples and to have a vague idea about your experience. If they do want a resume, it's to see your educational credentials and number of years of experience, not to see that one time you wrote this flier for LG and it rocked pretty hard.

There is no shortage of Web work. The amount of work is actually pretty overwhelming at times. There's no reason to look for off-Web work unless you just want less work and want to work harder to get it.

There's the skin crawlage factor. Imagine having to call people you don't know over and over again, trying to make yourself sound like someone they need even when you don't know if they need anyone. Imagine being turned down over and over again by people who don't know why you even called them because they never advertised a position and don't know who the heck you are. Yeah. Fun times.

How Much Can You Make With Suite101?

First of all, I can’t tell you. The site doesn’t allow anyone who writes for them to divulge how much they make from the site. However, people come here every day by searching Google for the answer to this very question. You won’t find the answer anywhere online, and if you do, it will probably be a very old number that was posted before they changed the payment structure.

So, the question is not really how much can be made on Suite101 but rather, is the money you make worth the effort that you put into the site. The answer to that is a profound yes and no.

There are two types of Suite101 writers- contributing writers and feature writers. As a contributor writer, your work gets little promotion and often little attention. The pay is fairly small, though there is a slight raise after you have 50 articles written for them. As a contributing writer, I did not feel that the income was remotely worth the effort. Maybe that’s because I don’t write about iPods and American Idol, or maybe it’s fairly standard. That I can’t say.

After I was made a feature writer, however, that all changed. There is a nice raise involved, but I think that the income shot up because you get better exposure. You write your category’s landing page and your latest creations are featured there. You also get a blog there that you’re required to post to every week. That also brings readers to your work.

After spending some time as a feature writer, I do think that the pay is well worth the amount of time I spend there. However, that isn’t generally my criteria for something with my name on it. About 98 percent of my work is never credited. It’s ghostwritten or simply work that the client doesn’t put a name on.

To have something online with my name on it, I require a good deal of creative control. In that respect, Suite101 does come through. I have to write weekly for my category, but the specific topics I choose are entirely up to me. I can also write additional articles for other categories if I so choose. If you want creative control- go for it. They don’t require that much of your time and they have pretty good page rank.

Meeting Clients in Person

Getting used to communicating with clients online wasn't too hard. There are a million ways to do it. But, when you're doing a local project there may come a time when a client wants to Meet in Person.

It looks like I'm going to have to meet with a client and a collaborator fairly soon for a mid-scale project that I've taken on.

That's right- not through email, not through Google chat, not through IMs. It won't be a suit kind of meeting, but it will be the kind where you have to put on a bra, get in the car and go somewhere. I haven't had to do this in several months. The last time I discovered several pros and cons of the face-to-face client meeting.

Con:
You can't wear pajama pants or eat egg rolls while you're meeting. You actually have to let the client dictate the space and parameters.
You have to be there at a specific time- not just a certain date or a range of dates. The client tells you the exact hour that you have to work. Oh no he di'int!

Pros:
For a complicated project, or one that involves several people working together, it really is the best way to communicate. You can collaborate more easily and get a feel for how to make the project turn out the best way possible.
You can see all of those buildings and trees and things you keep hearing about.
Sometimes a face-to-face meeting can get you and client working together better than days of emails. This saves time for both of you.

Whether it's with a suit or without, eventually most writers will have to meet with someone. For the most part, I think it's best to talk to clients in person the way you talk to kids- keep a pleasant tone in your voice and try not to swear too much.

Resisting a Writing Niche

When I started freelancing, I couldn't understand why so many freelance writers were limiting themselves to a niche. Wouldn't they be limiting their work? Wouldn't that cut down on the kind of jobs they could take on?

After awhile, I could see the temptation to take on a niche. Once you get used to writing about something, it gets easier and easier. You are then able to write it in less time and take on more work, making the day more profitable.

But, I have tried to resist the lure of the niche. For one thing, it does exactly what I feared. It does limit the kinds of projects you can take on. It won't matter much if someone is paying $25 a word for articles about mushrooms if the only thing you've ever written about is constipation. It isn't necessary to most clients that you have direct experience writing about their specific topic- if you can show that you write about many topics well.

Even if you do write about one or two things more than any other (marketing!), it's still important to make the effort to write outside that niche. If you have some health samples (no, not urine), some marketing samples, a few home improvement samples and an article or two about onions, you can demonstrate that no topic is beyond you.

Article Prices

I've been through a lot of different payment methods for determining article and ebooks rates. For ebooks rates I've come up with a per-page system that reflects the length of the overall book in relation to how long it will take and how many other things I will have to turn down to get the ebook done. But for articles- pricing can be extremely tricky.

Per-Article Pricing
When I first began, I started with a per-article rate that was the same no matter how long the article was, how many keywords it needed and what it was about. I was able to slowly raise that rate as I developed more clients, more online bylines and experience with more topics. It was not, however, turning out to be a great method of pricing. One article might take 30 minutes while another might take two hours, but both were the same price. It didn't really make good sense.

Per-Word Pricing
I then moved to per-word pricing. This worked a lot better than the per-article pricing, but it still didn't tell the whole story. I was chugging along pretty well at my per-word rate when I got smacked in the head with a few highly-technical articles. They were short, and the per-word rate was good. Unfortunately, they took longer than most long articles and reduced my hourly income to about minimum wage. What to do? Funny you should ask because I did come up with something better.

Topic Rates
I've been using topic rates for the past two months or so and this has been working out better than either of the last two rates. With a topic rate, I charge more for things that I know for a fact will take longer. A longer article won't necessarily take longer, but a completely unfamiliar topic will. So far I've had no problems with this with private clients. As for companies, well, they generally won't change their rates to suit your new pricing plan, the bastards. So, in those cases I've been choosing topics that are more in line with what I would be charging another client for them if they were paying what the company does. Make sense? Well, it does to me.