Real Life Highscore

This series of articles will follow my foray into the world of freelance writing. Hopefully it can serve as a guide for other newcomers and can help a few people decide if freelance writing is for them.

Entry 1 – Getting Started with Freelance Writing

Before now the extent of my freelance writing experience is doing some high school-level homework for some friends so if you are looking for a beginners journey into freelancing, I’m your man. I will try to walk you through the highs and lows, my feelings and any tips I discover along the way. If you find this series helpful or interesting please consider commenting or sharing it over Twitter/Facebook etc.

The Offer

My journey started with an offer from fellow InfoBarrel writer Dreamaker. He said that he was finally allowed to start referring a few people to a small freelance writing website that he had been writing with for a good amount of time. I can’t share the name of the site just yet because they are very strict about who they let refer but if in the future I am allowed to start referring people I might share with people who message me.

At first I wasn’t very interested, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I asked Dreamaker for a referral. I knew starting freelance work might be a way for me to earn enough money to keep doing the things I love so I wanted to give it a try. After all, the worst thing that could happen is that I make a few dollars, decide it’s not for me and then quit.

Signing up for a Freelance Place

This is the first step you should take and it’s one that you should hurry up and get over with. Most people are deterred at this early stage because they over think it and eventually forget about it. Sign up for a place, any place, just to get started.

Learning the Rules

Once I was in I read over as much of the guides and watched as many of the help videos as I could stand to learn as much as I could. There was a lot to take in about how they wanted articles written, the methods for research, and how to use the software. I suppose it’s a lot like any job – you first have to learn the ropes.

Taking the First Job

There was a few hundred to choose from so it took me a while to pick my first job. Eventually I will have to discriminate less to save time. Each job consisted of a keyword the client wanted a general article on, it was up to me to decide what to write as long as I followed the site’s guidelines for articles.

My first job was a 300 word article on selling companies. I got it done within an hour or two though this particular keyword was harder than it should have been as it was formed as a question. Learned my first hard lesson already – avoid keywords that are hard to put into the 3rd person perspective.

Pay for this job was $4.75 with a 5% bonus on top for completing it within 24 hours. Total – $4.9875

Waiting for Approval

Most good freelancing places have newcomers first few jobs checked over for quality by the editors or review staff. This felt like it took a week but in reality it was about three days. I was super eager to take my next job as I was seeing a heap of interesting keywords come and go.

Second Job

When I was finally approved there were not many interesting keywords available so I just decided to pick an easy 400 word one. I ended up writing about menu cover design which wasn’t too hard to do quickly. I’m still nowhere near the three 300 word articles an hour goal I would like to be at but I am getting quicker already.

Pay for this 400 word article with two rewrites was $5.25 with a 5% bonus. Total – $5.5125

I have now hit the minimum payout of $10 for a Paypal payout on Friday – woot!

Continuing On

My next goal is to get to 10 articles written so that I can start increasing my quota. Currently I am only allowed to write one article at a time, increasing my quota will allow me to do more at the same time. This should save me a lot of time as I can do each part (research, first write, re-writes) in batches. I will probably do my next journal entry once I reach that milestone, hopefully no longer than a week from now.

If you are enjoying this series so far let me know about it in the comments below! I would love to hear your feedback on what I can add to make it more interesting.