Real Life Highscore

This series of articles follows 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 2 – Fully Approved and Getting Paid!

I have now been freelance writing for the past three weeks and it has been an extremely positive experience overall. Now that I am fully approved on the freelance writing site that I am working through I thought it would be a good time to post an update. If you missed the first entry you can check it out here – Freelance Writing Journal: Entry 1 – Getting Started With Freelance Writing.

Experiencing All of the Job Types

Over the past three weeks I have a had a chance to try out a number of different writing jobs and have a fairly good idea of what to look for in new jobs. So far I have done articles between 300 and 700 words in length, some of which I just had to write straight up but others had me write an original and two re-writes for extra pay. I have even been requested to write 25-50 extra titles for a small bonus.

The re-writes can be a bit tedious but the bonus pay for these types of articles can be worth the extra work. Overall I prefer the standard ‘write-and-forget’ articles as it is a lot easier to be original only once. Taking a few urgent jobs was a good way to get myself a bit of extra pay when I had the time to get the articles written right away (usually within 24-48 hours). Extra article titles is really easy work for the extra $0.50 to $1.00 that it pays. I will grab those bonuses whenever I can to maximise my earnings.

Getting Approved

Shortly after my last post I became fully approved – although I didn’t realise it at first. I only found out when I didn’t have to wait for my next article to get looked over by the reviews team. It was a relief to be able to take another job shortly after completing one and it meant I could start earning a bit faster.

After approval I could also get my quota increased, that is the amount of articles I can take at one time. Writers start off with a quota of one and now I am on two. I hope to get my quota increased again very shortly as it will mean I can start batching my workload a bit more efficiently to increase my overall earnings.

A Nice Surprise

About midway through my second week about 10-15 really fun articles were posted to the job board. The articles were all about Minecraft! I was shocked as I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I could be writing about video games. This was huge bonus points for freelance writing in my eyes.

Needless to say I did the best job I could on those articles, even over-delivering on the word count in the hopes that the job poster would come back again with more work. I didn’t quite get all of the jobs but I got as many as my quota (and my writing speed) would allow.

In the end I got about $21.66 for writing about Minecraft. I can’t ask for anything cooler than that!

A Few Upsets

It wasn’t all fun and games (yes, you see what I did there) though, there were a few frustrating moments in my first few weeks of freelance writing. With every upset came a lesson learned and I shouldn’t be making the same mistakes again in the future.

The first upset came in the form of an article rejection. I actually got about two or three of these but they are part of the learning process. Mainly I need to watch out for keyword density (not going too high), making sure I have the keywords in the right spots, and making sure I am using U.S. spelling (I’m Australian and we spell like the British). Each of these mistakes are pretty easy to avoid now that I know and I haven’t made the same mistake twice. In the end it really was just a lesson learned, the editors weren’t annoyed, just helpful, and I ended up getting the articles fixed, submitted and paid for.

The next set of upsets came in the form of software bugs. I even lost about 30% of an article that I had already written and submitted. The main lesson to take from this is to ALWAYS keep backups. I normally do but on this one article I got lazy and, well, Murphy’s law applied. What could have went wrong did. Whenever you save work on-site also save it in a Notepad document  and save that document when you press submit. As I found out things can still go wrong even after you press that submit button.

Getting Paid

Finally, the fun part! I have had three paychecks from my freelance writing efforts and everything went into Paypal exactly on time and with exactly the right amounts.

At the time of writing this article my total earnings are: $62.51

Most of the jobs I have been doing are $4.75 for 300 words with two re-writes but I have also done a few longer and shorter articles (both re-writes and standard writes) which net me varying amounts.

Here is the list of all my articles so far, their payments and any bonuses:

Goals For the Next Month

Every week so far my pay has increased over the previous week. For April I would like to keep this trend up. I am sure that I will eventually I will hit some sort of skill/efficiency/time ceiling where I can’t increase my earnings any more but I think I will be able to keep doing this throughout April at least. Doing so should also help me improve my writing speed and efficiency whilst still balancing my time between this and other work/leisure. I have to make sure I keep my life balanced otherwise working for myself is pointless.

I should be making my next post in this series at the end of April unless something crazy happens before then. I’ll report back on how I went with my goal and share any knew tips or experiences I have.

If you have started freelance writing or are thinking about it let me know in the comments below! I would also love to hear your feedback on what I can add to make it more interesting.