When Good Enough is Good Enough: Part 1

One of the things that I struggled the most with when beginning my freelancing for pennies career was discerning when a piece was written well enough.

Despite the fact that each article was worth $4, I would spend easily an hour on each one, trying to make sure that the grammar was perfected, the tone just right for the sales environment, and that each piece provided an effective display of my writing skills.

This is exactly the wrong way to make money with trying to make a living with writing online.

If you want to make money by writing online, you must learn when good enough is good enough.

So: how good is good enough? In order to determine that, we need to first figure out how quickly you need to be working in order to make the level of income that you're after. To this end, I found this formula to be pretty useful:

Rate / Price = Quantity

Rate is the hourly rate you wish to achieve.

Price is how much your employer is paying you per article.

Quantity is how many articles you will need to write to hit your desired payrate.

Let's imagine that your goal is 15$ per hour. Now, let's also imagine that you have received a contract to write 50 articles for 100$, meaning that each article is worth $2.00. (Note: if you're just getting started freelance writing online, these are about the rates you can expect.) Let's go ahead and plug our numbers in:

$15.00 (Rate per hour) / $2.00 (Price per article) = 7.5 (Quantity per hour)

This means that you will need to write seven and a half articles in an hour in order to hit 15$ an hour. That's an article every eight minutes! Imagining that these are 250 word articles, you're looking at 31.25 words every minute.

So why are these numbers important?