When Good Enough is Good Enough: Part 3

Unfortunately, writing large quantities of text for somewhat small amounts of money means that you need to cut time out of your writing process somewhere in order to stay competitive. There are many different ways that you can cut time out of your process, and it's important to choose ones that you're comfortable with.

There's something that you need to be aware of, though: you're cutting corners. Often, you'll be intentionally doing work that is not as great as it could be. This might make you sick, it might make you regret taking on this job, and it might make you question your abilities as a writer. But if you want to profit from this ground level of freelance writing, then there is something you must do:

Suck it up.

There are a number of different places in which you can cut time out of your process:

• Editing: skim content through Microsoft Office and fix only those things which Office flags as being incorrect. (Often, employers will only be looking for this anyway, especially if they are non-native English speakers.)

• Formatting: save all of it for completion.

• Multiple files: write all of your content in one large file, and break it up later. This way, you don't have to deal with losing your writing flow to create a new file.

• Don't sweat the details: so long as the piece meets requirements for keywords and length, don't worry about the quality any more than is necessary to make sure its readable.

• Time limits: if it isn't perfect after your article time interval has elapsed, then too bad. Fix it later if there's time, but don't compromise your working speed for effort that will go both unnoticed and unpaid.

In the end, you're the ultimate arbiter on when something is good enough for publication. You should note, again, that these rules apply only when your name is not attached to the product.

When Good Enough is Good Enough: Part 2

Earlier, I broke down how to determine the approximate rate at which you need to write articles online in order to make your desired hourly wage. I used this formula:

Rate / Price = Quantity

Let's stick with our prior example of a contract worth $100 that involves writing 50 articles of 250 words each. As we figured out last time, that means you'll need to complete an article every 7.5 minutes, which comes out to something like 31 and a quarter words per minute. According to typingtest.com, the average typist can write something like 36 words every minute, this shouldn't be much of a problem for most people.

In fact, the average typist will be able to snake just into 15$ each hour with a contract like this.

However: that will leave exactly zero time for editing each article. Assuming that you read at about my average pace, it will take you something like 40 seconds just to reread your completed 250 word article. I'd hazard a guess that it would take something like five minutes to topically edit 250 words, which means you're looking at 14.5 minutes per article at an average typing speed.

This means that even topically editing your articles will cut your hourly rate in half - and this applies pretty much no matter what your typing speed is.

Unfortunately, this means that editing your articles to any level of perfection will directly impact how much money you are capable of generating.

Most of us are aware that, as writers, we are nothing without a reputation, and that reputation depends on writing and editing well. However, there's a pretty good chance that your name won't be on the final, web-published product. It is at this point in which you need to determine, for you as an individual, when good enough is good enough.

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?

Whooooa Introductions

Hello there.

I've spent the last few months of my life writing professionally. Not for myself, not for a respected institution, but for a variety of Internet-based businesses to optimize their content, push traffic, and help make them more money. As a result of this, I've figured out some methods of writing in a way that is designed to generate money. In this blog, I'll be going over a variety of different lessons that I've learned, and how you can integrate them into your own work.

I should note here that while I won't be directing you to the places where my work has appeared (without, of course, my name on it), I will be occasionally quoting for submitted pieces. That's because everyone likes quotations! Right?

As a brief overview of some of the stuff to come, I'll be taking a look at how to write SEO in a subtle but effective fashion, how to figure out how much money you should be making per article, where and who to sell your services to, and all matter of grammatical tricks and tips to help make you better at making money writing online.