Why Low Rate Writing Didn’t Work Out For Me
Burnout, burger articles, and large amounts of caffeine didn’t bring me to writing joy
Five years ago, at a time now in the distance recesses of my memory, I (accidentally) set out on my journey to become a freelance writer.
I had just moved country (from Ireland to Israel) and was looking for my first job. As I scoured the job boards, I began noticing that a lot of companies were looking for freelance writing support.
This seemed like something I could do. I had a degree in journalism and had intended to make that my profession (I continue to engage in a little freelance journalism, but have concluded, for the time being, that it’s just too hard to make a living doing that in today’s job market).
At university, I ran a student news website. Writing was what had always engaged and motivated me. And while I had always set my sites on in-house positions rather than contract work, freelance content marketing seemed like a good way to pay the bills while I was on the job hunt.
Three years later and I had enough writing work on my plate to be able to make the transition out of a full-time job in marketing communications and go full-time with the freelancing.
But there were plenty of interesting blips and detours all the way. Figuring out a viable rate has been one of them.
Writing About Microwaving Burgers
By comparison to the kind of things I’m writing about for clients today, the first gigs that I took on were almost comically weird.
I didn’t have a niche. Nor did I particularly intend making freelance writing a long term thing. I needed to pay rent and power and humus and beer. So I took what came my way.
Some of my first projects are seared in my memory.
In one, I was writing clickbait video descriptions about the best ways to microwave burgers as well as celebrity gossip (note: there aren’t many who are less interested in pop culture than I and I’m not sure I’ve ever microwaved a burger in my life). The copy was passable and I got a mild kick out of this weird way I had discovered to make money on the internet.
Next, I was (inadvertently) creating fake news for a company that turned out to be an ORM outfit trying to protect the online reputation of fraudsters. The con-men weren’t really investing in blockchain. They were just trying to get news of their arrest pushed down Google by the misinformation I was (inadvertently) helping to spread. Ouch!
Thankfully, my clickbait video writing days — like my time protecting the reputations of gangsters — didn’t last all that long. I graduated from the first tranche of freelance writing clients — the really dubious stuff — and onto the second one. But I stayed at the second tier for too long.
Why Grunt SEO Writing Work Didn’t Work For Me
At the second step up in my freelance writing ladder, I was now working for legitimate organizations. No more fake news or thoughts about how to best Netflix-and-Burger. Just companies that could supply a lot of work that didn’t take much mental effort to produce.
In the interest of not badmouthing specific past clients (I’ve never worked through content mills) I’m being sparse with the deals. But it was in the domain of bulk SEO work that anybody who has started out as a freelance writer is probably familiar with.
I thought, at this time, that I had figured out the basics of what to charge for writing and how to charge for it. Sadly, the kind of rates I was commanding — eight cents a word seemed reasonable to me at the time — put me in the rookie territory of the market. And not realizing that kept me there for longer than I needed to be.
Hemming out SEO-oriented “content,” I was a purebred volume player — because it’s the only way to make this business model work as a writer.
Which is why when people point out to me that you can make a decent income from a low per-word rate I do a silent eye-roll. Trust me, I know. I did this for the best part of a year.
Here’s the thing about writing for low rates.
When you’re living in a country with a developed world cost of living and are charging $100 a pop for your product, you need to produce a lot of product in order to keep your head above financial water.
Day after day I hemmed away furiously at my keyboard, driven by a daily deluge of caffeine. The coffee helped me both pull crazy hours and push the monotony of writing about the same two or three topics out of my mind. (A feature of volume SEO work tends to be that you end up writing about whatever verticals are in high keyword demand; which means lots of recurring topics).
Then I Realized: This Isn’t Sustainable
My daily caffeine-and-writing binges were beginning to take a toll on both my physical and mental health.
When your business model is predicated upon churning out lots of relatively cheap work, you don’t have much time left at the margins to actually think about what you’re writing. Nor, often, do you have time to eat lunch or step back from your computer once in a while.
The strangely mindless ritual of writing SEO content every day had also dulled my senses to the point at which I hadn’t really stopped to think about what I was writing about.
What was the point of all this “content” that I was being paid to create? Was it good for the world? And — even as a side hustle — what was this kind of working doing for my career? (Answer: nothing, a serious negative).
My monthly invoices were totting up surprisingly well — as anybody that has managed to make this kind of business model work probably knows (it really can work).
But simply looking at the financial viability of freelance writing was keeping me distracted from some bigger picture things, including my satisfaction, or lack thereof, with the work I was being paid to produce.
At nights, after the rush of the day’s push for deliverables was over, as well as the caffeine, a few recurrent thoughts hit me like a train:
- When I aspired to become a writer, hemming out SEO content wasn’t what I envisioned.
- This isn’t sustainable. Like, at all.
- This is making me pretty miserable.
The daily burst of adrenaline was keeping these all at bay. But only because I was productivity numb. They were there lingering in the background all along.
When I dove deeper into why this SEO writing phase wasn’t working out for me, I was able to realize some things that I needed to work on in order to make freelance writing more fun. Essentially, to take the pain points and try to flip them into benefits:
- I didn’t believe in the mission of the organizations for whom I was writing. I wasn’t trying to help awesome business owners to get their message out to the world. I was simply a cog in an SEO machine.
- There was no creativity involved in this writing whatsoever. The wrong kind of SEO writing is constraining and template-driven. My clients were forcing me to write for search engines, not people.
- By working for clients who were only willing to pay the bare minimum rates needed to compensate me for my time, I had to work at a furious pace that was totally unnatural (symptom: caffeine abuse). Furthermore, because I only barely had enough time to write the articles, I didn’t have enough hours in the day to look for better-paying work. I was thinking about making this freelance writing thing a full-time reality. But oddly this work was keeping me trapped in the SEO-writing doldrums. I couldn’t keep working at the margins of viability. I needed both more satisfying work. And some padding.
The Type Of Work That I Do Now
These days, I do rather different work for rather different clients.
I focus on thought leadership because I always enjoyed crafting opinion pieces and true thought leadership (note: much is not) is all about helping authors share great ideas in order to achieve marketing objectives.
I still do some content marketing. SEO is naturally a component of that and there’s plenty of SEO-focused work that isn’t mind-numbing. But it’s no longer the totality of my business and I no longer work for clients who are only willing to pay the bare minimum required to get the job done. Because I know that if I’m being honest with myself I simply can’t.
(Disclosure: as anybody who has seen me post on freelance writing forums knows, I’m very far from having “figured out” freelance writing to the point that my business is ideal. I’m still very much actively figuring things out. But I’m a good deal further on than where I was a few years ago.)
How did I get from tier two to tier three?
- I realized that feeling some sense of connection with the mission of the businesses I was writing for was essential for me.
- I realized that I needed more than just financial viability for freelance writing to work for me. If I didn’t, the low-end SEO work would have been perfectly fine. But it wasn’t.
- I realized that I couldn’t work for clients who only paid the bare minimum required to produce work. When I figured out how much I needed to be charging for writing not to be a sprint — and how much to charge per hour — my rates rose significantly.
In light of all the above, I’m now a mid-tier writer and not an entry level one.
I still periodically encounter leads who are aghast at the idea that a writer could quote $400 for a blog post. And I periodically question my own decision to get to this point and to turn down a lot of opportunities on the grounds that they don’t meet my rate. But then I realize that there’s no way I can put myself back on the hamster wheel of low budget SEO work.
Massive side benefit: when you’re being compensated decently for your writing you can also:
- Afford to take a walk or prepare a healthy lunch
- Afford to buy yourself books about marketing and content creation that will make you a better professional and increase your career prospects
- Let go of the lingering sense of resentment that many feel when they let themselves work for cheap, below their market value
But most importantly, charging more freed up time in my calendar to look for better-paying work and got me out of the trap of being stuck writing an endless stream of SEO content.
If that’s where your writing business is now, I recommend considering the above.
