Ghost wrote:anamericaninbangkok wrote:Ghost wrote:How did you get hired at $20 an hour Xiongmao? Did you just search for people who paid others peanuts and got monkeys? I just write right now though, and that's a cheaper skill than coding. Much of it depends on what your skillset is in the first place. But the market is open to all and inundated anyway. That's why my goals is about $1000 a month - consistently - completely online. I figure keeping a modest goal and forgoing any notion of getting rich is best. And that is still plenty more than a guy needs to live in a third world country.
If you break an article down to an hourly rate, $20 is not really all that much Ghost. For oDesk or Elance it's good money though.
The market is inundated with a high percentage of hacks. Anyone with a halfway decent education should be able to write but there is a big difference between writing and writing well.
My own goals in writing are unrelated to earning money. Money is certainly important however my goal is always to put forth an article / book that is entertaining and free of errors. If readers are entertained, the money should come...hopefully.
I find it difficult to make more than $8-10 an hour. And often it is less than that. But I am slow anyway. i don't have a good system or routine really. Just go trawl the sites and pick up short jobs or whatever. I'm working on it though.
This is the problem I have with these sort of sites. They make it so you get paid dirt cheap and have to bust your ass to make any money worth talking about. Also, you're thinking per hour not per article or project.
For example, I can write a good 1000-word article in 4-5 hours. That's about my max for the day, maybe 1500 words on a really good day. I set my minimum at 25 cents a word or $250 a pop. It takes me an hour to do a final edit on this sort of piece, which is short for a feature. So it takes me 5-6 hours to earn $250. That works out to 41.66-$50 an hour. Find a 2000-3000 word feature that pays this much and it works out to slightly higher than this. Also, the longer features tend to be in better magazines thus they will pay anywhere from 50 cents to $1 an article. Not easy to get these gigs but if you write 3000 words at 50 cents, that's $1500.
If you sell photos along with the article, which I almost always do, you make even more. Generally, magazines will pay at least $25 a photo, as much as $100 per photo. Plus if you keep the rights to the photos, which you always should, you can make money selling them elsewhere.
HBO purchased some of my photos a few years ago on two separate occasions. Besides the magazines I wrote for and provided with these photos, HBO bought them. I was on an assignment for 4 days, it took me another 3 days to do the write ups and the photos HBO bought were already online at the time they purchased them.
The breakdown was something like this:
Two magazines (articles - 750 words each) $300
Photos for the mags - $100
One magazine - 300 words - $50
HBO - 1st time - $2400
HBO - 2nd time - $2000
Travel expenses - $600.
The total worked out to $4850, or nearly $5K and I was paid for the second set of photos by HBO within a year of the first. The entire project took me about a week and I went to Borneo, which was cool.
I can't do this for every assignment but this is why I don't want to spend time on sites that are content mills.
Even minus the $600 in expenses, the $4250 is 3-4 months of living expenses for some people. At the time it was 2 months for my family and I.
A 3000-word piece that yields $1500 might take 5 days, it might take a week. But that's 4 hours x 6 days or 24 hours + a couple hours of editing, so say 26 hours total. That works out to nearly $60 an hour.
I would be pitching ideas to magazines and newspapers. Also, don't fall for that BS that "we'll provide you with plenty of exposure" but at this time we are unable to pay. A profit making magazine that is unable to pay is full of it. Always get paid for your work. In the near future I'm doing a couple of projects. It costs money to live and to travel and to pay the expenses (food, lodging, bribes, etc.)...If I don't earn money, I can't do the projects, simple as that.