Don’t Be Backwards in Asking for a Higher Rate of Pay

Starting out as a novice writer holds enough obstacles, so much so that I was happy to accept almost any writing project no matter what the pay. That soon changed as the compliments started coming in and I realised that actually clients were being sincere. Initially my clients were Americans and you can never be quite sure that they are being wholly honest with you or are they just saying nice things because they think it will “motivate” you?

I understand that actually they were very sincere, they meant the compliments not because they wanted to motivate me but because they wanted to keep me sweet so they could use my writing services in the future. I couldn’t understand why that would be as I’m no writer. A greater understanding of the worldwide writing market soon started to put things into perspective.

There are two great advantages I have over the bulk of my competition, the first is I write and speak English as a native and the second is that I am organised and stick to deadlines. Note I have said nothing about delivering great work, in my experience it helps, but you don’t need to deliver great work just delivering a reasonable standard of English and on time will put you ahead of 95% of the competition.

Very quickly I learned that I can charge more for my writing efforts. Initially I thought I had fallen on my feet when I was offered a long term writing deal paying me $10 per 1,000 words. Now I’m paid $20 - $25 per 1,000 on average and given I can produce 10,000 - 15,000 words a day you can do the sums to work out my earnings at the moment.

This dramatic increase in my rate has happened quite recently, since the start of the year.

How have I managed to do this?

Quite simply by being very hard about dismissing projects that are below my pay level and holding out on projects for a good rate.

Last week I bid on a project to provide web content for an existing website that is being revamped. I was pretty clear and comprehensive as to what I could provide and offered myself at the rate of $25 per 1,000 words, the first time I’d pitched that high. I was surprised when I received an email from the site owner asking for a chat and we closed the deal - at $250 per 10,000 words.

My competition were bidding far less but the site owner wanted quality for the e-commerce aspect of the site from which he is already earning thousands of dollars a week. From a business point of view it made no sense to skimp on a few dollars an hour for good quality content that will help him make even more money.

My point is, that once you have lost your writers virginity don’t be afraid to look for better pay. The market you are in is not saturated and your competition for the most part is not very high. English is the lingua franca of the business web and there are a huge number of businesses that require English content delivered on time - you don’t have to produce great work, just English and on time.

Delivering great work helps your reputation though !

Check out Writers Help at Supaproofread for more tips on getting the most out of your writing

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Writing for profit is a serious business

I’ve learned by experience that when I’m in writing mode there are certain things that have to be done.

1. Go to my quiet room;

2. Turn off the TV and music so there are no distractions;

3. Have a cup of Earl Grey;

4. Take a cigarette break every hour for a few minutes and rest my eyes; and

5. Write for no more than 8 hours a day unless there is an urgent deadline to be met.

These are my little rules and I follow them very closely. Forming a routine will help you become organised and disciplined in your approach to writing for profit. Bear in mind, this is work and you are getting paid for what you produce so a sense of pride and diligence in delivering quality is essential. For some, the creative juices will not start flowing unless you are working at night or you may have your own idiosyncrasies that need to be followed. Whatever you have to do to put yourself into writing mode is fine, but managing your time will be essential no matter where, when and how you write.

There are two things that I recommend any aspiring professional writer to invest in. First, buy a diary and preferably the large A4 kind with a page a day. Use this to plot out your day and your week as well as booking time slots when you are going to be writing. Be specific in allocating a project to each time slot, but also leave time slots for prospecting new business as well as some margin for jobs that come in unexpectedly, or for when a project overruns. This will help you forecast turnaround times to your potential clients when you are bidding for work. The deadline is king in the commercial writing industry and breaking them is taboo, unless you are not concerned about keeping clients who will quickly lose interest in using your services.

The second investment is a Skype headset and download of free Skype software which acts as a free telephone service. The headset will set you back about £10 - £20 from any computer shop, but after that initial cost it will give you the ability to speak to anyone else who uses Skype absolutely free. The ability to talk to your clients, especially when trying to close business, is a great advantage that you will have over prospecting writers who are simply relying upon email and forum message boards to make their sales pitch. Using Skype to verbally communicate is also invaluable when you are dealing with larger projects and need to keep your principal updated or throw queries at them.

When I am preparing a project, the research takes the bulk of my time as a general rule. Writing up the research in the format specified by my client takes rather less time than the research unless it is a topic I am already familiar with. Generally, I try to leave the completed article for a day or so and then return to it for proofreading, unless there is an urgent deadline to be met. If you attempt to proof read your article immediately after you have written it you will tend to focus on the content rather than the grammar and punctuation. Leaving some time between writing and proofing allows your brain to settle down and be able to concentrate on these features of your work which are just as important as the content.

As a father with several young children running around the house, dealing with interruptions is something I have had to come to terms with. Especially now with the summer holidays, dealing with the patter of not so tiny feet and sorting out the sibling squabbles is part and parcel of my working day. My family know that when dad is in his quiet room he is working and that means no disturbance. If like me, you are working from your home computer, then ensuring that your family understand that this is work, and breaking your concentration is not on, the sooner you are going to be able to be productive. A break in your concentration, even for a brief moment, can lose you much valuable time as you have to return to your train of thought and get back into the flow of your work.

To be effective and productive, no matter what you are writing on, you need to manage three things properly; your time, your surroundings and yourself.

Learn how to become an effective and productive professional writer at Supaproofread

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There’s an interesting project that is happening on October 15th of this year. Blog Action Day is attracting alot of attention throughout the blog world after its announcement of the launch two days ago.

So what’s it all about? Well, it’s pretty simple really, bloggers from around the world place a post in their blog on the 15th of October this year. It’s going to be an annual event on a different topic each year, with this year’s topic being on the ‘environment’ - there’ll no doubt be many global perspectives!

I’ve signed up the Supaproofread blog and I trust Supa blog readers will be interested in reading about this post in October.

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Know Your Audience

The majority of my work targets an American audience and that means Standard English has to blow this particular pop stand. When I take on a piece of work I always ask for the language to be used is specified. If the piece is for British, European or Australasian consumption then my Mother Tongue is used, however if the work is for a North American audience then you need to be able to Americanize your spellings.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned for writing for American readers; Supaproofread have put together a short writing tip on the differences between British American English wording and spellings.

You can of course simply avoid work that requires US English but to do so will wipe out a huge source of paid projects for you. US service buyers are also a lot easier to please than their British counterparts. The Americans like short sentences. They also do not like a comma, placed in the middle of the sentence.

One line paragraphs are perfectly acceptable.

If you are looking to be funny and far out just place a few exclamation marks at the end of your sentence!!!!!!

Dealing with the slight differences in spelling is simply achieved by turning your spell checker to the US English setting. In time you will pick up the differences in spelling - humor versus humour, color versus colour, aluminum versus aluminium and so on. Be very careful with a spellchecker as it will not identify all of your errs.

Writing for a British readership usually requires that you avoid the excessive use of hyperbole as it is quite literally the kiss of death. For an American audience it appears to be a case of the more the better. American audiences are far more at home with the outlandish than we are in the UK. They are also far more direct in approach when it comes to marketing copy so “Buy this cream and live 10 years more!” as a sales approach is common while a British audience would not give the copy the time of day.

American service buyers are also further down the marketing road when it comes to using keywords and key phrases in their content. Keywords and key phrases are those terms that are used by search engines in popular searches and in order to ensure that a web page is going to be highly ranked by a search engine it must be optimised (or optimized) for that keyword. This breaks into an area of content preparation that forms part of what is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. SEO is a term you will hear a lot when writing copy for the web and you will frequently be asked to include a keyword or phrase a number of times in the article you are to prepare.

For me personally, learning a little about SEO at an early stage of my writing career opened a lot of doors to paid writing projects which were SEO based. Typically, a project that is SEO based will ask that you use a keyword, say “MUSIC” and you will have to include it in the title, the first sentence of the first paragraph, a further three or four times in the article body and again in the last line of the last paragraph. It is not difficult to achieve with a little thought and practice (or practise) and writing SEO copy tends to command a small premium. SEO is a very broad subject and not for consideration here, but I would strongly recommend that you read about it on Wikipedia here.

For a host of services that will help you deliver clearer and better content take some time to look at our main site’s resources section

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