What is the going rate for freelance writing?
That's a question that is commonly asked by most people who are thinking about venturing into the world of freelance writing.
The answer however isn't quite as straightforward as you may have hoped.
What is Freelance Writing?
First, let's take a look at what freelance writing is. Freelance writing is where you write content (articles) for other people, blogs, or businesses. Essentially content that isn't for your own website, business or purposes.
Quality content is the lifeblood of any website, magazine, newspaper or newsletter. In order to scale up blogs and businesses, large amounts of content is usually required. Hence why businesses hire freelance writers to write content for them.
These blogs or businesses will provide a brief (outline) on the article / content peice that they require and it's then down to the freelance writer to research the topic, and write a quality article that fits the brief that has been provided.
What is the Going Rate?
This is the tricky part as there are various factors that help determine the rates that you can charge. Chargable rates can be per word, per 100 words, or per job.
Things that you need to consider are:
Each of those 4 factors can play a role in determining the chargable rate for your writing work.
If you have years of writing experience across various industries and have written content for notable clients, you can write for high end clients and charge more.
If you're writing for businesses within high-end industries, where their turnover and profits are high, you can expect to charge more.
If the subject matter is complex and lots of research time is required, you can charge more.
If your client needs written content quickly, you can charge more.
Starting Out as a Freelance Writer
If you're new to freelance writing and have no clients or opportunities it's a good idea to create a portfolio.
Businesses or potential clients will likely want to see examples of your writing work before hiring you for a writing project. Therefore, having examples to show them is vital if you're wanting to attract clients and get writing work.
One way to do this is to choose an industry that you'd like to write about and offer to write one or two articles for free. As no fee will need to be negotiated, it's a win win for the business that you're doing the writing for.
It's also a win win for you as you'll not only gain experience and have a writing peice for your portfolio. There's a possibility that this prospect will like your writing work and offer you paid writing jobs in the future.
Once you have a portfolio and have gained a little bit of experience writing for other websites and businesses (for free), you can then start charging for your writing services.
Freelance writing can start anywhere from $5 for a 500 word article, to hundreds of dollars. To get your feet wet as a freelance writer you can choose to pick up a few writing clients (or jobs) and offer a low-end fee of $5-8 dollars.
As you gain experience and happy clients, you can then start to increase your prices.
Think of this as a process. The free or 'low end fee' work that you're providing is a stepping stone to bigger and better writing projects that will pay you more. Like many things in life, you need to run before you walk.
The Biggest Problem Freelance Writers Face (and the Solution)
The biggest problem that all freelance writers face is 'research'. Being able to learn about a specific topic, obtain facts and information, and to have all of this at their finger tips whilst writing.
Our RewriterApp software has a fantastic topic research feature built-in that allows you to quickly gather hundreds, or even thousands of content snippets based on any keyword(s) that you enter into the software.
All of these content snippets are highly relevant to your subject and the software has build-in filter options allowing you to filter all of the content down to find the information and facts that you're looking for.
This is perfect for any topic, niche or industry and will provide you with all of the topical research you'll ever need for any writing project.
You can get access to this software for as little as $19. Get access to the oftware HERE.
To your writing success!
Andy Black
RewriterApp