Advice for beginners

[ibenia]

Thanks for the information.

[Barry_Walls]

Hi all

I have experience in this area from many angles. I have written myself (I'm pretty poor at it), I coach others in the business end of writing online for a living and I have spent a A LOT of money on sites like elance and guru.com for my web business, so I know what bidders need to do to get work.

Here is my advice to newbie writers.

1. Realize that getting work is a numbers game.
2. If you take longer than 20 minutes to write an article, you are costing yourself money. Either you aren't as efficient as you could be or your research time is costing you money.
3. If you bid at $5 per article, thats what you will get paid.
4. If you bid at $10 per article, you will win less bids, but you will win some.
5. when you see someone trying to hire a writer for $2 an article, look at their history. Either they are new or they have a low rate of awarding work.
6. Getting enough work is easy with the right strategies.
7. There are multiple sweet spots in writing. These can be leveraged so that you can concentrate on where you earn the most money to ramp up your earning rate.
8. Specialists get paid more than generalists. Rather than bidding for jobs outside your circle of competence, you will earn much more in the long run by casting your net wider.
9. Your standard writing rate should be $2 per 100 words....which is equal to $60 per hour once you get established, experienced and efficient.
10. You can earn $1,000 per day from writing.


Hope this helps.

All the best

Barry

[WriteOn]

I suspect you've overdosed on the Blarney Stone ;-)

[Barry_Walls]

Originally Posted by WriteOn

I suspect you've overdosed on the Blarney Stone ;-)

If theres something you're unsure of or if you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer them for you.

[wah0mer]

20 minutes to write a how-many-word article?

[Barry_Walls]

I'm probably a bad example. Most of my students write 500 words in 20 minutes.

I do 500 words in about 10 minutes...start to finish.

[redcat444]

10 minutes, including research? Or just writing it after the research is done?

[Barry_Walls]

Originally Posted by redcat444

10 minutes, including research? Or just writing it after the research is done?

After a while, if you consciously work in specific niches, you really don't need to do any research.

Being a specialist allows you to do far more articles because your research time is almost non existent.

Also, specialising allows you to comfortably increase your rates to weed out your bottom buyers as your pipeline fills and your marketing pushes new, better buyers into your funnell.

You could call it a double whammy, but its really more like a quadruple whammy considering the exponential lift in earnings.

For example, I play quite a bit of mid/high stakes no limit holdem online poker. I know this niche backwards. The writing is technically difficult for a writer to research and be taken seriously by good players. Its often situational and opponent dependent. A real and deep knowledge of the game is required. I charge $30 per article and do one in about 10 minutes.

I also write about macro economic theory and trends and charge $25 an article....less than 10 minutes.

But ask me to write an article about forex trading and I'd struggle to do it, so I fill my diary with work that I know well instead, since I can't charge enough for a forex article to offset the extra time taken to do it.

If you don't know your subject, you're stuck and $10 an article
and 20 minutes of research time with 6 or 8 minutes of writing time. Thats @$20 an hour compared to $180 per hour (I never earn this amount since its nearly impossible for me to work at 100% efficiency) but $150 is doable with poker articles and over $100 with business/economics articles.

If you're thinking...."I don't know any area that well", you can get to know it by writing about it. You might start off at $20 per hour, but soon, you'll increase this as your rates increase and you research time falls with experience and accumulated knowledge.

Hope that helps.

All the best

Barry

[melle]

So Barry, share your secrets about where you sell your articles?

I could write a lot in health and get paid a lot more per article if I knew where the better markets were - most of the time I get paid around $5

Also - for recommendations on making money by monetizing your own website, would you recommend sales of products or what? I mean I know about google adsense and all that but maybe I am dumb and it just doesn't seem that easy.

[Barry_Walls]

I personally think $5 is too low unless its your first few jobs to get some recognition. $10 per 500 words is the minimum after that. These $2 per article buyers think they're doing you a favour giving you the work...forget that. Then they wonder why people hand them rewritten PLR. What do they expect for $2?

Many people look at sites like elance and see a few people working for $2 per 500 words and think "Everyone is like this"...but they aren't...only some are.

As for Adsense, a friend on mine makes a massive online income and he can hardly make any money from adsense. Sure, he might get 500 clicks a day at $0.03...but thats $15 a day. Whats the point? I never looked at it because I trust him to know what hes talking about.