Daily Writing Jobs

As a budding freelance writer, you likely wonder what the average pay rate is for certain types of writing — article writing, SEO copywriting, website copy writing, eBook writing, and even blogging. Since blogging gigs is the topic of this post, I’ll delve a little bit into the going rates for blog post writing, and why the bulk of these writing projects are priced as they are.

Predominantly, you’re going to find that blog writing gigs don’t pay very well. From what I see of the market, if you want to have great chance of earning $10 per post or more, you’re going to have to have your own website where you offer your writing services, and a client base that is not made up of the average crowd of blog content buyers.

There are some real problems that face blog writing gigs, though, especially for new writers:

1. A large percentage of blog writing gigs require that you already have an established blog yourself. In other words, quite a few of these gigs require you to post content on your own blog.
2. Many times, you’ll have to do extra work for blogging jobs — meaning that you’ll not only have to write the blog post, but you’ll have to post it on your clients blog(s), if they don’t request that you post their work on your own blog.
3. In the majority of cases, by taking on a blogging job means that you must be familiar with SEO copywriting. However, as most website owners are exceptionally ignorant, and trust the false SEO advice that prevails online, they probably want you to write content using a pre-determined keyword a bunch of times, not true SEO Copywriting. While repeating a keyword phrase within content is not difficult in the least, you still must know how to do it without messing up the readability of the content.

It’s not likely that you’re going to find blog post writing jobs that require a conversational tone, and no additional work, though, they are out there.

So, even with all of this additional work that you’re likely going to need to preform, blog writing gigs generally do not pay well, especially for new-to-the-game freelance writers. Realistically, you’re probably going to earn between $3 per blog post to $6 per blog post, depending on the client and the length of the content that they need. However, as blog content is well-known for being shorter than for-the-web articles, you probably won’t have to write out 400 words — in fact, 250-350 words is generally the max word count that many of these blog owners are looking for.

In my opinion, the reason that these rates are so low are as follows:

1. There are so many freelance writers online undercutting each others’ prices, that the prices for writing services have dropped in certain markets.
2. Blog post writing is quite easy, and arguably easier than writing a 400-word article.

I’m going to stretch my hypothesis a bit further here by saying that the lower rates also have to do with the lowered word count, both directly (as mentioned above), and indirectly. See, when you have non-native English speaking writers, you can usually tell with a longer article — even at 350-500 words, it can become very apparent. However, with 200-word “blurbs”, not really articles, there is a chance that a mediocre, non-native English speaking writer may be able to adequately perform these low-word count jobs. And, because they might charge $0.50 – $1.00 for 200 words, this can really drive the prices down in the low-to-mid range markets. Another thought is that because the prices are so low, buyers are willing to spend the $0.50 – $1 and spend 30 seconds tweaking the content.

These are really opinions on my part, but I see the trends — blog post writing, in the biggest market for it, predominantly pays $3 – $6 per post. It’s not something that you can get rich on, but with the right gig, you can make a few bucks to tide you over until you find something that pays better.

If you want to earn more money writing, and want to learn how to find a ton of freelance writing jobs, check out the Daily Writing Jobs Membership. I offer a getting started guide for new writers, and updated writing job-finding guide, and a daily writing job desktop notification system (some features coming in June, 2009).