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Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Freelancing Frustrations: 1st Wed IWSG

It's the 1st Wed. of the month so time for the Insecure Writers Support Group (ISWG) blog hop monthly post. Good thing I'm on "F" because I'm feeling soooooo frustrated with freelancing lately. Although I've made some significant accomplishments with getting paid for writing articles, working through the frustrations seems to be where most of my energy goes.

Frustrations:

  • Not Earning Enough Dough (NEED): As of today, I'm like $15 away from earning $600 from my Yahoo! Contributor Network (YCN) articles. Most of that sum is from upfront payments and $20 or so is from page view earnings. For 6 months on the gig with 61 published articles, that's almost $100 per month for 10 articles per month and almost $10 per article average earnings.

    It's a decent start, but I've gotta do a whole lot better! Like 10x per month better. Do I pick up my article output to 100 per month and if so, should that be with YCN only or should I try to find an additional paid article writing outlet?

  • Topics that Work and Earn Enough Takehome $wag (TWEET$): Thinking up topics to write about, that  YCN will approve and pay upfront for is my biggest challenge. And, the content has to be something original. Then it has to be "searchable" enough - and that's still a thorn in my side with the Finance editors (see previous post). 

So NEED and TWEET$ are my 2 main Freelancing Frustrations. I'll be pondering my options to pick up the pace this month. I'm sure I won't do 100 articles this month, but I'll try to pick it up to like 2x more each month. So the plan is to get 20 articles published in June, whether all at YCN or not is tbd. I'm also looking for popular search engine topics. 


As always, comments and suggestions would be most wonderful!

(btw: if you're a fiction writer from IWSG, or elsewhere for that matter, YCN does have a "
Creative Writing" section if ya didn't know that already. I don't think they pay upfronts, but it's a way to get published and earn page view performance payments too. One of the poets and short story writers just got over 100K page views and earned a "Top 100" badge). I've seen open assignments for poetry, flash fiction, short stories and the like in the assignment desk, so there's opportunities there if you're interested)

5 comments:

  1. A hundred articles a month? That boggles my mind.

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    1. LoL - I know, but there are people on there that can crank out 10 articles a day, for 5 days a week, so it's apparently possible.

      But I'm too slow of an article writer to get that productive just yet, but I think upping it to 20 for this month is reasonable - hope so anyway!

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  2. Whew, that's a lot of writing!

    As for topics to write about... I don't know if you ever write about state politics instead of national, but my husband is running for a seat in the Michigan State House - he's interested in implementing some pretty big changes, but he's never run before and so doesn't have much of a voice in the media. He has some cool and (I think) groundbreaking ideas about campaign financing if that's anything you're interested in. If not, NO BIG DEAL - I'll still continue to stalk you for the other great stuff you write about. :)

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    1. Hey robyn!

      I wish I could, but my new politics assignment is limited to "the presidential election in swing states" topics, so the state level is not an option - at least not for now.

      But there might be another contributor with a general politics assignment that could submit an article about your hubby - I'll be happy to ask if there is and if so, if they'd be interested.

      Is he running in a primary or is that over with already? I'd think running for office for the 1st time would be quite an interesting experience!

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    2. That would be great - thank you! He is running in a primary, and the vote is Aug 7 for that. It really is fascinating, for both of us! There's a learning curve, for sure, but it's been a lot of fun and feels good to do something we're passionate about. :)

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