I bet you have said this out loud (or at least thought it): “It is not about writing fees or money, for me writing is about doing what I love!” That sentiment is all well and good, but at the end of the day passion isn’t going to put food on the table for you and your family, nor is it going to help you pay the rent (and if you are charging “love money”, rent is all you will be paying, because good luck buying a house!).

You have to remember that freelance writing is a business, although it is a form of art as well. This is particularly true when it comes to writing for the Internet for a living: most clients are not looking for you to write inspiring or humorous stories, they want content to help them compete with other sites for informational purposes or for Search Engine Optimization purposes (Whoops! If you haven’t heard that term before, we have the right section for you! Understanding SEO is a great way to land clients and show them you know what you’re about!), or for both.

Nothing will put you in a more business and less artistic frame of mind than writing a couple dozen articles on the advantages of buying a condominium in Toronto, and if you haven’t established a good criterion for determining your writing fees, you will certainly wish you had!

The Writer’s Market is a web site based on surveys completed by freelance writers all over the world, though mostly in the United States (don’t fret, the US market is a pretty good measuring stick for writers from developed, English speaking countries all over the world). You will find a wealth of information on the site, including how much the average freelance writer can expect to earn (usually between $35,000 and $50,000 per year) and a great break down of what individuals are charging for specific jobs.

That’s great for the brick and mortar freelance market, but how does one go about establishing writing fees for an Internet based writing business? This site wouldn’t be very helpful to you if I didn’t offer some recommendations in this area, so here are some of the ways that I have determined writing fees over the course of my career.

Charge low to build high.

On bidding sites particularly, you will find that there are “tiers” when it comes to potential clients. Some buyers are only looking for a lot of material to be banged out quickly, at the least possible cost. Higher paying clients want to see positive feedback and some quality samples before they take you on for a job. People brand new to the bidding market should probably set their great expectations aside for a while. My first couple of jobs paid $5 per article; not a lot, but I did them well and got great feedback, and within four months I was able to triple the rate, and still get jobs.

How quickly can you write?

One of the advantages I have is that I am able to process information and write it down very quickly. Even writing at $5 per article I was able to have a per hour wage that was competitive with the entry level jobs I might find around town.

Compare hourly rates based on your fees with those you could expect in a non-writing job.

I alluded to this above, and I will spell it out here. It is of no use charging low writing fees if you are making less than you could at another job. The jobs I was getting paid $5 per article for were 400 words or less, and I could complete between 3 and 6 of them in an hour. That translated to an hourly rate of $15-$30 (US, and in Canada at the time our dollar was about 1.10 on the exchange rate). This was either on par or double what I could expect at another job, so I was pretty happy with the writing fees I was charging.

Consider what you are writing about.

Now, if I was writing a 1000 word piece which compared recreational vehicles (that came later), I would not have been too happy with the writing fees I was charging. That topic would have taken me an hour or two to research and write, resulting in a very low hourly wage.

Once you get established, raise your rates!

I knew that $5 per article was coming in pretty low, and that eventually if I wanted to make a real living I would have to raise my rates. I couldn’t write four articles an hour for the rest of my life, and even more importantly, I found that the work was not filling a forty hour work week. After I had built up a solid reputation, I was able to raise my rates, and today I charge between $15 and $25 for a 500 word piece. Now a lot of writers used to magazine and newspaper writing may (or may not, I have never been able to get a straight answer on their writing fees out of them) scoff at even the higher fees I mentioned above, but I think the key it to be happy about them within yourself. At even $15 per piece, I am making an hourly wage that is equivalent to my wife, who is a Registered Nurse. It’s a wage that I am happy with, and one that my clients are willing to pay for the work that I put in.

People starting out on their freelance writing career might think the “ freelance writers wanted “ jobs hard to find. Landing those first few jobs can be really tough, even when it comes to bidding on Internet jobs for various site developers. One of the keys to landing Internet writing jobs is to understand that the advice of freelance writers is wanted. Armed with just the right information, you can present yourself as an expert when it comes to what people are looking for, and succeeding with, when they write for the Internet.

In this article, we are going to look at some ways in which you can sell yourself and your advice to a client or a potential client. It’s about knowledge and about the right presentation, and I have had some experience with both. Here is what I have learned.

A basic understanding of SEO can really get you in the door.

We develop a better understanding of search engine optimization in another section of this site, and I really can’t stress enough how much site developers love to work with a freelance writer who understands this web strategy. A client of mine, a web site developer herself, continually stresses the importance of SEO and sound marketing practices. Letting potential clients know that you have a working knowledge of this proven strategy will mean you are in the top tier of freelance writers wanted for their services.

Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.

Please, please understand what you are talking about before you make your SEO pitch. One of the best moves I ever made was purchasing Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. It really helped me gain an understanding of what the search engines were all about, and as a result I was not only able to land jobs, but also to point out to various clients areas in which they could improve. The quality of work combined with the extra help solidified many working relationships, and set up recurring sources of income, for me.

Don’t come off as a know it all!

If there is one thing that will send you to the bottom of the list of freelance writers wanted for their services, it’s acting like you know everything. You might know a great deal more than your client about the material or even developing a web site, but you have to remember that they have already decided on a method that they think will work for them. Never just come out and say what you think; couch your advice in questions and so on. It seems a little bit weird, but pride is a big factor when it comes to freelance writing jobs, and you have to be careful not to offend.

If a client asks for help, give it.

“What do you think?” This is my favorite question from a client, as they are deliberately soliciting my advice. I have a lot of great ideas and I tend not to offer an opinion unless I know what I am talking about (unless of course you happen to be my wife, but that’s a different story), so when this question gets asked the flood gates will open. I don’t expect all clients who ask this to use all my suggestions, but the ensuing discussion almost always helps both of us to further our knowledge of the Internet, web sites, writing, the reader, and most importantly our own working relationship.

Freelance Writers Wanted ads can be found easily. But the ask for more than just writing skills. It is the advice of freelance writers that is wanted, but you have to know how to deliver it. Moreover, you have to have the knowledge to back your statements up. If you are just blowing smoke at your client, they will eventually realize it, and then that is a client lost, possibly forever.

One of the main arguments that some writers will pose against landing freelance writing assignments on a bid site is that the competition is simply too steep. I have to say that part of the reason why I disagree with this theory is that really, competition is fierce in the freelance writing world in general, whether we are talking brick and mortar or online writing opportunities. In this article, I am going to use some information from clients past and present and sketch a bit of an outline on what people with freelance writing jobs are looking for in the writer that they hire.

Disclaimer: If you’ve read a few articles on this site you know that I hate ambiguity, unfortunately ghost writing assignments mean that most of the time you have to keep everything confidential, so I can’t give the names of the clients who provided this information to me.

Good Feedback

Almost every bidding site will have a feedback section where your former clients will rate your services. This is yet another complaint that many writers who claim to shun these sites have against the whole process, and again their point is accurate, but only carried so far. The bidding sites are notoriously unhelpful when you get a difficult client, who may actually be a competitor looking to screw over a better business. Still, if you are reliable, most of your feedback will be positive.

And that’s important, because 9 times out of 10 the feedback is the first thing that your potential clients will be looking at.

Samples

It is always a good idea to attach samples to your bid, even when they are not asked for. Make sure that they are as relevant as possible, and go over them two or ten times to get rid of any spelling or grammar errors; they can be hard to pick up but they will make a difference!

Price

Price will often make a difference in whether or not you get picked for a freelance writing assignment, but not always in the way a person who hasn’t used a bidding site expects. Some buyer – and most of mine are in this group – see a bid that is too low as reflecting poor quality, and they won’t pick that kind of bidder.

Portfolio

Finally, the way your portfolio is presented will also make a difference in whether or not your bid is picked. All bidding sites provide the opportunity for you to create a portfolio, and you need to take advantage of it and create the most straightforward profile that you possibly can.

I received a phone call from the United Kingdom a while ago, from a web site developer who had seen my portfolio on a site and had shortlisted me for his freelance writing assignments. One of the specific things that stood out about me in his mind was that I didn’t bother with some of the “sap” that many writers think will sell “writing is my life”, and so on. Remember, you’re setting up a business, and you need to think professionally not artistically!

In various articles on this site, I’ve talked about ways in which you can find freelance jobs writing online. Most of the time I am talking about landing freelance work on bidding sites, where I make the bulk of my money.

In another article I outlined some specific client feedback I have received on those sites as to why they selected my bid over others; in this article I will use the same approach but in regards to some of the other ways I have landed online writing jobs.

The Cold Call

This is actually the freelance job finding technique that I hate the most. I don’t like to submit my name to anyone who has the chance to reject me and I really, really hate callbacks when I haven’t heard from someone. It feels pushy.

Still, according to at least two repeat clients, persistence paid off. Every time I come across a site on the web that has fairly obvious mistakes in spelling and grammar, or just suffers from poor writing in general, I look for the “Contact Us” button and explain in a letter what it is I do and how much experience I have.

If editing is the problem, I point out the errors I noticed. Most of the time I don’t hear back, but I do write down the sites and check back. If the fresh content still contains a lot of errors, I try again, and like I said, it has worked twice and that means two recurring clients (of course my success rate is still probably around 1% here but hey, work is work!).

The Application

Slightly better than the cold call approach is replying to jobs which advertise that they need someone for freelance jobs writing. There are lots of sites out there, particularly SEO exerts and web site developing companies, that are looking for writers to create content for their clients.

They can be found using services such as Craig’s List and other online classifieds, even through a search on one of the big engines.

Once you do find a site that is looking for writers to fill freelance jobs writing positions, the process becomes a lot like applying for a job fresh off the street.

Make up a good CV that includes your vital information and your years of experience, and remember to include your experience in the area. Be careful about who you include as references; the last thing you want as a freelancer is to be seen as competition or providing competition with material!

Once you send in your application, make sure to write the email address down, just like with a cold call. If you don’t hear back within five business days, contact the company again to see where the hiring process stands.

I think that both of these methods are a lot more work for a lot less in return than using bidding sites. Sometimes it can be a lot like hollering down a well, and it’s pretty lonely just hearing that echo.

Still, until you have a secure income every month with steady freelance jobs writing, you should take advantage of every opportunity possible.

Part of the reason for the existence of this website is to show you how to write successfully online, help you to know what kind of freelance jobs are available, and where those freelance jobs are available. After all, it can be pretty hard to make any money at a freelance writing career without any writing assignments!

Finding Online Writing Jobs

In this section, we will talk about where you can find an online writing job, or many freelance jobs writing on the Internet. If you have just started out you may find it hard to believe how many freelance writers are wanted, but in fact freelance writing jobs are available all over the web, you just need to know where to look for them.

Writing Fees

Another important aspect in learning how to write for the Internet, and how to make decent money through freelance writing assignments, is understanding how to establish your writing fees.

The main source of my income is through bidding sites, and that means I walk a fine line between bidding low enough to get the job, and high enough to make the job worthwhile. Setting writing fees will depend on how fast you are as a writer, how much you want to get (or think you will enjoy) a specific online writing job, and whether or not you have worked with a certain client before.

What are Clients looking for?

One of the exciting parts of this section that I am really looking forward to is sharing with you some in depth details of what it is that different companies on the Internet are looking for when they have freelance writing jobs available.

I have worked with dozens of different clients in the two years I have been writing for the Internet, most of them very steady, and am planning on interviewing them to see what exactly it is they are looking for when they choose a bidder.

It’s not always expertise within a certain area either; that’s part of what makes an online writing job so much fun. I’ve written on an incredibly diverse range of topics, from weddings to real estate to recreational vehicles, and in the process I have attained a level of knowledge that allows me to place higher bids on similar topics in the future.

The Bottom Line: Nurturing Relationships

Above all, making money through freelance writing assignments online is about establishing and retaining a great relationship with the people who hire you for freelance job writing. In this section we will be stressing the relationship with the client; how to deal with them, making sure that all the requirements of the job are understood, and keeping the lines of communication clear.

I have made my fair share of mistakes in the area, mistakes that have cost me money both in the short and long term. I think that anyone could benefit from both my positive and negative experiences in this area!

The primary way in which I find online writing jobs has been until recently through bidding sites. These sites are a good way to start out, but they do have some significant shortcomings, not the least of which is the competition that you will find.

In this article we will take a look at Guru.com, a site I have used a couple of times. As always if you have had experience on this site, whether similar to my own or different, we would love to hear from you!

Usability

Guru is by far one of the most complicated bidding sites I have come across, although in most cases it is hard to see how the extra work helps one land more clients.

I mean, how many profiles does one person or company really need? And they should be a lot easier to start up as well; in one case the onsite help described clicking on a link to upload samples, and the link itself was dead. Contacting the Guru.com staff was no help, but that was par for the course as we will see in a bit.

Fees

The fees that Guru.com charges are a little bit ridiculous, probably because for the most part the resources of the site are concentrated on the tech jobs and not on the writing end of things (this is actually a big problem with Guru.com’s main competitor, Elance.com, as well).

While Guru.com does say that they provide bidding on some jobs for free, the reality is that these jobs are incredibly hard to find in fact, I have never seen one!

Client Potential and Competition

Guru.com also tends to attract online writing jobs that pay less than anywhere else. I don’t know if it is because their marketing campaign is done less enthusiastically than Elance’s, but the average price paid per article on Guru is about one third that of Elance.

In addition, many of the lower end buyers that are found on Elance will also post projects on Guru, and many of the same writing companies can be found on both sites to boot.

Feedback fairness and comprehension

As on Elance.com, Guru does not provide a very clear feedback process for buyers, and that means fairly subjective feedback for your business. What’s worse, Guru staff takes no interest in determining the fairness of feedback left for their paying providers, which means that one bad review can lead to a lot of lost business, most of the time very undeserved.

All in all, I would recommend avoiding Guru.com as a source of work. The site has all the failings of Elance, but without any kind of free service and higher prices to boot (now that Elance.com has reduced theirs).

In addition, the high paying jobs that you hope for as a beginner just aren’t there, and when they are landing them is much more difficult.

As a buyer I realize that the feedback system is not very useful on a qualitative level. A personality clash or miscommunication can easily to results below expectations.Instead I pay more attention to the amount of feedback someone has received for their writing jobs online.  I might read a few comments, and if there are positive among them, I am happy. and move to the next step of inviting more details to see how people react to my questions. That is what I base my decisions on when awarding writing jobs online.

When I started looking for writing jobs online, I could not find any solid information about what to expect and how to go about it.

I have since had a lot of success using bidding sites to find writing jobs online. In under two years I have managed to grow a business to around $50,000 per year. Most sources I have seen state that as the high end of the average freelance writer’s pay scale. (Now I am happy with that, but you might think it seems like small change. There are freelancers who earn yearly wages in the six figure range, but hey, it hasn’t even been two years yet and I am still hopeful).

I wasn’t really optimistic about making even this amount back when I started. A lot of the writing jobs online were incredibly low paying, many through individuals who were unreliable. It was a lot of work for not much in exchange. That all changed the day I discovered www.Elance.com. Now I know that that line sounds like the start of a glowing testimonial trying to convince you to use the site, but it isn’t. I assure you I have many issues with Elance (which will be apparent shortly), but in the end it works for what I need to do, which is make money from home by writing for a living.

For organization’s sake, I have decided to break the reviews I write on different online bidding sites down into different categories. I am going to avoid assigning a “value” to sections on a site, simply because I think that the words should be able to determine what is good about a site and what you need to watch out for. So let’s get started!

What you can expect to pay

Elance is a site where you must pay in order to get a “Select” membership. Ostensibly the Select membership allows you to bid on jobs that are of higher value than the others, and I have found that in most cases this happens to be true.

I have paid for the Select Membership. My most lucrative contracts (and best clients too) have come in the Select category. You don’t have to be a Select member to bid on other jobs, though, so if the idea of paying rankles you, then you can go for the other jobs, although you won’t have a feedback section, which allows you to gain credence in your bids.

Aside from that monthly fee, Elance deducts a percentage of the fee paid to you on every project by a client. This part of the pay structure is pretty annoying, because you end up coughing up close to 8% of the money you make on every project. If it’s a smaller project, you can end up paying even more, because Elance demands at least $10 off of every single project.

What you can expect in return

We have already kind of touched on what you can expect in return for signing up on the Elance site: access to a lot of writing jobs online. There are plenty of buyers who use Elance, with dozens of writing projects being posted every day.

Where Elance really fails is in their service to the people who are paying their fees. The site is free for people posting projects, thus it is only bidders who are contributing to the site’s financial well being. Elance seems to think that the opportunity to make money is thanks enough, and are very neglectful or downright rude when a bidder needs help with a client. Their negotiation process is so convoluted as to be useless, and as we will see in the next part of this article the feedback program is a bit of a mess.

Feedback program

Elance states that feedback is the backbone of their system, and this could not be stating the truth more clearly. Writing jobs online, landing them and continuing to get more, depend on good feedback from past clients. Most of the time if you do a good job, there is no issue with this, but all the feedback is opinion, and although Elance provides guidelines as to what the feedback categories mean, buyers usually don’t take the time to read it.

A good example of this is in the “Project Cost” section. Clients rate a provider on a scale of 1-5 according to criteria set out by Elance. The Cost section states that this feedback is based on “the client’s ability to complete the project within the stated cost of the bid”. I have not once asked a client for more money than I bid for, even when the project turned out to be more time consuming than I had thought. Still, several clients seem to think that this section refers to cost, period. If they think I charged too much, they will deduct points. I have brought this up with Elance, but they say that it really doesn’t matter what the criteria states, feedback is the opinion of the buyer.

The upshot is, you can end up with a score that doesn’t always give an accurate reflection of the job. Elance will not remove feedback unless ordered to by a court, and my guess is that they are fully cognizant of the fact that not a lot of freelancers can afford to retain a lawyer and foot the bill even when they are justified in their complaints. It’s a big weakness in the Elance system, because everyone runs into a client at some point that just cannot be pleased within reason.

The quality of the clients

You will find a great range of projects and topics on the Elance site when it comes to freelance writing jobs online, from books to press releases to reviews, articles, and everything in between. Moreover, these are on virtually every topic under the sun, so if you like to learn and earn you’re in luck, and the more diverse your knowledge base, the better.

Of course, the range of buyers runs from those with ridiculously low expectations in the area of pay to the more reasonable. Whenever freelancers are competing for writing jobs online, it will be hard to really command the prices that the jobs are truly worth, and that is in evidence on Elance. Still if you like working in bulk, there is good money to be made.

The competition

We kind of touched on this above, but it bears repeating: when you have a bunch of writers, or writing companies, competing for work, you are going to find a situation where the pay may not be as good as it should be. Elance, like other bidding sites, will take money from anywhere, no matter how well that individual or company does as a writer.

In addition, there is international competition on the Elance site. Keep in mind that when it comes to outsourcing, you have to compete with people living in countries where the average cost of living is much lower than the UK, Canada, the US, Australia, and so on (a bottle of Coke in India costs 15 cents. Justify that one!). As a result, they can afford to bid a third or less of what you need to earn on a given job. We talk about how to deal with competition in the form of poor or international writes in another section; the point here is to demonstrate that you will encounter this on Elance.

The upshot of it all

If there were a lot of options out there, I think that Elance would end up sinking. They charge very high prices for services that are not all that great and when it comes to dealing with issues their bidders have, they might as well be non existent; they are more or less just a processing company.

That being said, I certainly have no complaints about the number of writing jobs online that can be found on the site. If you are discerning in your bidding, and in your choice of clients, then your problems with Elance should be few. Sooner or later, though, everyone runs into a client who just can’t be satisfied, and it’s in these situations that the flaws of Elance are made very apparent.

Do you want to progress from writing to building a writing career? The purpose of this site is to help you to leave the every day grind of an office job and exercise your writing skills.

I want to guide you through the process of setting up your freelance business to make sure you succeed. Of course, one of the most important parts of making a writing career work is in finding jobs.

There are a lot of jobs for freelance writers out there, in fact with the Internet there are probably more freelance writing opportunities out there than ever before.

Using Bidding Sites

In this section, we are going to narrow the search for online freelance writing jobs right down to the area where I have had the most success, financially speaking: Internet sites where you bid to land certain jobs.

Most of the time the freelance writing job opportunities that you will find on these sites will involve writing for different web developers, and that actually takes an entirely different skill set than a traditional freelance writing job opportunity would call for (we cover a lot of the specifics in another section of the site).

It took me a while to really get the hang of Internet bidding sites; in order to land jobs and have a viable career with online freelance writing jobs you really have to know the ins and outs of the various bidding sites.

Some of the bidding sites attract online writing jobs that are much higher paying, with much better clients, than others. Even smaller sites (such as ifreelance.com or getafreelancer.com) can offer a surprising wealth of online freelance writing jobs, though, so I am going to try to use and review the best sites for you.

Which one to choose?

What I have found is that no site where you can find freelance writing job opportunities is perfect. In fact the two biggest sites that I have come across, Elance.com (see my Elance review) and Guru.com (see my Guru review), have some glaring weaknesses, particularly when it comes to mediation and the protection of the people who pay to bid on jobs. You’ll see what I mean when we get into the specifics about these sites a little bit more.

In the meantime, you should start out this section by reading the article entitled “Find Freelance Writing Jobs Online”. It gives a good overview of what you will need to do to start bringing in clients on bidding sites and what most of these sites have in common.

Once you know where to find these sites and what to look for, you will find that the money you have always wanted to make writing comes in fairly quickly. And if you know what you are doing, you will be making enough money to consider online writing a viable career in no time.

Ifreelance.com is another option where clients are posting freelance writing opportunities for bidding. This site which uses the same approach as bigger competitors such as Elance.com and Guru.com but is not quite as large as those two giants.

Price

Just like Elance and Guru, ifreeance.com has a structure wherein freelance writers can bid on freelance writing opportunities for free or within a certain pay structure. Unfortunately, just like Elance and Guru, the opportunities are a little bit thin on the ground in the free category in particular. You also have to suffer the lack of a feedback section or a good profile.

Fortunately, unlike the two big bullies on the block, ifreelance does not ask for nearly as much money from their providers. In fact the top membership cost is only $60 (US) a year, making it more than competitive in this aspect.

Clients and competition

Because ifreelance is not as big as some of the other bidding sites, it stands to reason that there are less jobs posted for individuals and writing companies. Moreover, there seems to be a lot of the same competition for jobs on this site as there is on other bidding sites.

You can also expect the average project on ifreelance.com to bid around $6 per 500 word article; definitely much lower than the average on Elance or Guru. Still, the fact that ifreelance charges less fees on a regular basis and takes no cut at all out of the fee of a project decreases the gap quite a bit.

Feedback and clarity

When it comes to setting up a profile, ifreeance.com really gets it right. You don’t have to go through a lot of steps, unlike Guru, for your profile to appear attractive and to get attention. Better still, everything is very user friendly and you won’t have to spend valuable writing time puzzling through the ins and outs of the site.

When it comes to feedback opportunities, ifreelance falls into the common trap of all three of the bidding sites I have reviewed here; there really is no balance and no appeal between the client feedback and the provider feedback.

Writers do get stiffed on this site (although it does not happen frequently) and when that happens not only is there no appeal process, but you are not allowed to warn your fellow writers via your feedback input on a client.

All in all, ifreeance.com is a pretty good site for writers who are looking to make a side income without a lot of hassle. The rates for membership are very reasonable, and it sure is nice not to have to write the first three articles in a project in order to pay additional site fees as you have to on Elance and Guru.