$500 a week online - Doesn't sound hard

Depends what sort of word count they want I guess. But if you are talking a 'standard' 300-500 that is indeed very good money.

To charge $50 for one article is absolutely crazy and I don't know anyone who would pay that much.

I have seen people on this forum claim they would only pay $5 for a 500 word article.

On textbroker.com I can negotiate an excellent article for about $7-8 dollars. If you can make $50/article writing articles than all of us on these forums should stop our website businesses and become full time writers.

When you talk about offline businesses like Microsoft and Apple, let me fill you in on my experience with this. I have worked professionally as a software engineer for 10 years. First at Sony, then at Disney where I am now.

I work with technical documentation writers every day. We work with code and projects and have to make sure that all the new features and functionality is properly documented.

One of the individuals I work with has a Master's degree in English and has been doing technical writing for 30 years. He gets paid decent I am sure, but still not as much as software engineers.

You are stating that working as a writer you could make so much for Apple or Microsoft, let me ask this question then; Does the poster of this forum have professional training and the education to back up technical writing skills? If he does not, there is no way he is going to fit into the category of writers you are talking about at 'Apple or Microsoft.'

As a professional, yes, you can make great money writing. But becoming a professional writer takes years to get the sort of money that big companies pay out.

I have the utmost respect for writers because it requires a significant amount of time & work to create good content, but let's not water down what it really is.

No one online is going to ever pay $50 dollars for an article to be written, and if they are, tell me where as I am going to just write full time.

Just my 2 cents...

Good luck landing those gigs

Will

I get where you are coming from but if you don't have a Masters in English writing and a well established writing portfolio, you will have a hard time landing a writing job with any of these companies.

In theory, yes you can (and you should) make more than $5 an article but the Fortune 500 analogy is not a good one in this case.

Most of these companies pay staff writers a salary of $40k-$90k. That comes out to something like $19-$48 per hour. How long does it take you to write a 500 word article?

You aren't wrong necessarily, but to mention what big companies pay for writing is ridiculous. They hire agencies that pay copywriters to write what their internal copywriters don't. And in any event, it isn't the WRITING that is expensive. It is the client management that edits and adjusts endlessly... that is expensive.

Maybe $50 would sound less appealing if you knew it was possible to make $1000 for the same number of words?

There are magazines who surround their articles with high paying ads that are willing to pay those kinds of rates to a freelancer.

The trick is learning which magazines pay like that, who the editor is that you want to be pitching, what to pitch them, and how to pitch it so that they buy.

And then you have to actually write the article that you pitched, and do a good job of it.

It certainly isn't easy. But it's not impossible either.

Are you saying you're not enthusiastic about another "pay more for writers" thread? Shush.

Why? So you can slowly crawl your way up the ladder like you do in the corporate world?

The kind of clients and work you get for $5 is nothing like the clients and work you get at the higher end. The low end work doesn't even qualify you for high end work. You're gaining experience for the wrong thing, if your goal is to move up.

The reason the online articles are only worth $5 is because they are mostly articles people need as filler for SEO. Few people are willing to pay much for that because it can be outsourced globally. I sometimes write articles for a content mill and have noticed that as soon as SEO filler work becomes available (and sometimes there is a huge amount of it), it gets churned through pretty quickly due to a lot of overseas folks just loving to make $5 per 300 words. So no, most people aren't going to make much money writing online.

In order to get $50-100 per article you have to go offline or be hired with established credentials. There is a good amount of competition. Please don't hype the writing thing up too much because there is more supply than demand when it comes to professional writing. With that said, you can make decent money once established with great writing skills.

As someone that worked as a freelance writer for a couple of years before I got into the IM business I think a good high quality writer deserves to be paid much more than $50 for 500 words. What always got me down was there were so many people that worked for so much less than this and some of them were actually good writers then why would someone pay me more money? I did find the clients through marketing myself but it took a lot of time. It was constant work as no client lasted forever. This is a sore subject with many people. Now that I have my IM business and I still write some of my own stuff but I also hire writers I feel I need to pay them what they are worth depending on how well they write.