She said though “Hey I used to do Yahoo Answers for wind down time at the end of my writing day” so it all depends on perspective.

She did mention she prob won’t do a blog job again. (not my writing, your mind dudes)

Sure i can throw out .05 a word or $25 per post. But it isn’t that simple, because there is word count to consider, length of time it takes to craft an article, what other duties are involved besides content creation, etc.

On the flip side, if you own a blog and want to to hire a writer, but can only afford say $10 per shor blog article. This has nothing to do with variables. Because regardless of someones experience, knowledge, etc if i can only afford to pay X amount. That is all i can do.

So at that point it is about the writer. What is he/she willing to take a job on for? There is the writer’s side and the employer’s side.

It varies for both. There is no one right or wrong amount. The whole thing should come down to a mutually beneficial set up.

-Mike

In freelance writing, rates are all over the place and I didn’t want to start THAT particular war with this post. Whenever specific rates are mentioned, the conversation always becomes about the rate — which may or may not be what was intended. In this case, I did not want to visit “the rate question.” Only what goes into coming up with a rate, from my perspective.

Thanks for weighing in.

If the minimum wage is $7 per hour, use that as a starting basis of how you charge clients. If you can do one post per hour, including research, writing, editing and promoting, then charge at least $7 per post.

Also, think about what you are getting in a per word rate. If you are writing 1000 words for $7, your rate is less than $0.01 per word, which to me is slave labor. 500 words at $7 gives you a per word rate of $0.014 per word, which is approaching a good no-experience starting wage of around 2 cents per word.

If your goal is $50 per day, with 2 hours of work or $25 per hour, how much can you produce in those two hours, and how does that work out for content for those purchasing your services? Make sure they don’t forget that there will be time needed to research, edit and even promote articles, and that time is all billable as well.

Don’t just charge for your writing, unless that is all you are ever going to give them. If you want to build a community, and will be managing comments, among other things, you deserve some sort of compensation for that as well.

Much of this is based on what you hope to earn from your work, and I think numbers need to play a stronger part in building examples of pay rates. Why people publish such posts without example numbers is beyond me. How can you talk pay without numbers?