Do You Want to Earn $1.00 a Word?
By: Elle C.
Tags: Marketing, Writing, Careers, Médium, Career Advice

Do You Want to Earn $1.00 a Word?

Eight Steps to a Powerful Writing Income

In 2017, I received $7,300 for a white paper I’d written. The article — a 7.3K word leviathan on establishing a workplace safety culture — paid a dollar per word. Although one of the larger single projects I’ve developed, it reflects my standard rate. Depending on the depth of research, I usually charge $0.50 to $1.00 per word. Can you get this type of pay? Absolutely. My skills aren’t magical. Dear Writers, stop selling yourself short. There are markets that pay quite well for your knowledge. Earning a viable income simply requires refocusing your craft as a business commodity.

Underpaid & Unappreciated Are Unacceptable

Threads comparing earnings and reader views are regular sources of discussion in the social media writers’ groups I’ve joined. I don’t comment much, but it saddens me to see the labors of these gifted people unappreciated by trivial earnings.

Writing is a talent, honed by countless revisions, successes, and failures, and fueled by well-caffeinated, sleepless nights. If you’re like me, my creative process is also peppered with colorful language verbalized as I bang on the keyboard, too. I write as if I have sudden onset of Tourette’s Syndrome.

We all put our hearts and souls into our pieces.

Historically, despite the labor creating our beautiful art, the industry is ridiculously underpaid. Worse, many skilled writers continually produce well-researched, informative pieces for free. Why do we torture ourselves so? It doesn’t have to be. You can make real money crafting words.

The type of writing I’m covering here isn’t the personal narrative style that one finds on Medium. It’s often dry and technical. And sometimes, it’s soul-sucking. But through it, you’ll learn. This education is invaluable. It transfers to the totality of your writing skills.

And when you agree to a contracted project, the income you’ll receive is known. For me, that’s relieved the stress from my creative writing. When I am paid well from other sources, I enjoy my personal free writing without worry about earning potential. I also have pride in the projects I’ve created. Sometimes I pull up a website in a random search and realize, I built that lovely content.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

I wish I could say that I’d planned this concurrent career meticulously using my brilliant business mind. Alas, I stumbled on this lucrative market in 2008 when I was at a low point.

In that one year, I’d remarried and divorced a second time, obtaining an honorable mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest crash and burn of wedded bliss.

It was also the year one of my daughters began her decent into chronic illness. She has Crohn’s Disease, but it was a lengthy process to diagnose and stabilize her. In those twelve months, my daughter had six hospitalizations, and was often so ill and weak, 24-hour home care was needed.

The consulting company where I’d been Vice President, had sold. I was on unemployment for the first time in my life, smack in the middle of a recession. I couldn’t leave my kiddo to do the type of consulting projects I’d previously performed or take a full-time salaried job doing similar work. I was depressed, desperately poor, and feeling the mental whammy of another failed marriage.

And adding to this mélange of crisis points, my car had been totaled in a wreck and I had to wait three months for a settlement. Carless, jobless, poor, lacking a partner’s support, and with a critically ill kiddo — my life had become a tragic country music song.

I needed money. How to obtain it and work from home?

At the time, the content market was fairly new. Websites, like Demand Media, were churning out thousands of these pieces every week. Content mills paid a pittance, but it was income. The easiest articles for me to create were ones that reflected my career background in risk management and workplace safety. I knew the genre intimately. I had a decade of this work, mediating OSHA penalties and ensuring compliance in businesses.

After I’d amassed several of these articles, I created a profile on Elance (which is now Upwork). With a portfolio of article links, and a career background on those topics, I began bidding on jobs, finding that I could double or triple the pay of content mills with these projects. It still wasn’t great income, but where I’d been writing a 500-word article for $15-$25, now I was consistently earning $50 for similar length pieces. I took any projects I could — eBooks, content articles, white papers, continuing education modules, and blogs. If it paid, I wrote it.

The financial pressure began lifting. I was able to get off unemployment. My kiddo improved. I started a new risk management consulting business in 2009. Life had resumed and was on an upward economic trend. I continued to take occasional projects through Elance, but I didn’t depend on them.

In 2011, I was approached by a legal editor through LinkedIn. She had seen the projects I’d posted on my profile and inquired about my availability for writing opportunities. In a few hours, I stared at a screen with the contract, budgeted at $5,000 for the first ten articles, roughly 500–700 words each. The rate was $0.75 a word. I thought I’d been scammed at first. The pay was wonderfully thrilling.

That one project opened the door for others with similar or greater earning potential. I quickly learned there was a thriving market for the information I knew, and it paid well. I began pricing my work accordingly. The weighty 7.3K word white paper I’d mentioned at beginning of this article, followed with two years of additional content writing for that client’s long-term marketing campaign, all at the same payment rate of a $1.00 a word.

I’ve written for Fortune 500 clients and enterprise businesses, as well as small companies. But my rate of $0.50-$1.00 per word stays similar. And clients don’t typically question it. As second income, I earn an annual average of an extra $20K-$30K from very part-time writing projects. I ghost write for some sites, but the earnings offset not having a treasured byline.