2020 Guide to Freelance Writer Salaries
By: Tina Morlock
Tags: Freelancing, Blog, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Writing

Let’s get the crappy part out of the way. When you’re first starting out as a freelance writer, you may feel a bit discouraged because nobody wants to pay you what you’re worth. You’ll see a ton of short writing jobs out there between $5 to $10, work that any professional might charge $100 or more for. The unfortunate part about this is that this part of the market exists because plenty of people are willing to work for those low amounts.

In the beginning, we might think that it’s a rite of passage because we don’t have any professional experience under our belts, and if we could simply get a handful of low-paying gigs out of the way to build our portfolio, it might be okay. On the surface, that’s true, but underneath it all, it de-values what we bring to the table.

There’s also another side to it that should be considered. There are some freelance writers in certain economies who can live well on these low-paying gigs. As an example, I once had an author contact me about editing their book. They lived in an African country with a low cost of living. When I did my research on their economy, I realized that what I was charging for the edit would be comparable to nearly a year’s worth of wages for someone living there. It was an impossible situation I couldn’t solve. In the end, I offered to edit a small portion of the manuscript in exchange for this author signing up for my email list. I didn’t want to completely turn her away, but I also knew there was no way the project would be worth my time if I lowered my own income standard to hers.

So, how do you get past both these hurdles?

The answer lies in exactly what type of clients you’re interested in working with. If you want to build a freelance career that pays you what you’re worth, you need to focus solely on seeking out the clients who can benefit from your skill level and who understand the value a great writer can bring to the table. Are these jobs harder to find? Yes, of course they are, but we should focus on that old adage that tells us to work smarter, not harder. Working smarter means focusing your business on the clients who understand what you have to offer.

And once you’ve decided what kind of freelance writer you want to be, you also must figure out what you can reasonably charge your future clients. To get a good idea of the potential of various types of writing services, I’m going to talk about different opportunities and what some successful freelancers are making from that type of work. Some of the writing opportunities I’ll talk about here are client-based while others are based on making sales of writing products you create to sell to the public. But no matter what, you still need to focus on who that ideal audience is. (This is something I’ll talk about at length in future blog posts.)

1 — How much can I make as a freelance editor?

To start off, let’s look at the going rates in the publishing industry for professional editors. (You can find this information at the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) website. I’ve done the work here to break the hourly rates down to per word rates based on their time estimates.)

Keep in mind that these are only guidelines. Some editors charge a bit below these rates and are quite experienced while others charge much more.

Let’s break these rates down into real-world examples. I’ll use one of my past projects as a generic example.

Let’s say a self-publishing memoir author has come to you with a manuscript of 120,000 words. Since memoirs tend to be a bit longer than other types of nonfiction books, this isn’t out of the ordinary. And let’s say — in a perfect world — they would like to hire you as their developmental editor, line editor, copy editor, and proofreader.

So, let’s break this down.

Developmental Editing — $4,320

Line Editing — $3,240

Copy Editing — $1,440

Proofreading — $1,080

So, at the lower end of these editing rates, the total for this contract would be $10,080. Now, I normally give a bit of a discount when they hire me for all services, so let’s discount it at 15% for a final total of $8,568. If you were lucky enough to land contracts like this once a month, you’d ease into the six-figure freelancer category in twelve months only taking on one client per month. Sounds like a dream, right?

Well, to be honest, I don’t get the opportunity to do a lot of these projects, so it’s not as easy to accomplish as you’d hope. So, let’s look at a more realistic pretend project.

Let’s say another self-publishing author contacted you, but instead of a memoir, this author needs a novel edited. The manuscript is complete at 70,000 words, which is about average for a full-length novel. Instead of all four services, they only want to hire you for a line edit and copy edit.

Line Editing — $1,890

Copy Editing — $840

Total: $2,730

This is much closer to the reality of day-to-day life as a freelance editor. If you were a full-time freelancer, you could easily handle three of these projects per month, totaling up to $8,190 in income per month. That’s only a couple thousand shy of a six-figure income, and that’s not bad at all.

However, unless you’ve been working for a while and you’re in high demand, you won’t always be able to command your top rates. I’m a managing editor for an editing guild and projects with a budget of $1,500 or less are much closer to reality. In a situation like that, you’d have to decide if it was worth it to lower your rates, or if you were going to stand strong with the full rate you quoted.

The solution for that is to structure your editing business from the start to go after those higher-end projects, and doing so would easily allow you to earn six figures once you got the marketing right.

2—How much can I make as a freelance blogger?

From low to high, there really isn’t one figure that gives an accurate representation of the income-earning potential of being a full-time freelance blogger. Some bloggers make absolutely no income from their blogs while some bloggers make six or seven figures a year from the work they put into their blogs.

Before we get into the numbers, let’s first talk about ways a blogger earns income only through their blog.

Selling services and products you personally deliver

Advertising

Sponsored blog posts

Affiliate marketing

Donations

Writing and selling a book based on your blog

Online courses

eBooks

Now, let’s talk about the income potential of each of these elements of a freelance blogging business.

Services and Products

This can be anything that relates back to what your blog is about. For instance, if your blog is inspirational or motivational, you might become a motivational speaker and book paid speaking engagements. As a beginner, you might be able to command a $500 fee for each speaking engagement you do. You’d have to do quite a few of those—at least 8—EVERY MONTH if you wanted to make $50,000 a year from your blog. Ouch. That’s quite a bit of work! However, once you build up your brand and social media following, you’ll be able to work toward making up to $20,000 per speaking engagement.

Advertising

Once you build up some traffic, this will be a more ideal income-earning activity for your blog because it’s not as time-intensive as the speaking engagement example I used above. Forget Google AdSense. That just clutters your content, and you don’t make a livable wage with that. What you want to do is sell advertising space directly to other businesses that have the same target audience as you. You can either set a specific dollar amount for each type of ad (like $50, $500, $1,000, etc.), or you can charge according to the traffic you receive, which has the possibility to earn you several thousand dollars per month if your traffic is excellent.

Sponsored Blog Posts

A sponsored blog post is when another business or entrepreneur pays you to publish a blog on your website. They’ll either hire you to write the blog post, or they will supply the content for you. You’re going to be able to earn much more money if they hire you to write the post—perhaps about $600 to $1,000 per post if you have really good traffic on your website. You might even be able to charge more if you offer an extensive marketing plan for their sponsored blog post.

Affiliate Marketing

Using affiliate links and ads is one of the more profitable ways to monetize your blog. One of the affiliate programs I belong to pays out $1,000 for every sale I send to them. Others offer a generous percentage for each sale, sometimes 40% to 50% of the total cost of the program or product. Though the higher commissions might be more challenging to sell because they are attached to higher-ticker items, they can be a great boost to your income if you can sell at least three of them per month.

Donations

Most blogs that ask for donations aren’t really making a livable income from their blog. When they ask for donations, it’s generally to help pay for the costs of hosting. So, while donations can help, I wouldn’t rely on them for a full-time income as a freelance writer.

Book Publishing

If you have a well-defined theme or niche for your blog, once you’ve accumulated enough blog posts (20 to 30), consider how they might all fit together in a full-length book (or eBook) you can publish. Some independent authors I know are making six and seven figures from publishing their books, so if you don’t limit your book promotion efforts, I think the income potential is tremendous there.

[Want to learn how to make 18 streams of income from your book?]

Online Courses

Similar to book publishing, if you have a strong theme or niche for your blog, look for opportunities to create a variety of courses based on the topics of your blog. I’ve seen online courses sell from anywhere between $49 and $5,000—and there are some high-end courses that charge more than that.

eBooks

The beauty of eBooks is that they don’t have to even be close to the same length as a standard book. eBooks I’ve paid for in the past have been around 20 pages or more. You can add in images and diagrams to make the text easier to read, and that will also take the burden off you to write a lot of content. You can either sell these through your website or upload them to Amazon (or any of the other book retailers).

When you combine all of these income opportunities for blogs together, it allows you to earn AT LEAST a six-figure income doing something you love—and you get to help people in the process!

3—How much can I make as a freelance copywriter?

To start off this conversation, let’s look at some of the rates for beginning freelance copywriters:

Blogs—$100+

Case Studies—$300+

White Papers—$200+ per page

Short Info Pages—$100+ per web page

Long Sales Page—$200+

Short Marketing Emails—$200+

Freelance copywriting is still one of the most lucrative freelancing fields to break into today, and it seems like the demand has been growing as more technologies emerge, algorithms are updated, and new social networking trends pop up regularly.

One way you can use your copywriting skills to create a stronger business is through specializing in a specific type of copywriting skill. For instance, how much easier do you think it would be to create a name as the go-to person for short email copy vs. being a generalist who can write all forms of copywriting? When you niche down, you make it much easier for your potential clients to find you, allowing you to build a client base much faster if you’re going after any copywriting project you can get your hands on. However, keep in mind that doesn’t mean that you can’t offer those other copywriting services. If I was starting a new copywriting business today, I’d first build a foundation on that one thing, then once that starts to grow, I’d extend my offering to other forms of sales copy my clients need written.

Using email copy as an easy example again, let’s crunch the numbers further:

Let’s say you land a client that retains you on a six-month contract to write weekly email copy, locking in a per-email rate of $250/email. That’s $1,000 of income per month. So, in theory, all you would need to make six-figures that year would be to acquire and maintain nine clients who needed weekly email copy written. Again, in theory, let’s say it takes one to two hours to write each email once you have the pertinent information and graphics you need. You could easily write two emails per workday, then use the rest of the day for marketing or other business activities. And this is something that holds true for many other freelance jobs—the actual work you’re paid to do doesn’t take as much time as it does to bring that client in.

I’d like to say it’s just this easy to build and maintain a freelance business, but it’s not. It takes time to make the connections, and you don’t always get to keep every single client who hires you. The average client retention rate is around 20%, so you’re going to have to continually work the business to work in the business. But don’t let the obstacles tell a story you don’t want to hear. Once your business starts blossoming, it will be worth all the hard work you’ve put in and so much more. Start out small today with the resources you currently have, and if you stick to it, you’ll eventually end up with something you can be proud of—and something that will more than pay the bills.