Freelance writing has surely become a big opportunity for earning for many since blogging and web posting has become popular. It is true that to reach a position from where a writer can earn significantly, takes quite some time but once there, a person can actually sustain himself only by writing.
Writing for earning can basically be of two types. The first one where the writer can posts his articles online and through advertisements, he can earn. The articles can be his own writing or can be outsourced to other writers. They basically constitute the second type. The outsourced writers earn small amount but if they are good in writing, they can also earn a good amount. The first case is discussed in a different blog post. Let's see how the second one works and which are the sites and how much can a freelance writer earn.
I must mention two sites primarily. There are many such sites but these two has large popularity and it is easy to register here. The first one is freelancer.com. In it, one can easily create an account and start writing. In my personal experience, I have seen it is not very easy to start here. Because there are thousands of projects available at any moment and bids are pouring in. The chances of winning a bid are higher for the earliest bidders because I have seen most clients do not close their bid even though they have selected their freelancer. freelancer.com gives chance to the clients to directly contact their freelancer over chat and even share their email or phone. In this way, mostly the clients directly contact the earliest bidders and select someone. The bids remain open and become extremely confusing. It also has to be remembered that freelancer.com is a platform for all types of freelance work and writing is only a part of. Once creating the account you have to be very specific to your skills and select as few skills as possible. Choosing two many skills actually open you up to a huge bank of projects and it becomes difficult to choose from that. One great advantage of freelancer.com is that there are almost all types of writing projects be it ghostwriting Ebooks, blogs, SEO contents. Freelancer allows a long term relationship between a client and a freelancer. Once the client is satisfied with the writer he can actually request his work without going back to the site. In my experience, I have seen all my clients who have liked my writing, have started sending works to me directly through chats or skype. Even though freelancer.com has its own payment account which you can link to your personal bank account, it is used very often. Most clients direct payments to banks bypassing the freelancer account. This is also preferred by the writers since they get immediate payments.
The other site, iwriter.com has a more professional approach. Just like freelancer.com, iwriter.com too posts projects but here the client has to make the payment at the time of posting the project. Unlike freelancer where the amount of earning is completely dependent on the choice of the client here for a fixed length of an article, the fees are fixed. You can say some client in freelancer.com is offering $2 for each 500 words whereas at the same time someone is offering $2 for 1000 words. This does not happen in iwriter.com. In it, the earning as a writer depends on his skills and status. Iwriter.com classifies its writers in four categories depending on their skills. The basic writers earn the least while the elite plus writers earn the most. By continuing writing any writer can climb the ladder by getting required ratings and by reaching each new slab their earning increases.
While a basic writer earns only about $1 for a 150 words article a premium gets $2.5 for that. Similarly, whereas a basic writer gets $2.4 for a 500 article a premium earns $4.8. The path to reach each new slab is not easy but once you have reached a new level you start earning double. An elite writer earns $8 for writing a 500 words article whereas an elite plus earns about $28 for that. The only way to reach this slabs is your ratings. The process of writing and approval is also very systematic in iwriter.com. Each and every project posted will be visible to anybody, however, a writer can select only those articles in his category or lower. For example, a premium writer will not be able to select an article reserved for an elite writer but he can choose one in basic category. Depending on the length of the article there will be a time reserved within which it has to be written and posted after which it will go to the client for approval. The reserve three full days for the client to approve or reject an article even though mostly the result comes within a day. In case a client does not approve or reject or ask for revision within three days of its submission it gets auto-approved and the writer earns the money. He does get a rating for this though. When an article is approved, the client can give up to 5-star rating to the writer and even if it is rejected he can give rating up to 3 stars. The ratings are very important since iwriter.com has a very strict policy of maintaining their quality.
The very first article written by a writer is part of the test and there is a very little margin of error. A writer must achieve an average of 3-star rating otherwise his account will be blocked. In this way, he must achieve 3.2 stars by 10 ratings and 3.4 stars by 15 ratings. This might look simple but be very careful. Only one single 1-star rating can completely change the equations and you might get your account locked. Like everything else, there are easy tricks to improve post quality which will be clarified in a separate post. Even though iwriter.com maintains a very professional approach, there are certain problems with that. In case the client has not provided a very clear instruction of what he wants or what needs to be done, it might be a problem for the writer to figure out. Since there is a time limit for completing the project there is very little time to seek clarification. It might happen the client is not online at the time of your writing. On the other hand, freelancer.com provides a system which is very flexible.
Now let's come to the most important aspect. How much one can earn by writing in any of these sites? My personal experience in writing on both the sites is different. Since I found iwriter.com to be more professional and systematic I continued there and to be honest I started making quite some money from the very beginning. I used to write one or two articles every day. So I was writing about 1000 words every day. Not that all my articles were accepted but I used to earn about $4 every day. That made $120 per month in the initial stages. As a freelance job outside my main job, the amount was handy. The earning started increasing after a few months once I reached Premium and Elite stage and I was getting about $200 per month.
So guys, If you have a passion for writing, freelance content writing is a good option for earning some extra money. It opens you up to a wide range of topics and you get to know a lot of new stuff that you not have heard of before. All my best wishes to you. Start your journey and see where can you reach. There is absolutely no limit to that.
