The online freelance writer seems to have peaked a few years ago, around the time President Obama was just getting comfortable in his first term. Jobs got scarce. I finally decided to augment my income with online writing assignments in May of 2011. Apparently the bubble had just burst. I charged in anyway.
One year later, the dozen or so sites I registered to write with has shrunk to several main pillars: Suite101, Associated Content (Yahoo!), and Examiner . And then, there is this very blog.
What have I learned?
That it takes a LOT of articles to make this worth your time, if you're in it for the money.
If you want to get your name out there, or just love to write, you will love the nature of freelance writing. You can be as casual or focused as you want. Serious freelancers who want to make a real living should find clients who offer contracts. But if you have no writing portfolio, one of the sites mentioned above can help build some credibility.
Most viewed/read articles:
On Waffle's Shaddai, the "quarterback Sam Bradford v. entertainer Seth MacFarlane" doppelganger post has pulled a lot of people. Probably lots of Family Guy fans. "Is Kobe a Vampire?" was the top attention-getter for a while, but Sam & Seth passed it in spring on 2012.
Associated Content must have temporarily spotlit my "best actor-athlete of the modern era" article. It leads second place, about underrated films, by a 5-to-1 margin.
On Suite, a news item about Eurobasket 2011 spawned several high-ranking articles. A story about Macedonia's upset over host Lithuania actually beat ESPN's comparable stories, in the days after the game. Suite has reset the entire site and erased all of the social network approvals, but Facebook and Twitter really pushed that article... As for long-term articles, an article about the children of the rich and famous continues to draw readers months after publication.
Examiner has been a time-eater, as I am covering a local minor league baseball team. Too much competition from news outlets with more access. This was a gig I didn't think through very well. I could just quit and lose the few dollars I have queued in their till. Or try to switch over to video game reviewer, which is not dependent on other people's time. We shall see. Probably one of my most popular articles there was a short history of the Salem Red Sox franchise. The editors there liked it, anyway.
Have I made any money?
Not really. Let's check the numbers:
About fifty-five weeks.
Maybe fifty articles/posts across all platforms.
Total from pennies-per-view and other assorted ways to get paid: $15. (Doesn't include interested surfers who checked out Alexandr or the fiction. Still nothing to write home about.)
Not bad for the first year, considering I didn't take the freelance commitment as anything more than a tool for brand exposure. Name recognition was the original goal and it proceeds....
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