As long time readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of writing for Demand Studios for certain things. While I don’t think that it is worth it to write for Demand Studios as your sole source of income, or for even a big part of your freelance writing business revenue, Demand Studios assignments offer a unique combination of flexible scheduling, fast pay, and ease of projects that is tough to find elsewhere. That makes Demand Studios good to write for when you get those 2:00 am can’t sleep nights. If you can’t sleep, you might as well make some money while you are increasing your sleep deficit.
However, the entire value in writing for Demand Studios comes from being able to do it fast. Writing fast for $15 an article isn’t enough; you have to write really fast to make writing for Demand Studios worthwhile. I shoot for 4 articles per hour. Do the math and that works out to a freelance writer making $60 per hour. That obviously is not the best hourly rates freelance writers make, but it is good enough to make it a place to keep in your back pocket for emergencies or just for those slow weeks.
Constantly striving for speed in writing and making more as a freelancer has its drawbacks. It can feel more stressful than it should. Everything gets more stressful when there is a timer counting down, whether real (I use a little digital kitchen timer) or imagined. Also, by dropping in and out of the Demand Studios community at seemingly random intervals, one ends up missing some things along the way. Occasionally, I have numerous messages waiting for me on my "Work Desk" and I just end up clicking close without reading them so that I can get going. That means that sometimes I miss things.
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New Pay Rate on Demand Studios Articles
Today, I logged onto Demand Studios to claim a queue full of articles for the upcoming pre-Memorial Day period when prospecting for new freelance writing clients and looking for projects to fill the business revenue pipeline becomes a low return time investment. When what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a bunch of article titles, and a new price tier.
I haven’t had any time to investigate it yet, but there is now a $16 per article pay rate on Demand Studios. Again, this is not even close to what a professional freelance writer is worth if you can’t crank these suckers out by the handful in a short period of time. However, assuming one could continue to meet the rate of 4 per hour, a $16 rate of pay works out to $64 per hour instead of $60 per hour. That doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but it works out to something like a 6.5% pay raise if you filled your claimed article queue with $16 articles.
It may turn out that this new tier is worthless. There may be extra work involved that would slow things down too much. There may be just a bunch of lame titles that would be either too painful or too involved to write. However, when I clicked on the filter for $16 and then clicked on Business and a couple of other categories, it seemed like a decent sized list popped up. I’ll let you know more when I know more.
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Writing For Elance as a Professional Freelance Writer
Recently, I had the opportunity to review an ebook about getting freelance writing gigs (and other work) via freelance project bidding site eLance. As I have mentioned in the past, there have always been just too many ifs, ands, or, buts, that go along with getting freelancing work on Elance. However, this how-too book lays out a path for successfully getting high paying freelance jobs on Elance. It was recently referenced by a successful Elance user who credited it with his success.
I’ve read it over and am now in the process of trying the ideas mentioned. Some of them are basic, and others are ones I pretty much already figured out for myself as a successful online entrepreneur, but there are some pointers that I have never tried before on Elance or anywhere else.
Look for an upcoming review here on ArcticLlama professional freelance writing blog once I have a chance to ascertain the value of the advice. Or, do yourself a favor and just grab the freelance writing RSS feed.