Gabriella, I absolutely love your reactions to these posts. 🙂

You sure did make a great decision there. Great system, too. It makes your life, and their lives, easier. Pretty sweet! And look how that’s turned into more work. How great is that? No apologies — your example is one we should all be following.

I had a job not long ago that paid $1/word. Great! Except it took me four solid days to finish it. The actual payment based on my time put into it was more like 4 cents a word. That $1/word wasn’t really paying off for me. It turned my $150/hr. rate into a $23/hr. rate.

Conversely, another job I have monthly pays $900. It’s a three- to four-hour investment. So while the pay is lower, I’m actually getting paid more for it because I’m not spinning my wheels for days — correct my math if it’s wrong, but I’m figuring $225/hr. Plus, this is the client who gives me special projects on top of that, so I can expect roughly $14K annually from this one client.

Yea, I’ll keep that one over the first one.

How low would I go? As you did, Lori, in evaluating that crappy job, I think writers have to look at their hourly rate.

I have a client for which I write seven 750-1,000 articles a month–been doing it since 2008; he’s my longest-term client–and I get paid $2,147. Sounds low. It’s not.

I have a great system for these articles. I interview four sources, each for a half hour, who speak to all seven topics. So that’s two hours. Maybe add another hour for finding and arranging interviews with the sources. Then it takes me a day to write all the articles and about more two hours to proof them.

So that’s two business days max on this work at more than $1K per day, which roughs out to well over $100 per hour.

What needs to be there to take a lower rate? Great systems. If you’ve been at this a while and have great systems that allow you to work really, really efficiently, you can entertain offers that don’t, on their face, hit that $1 per word writing baseline most people use.

By the way, I took that client three years after I began freelancing, and I took it after turning the guy down first. He offered me too little. I stuck to my guns and politely told him I couldn’t take such low pay (I don’t even remember what it was at the time). A few months after I turned him down, he came back and said he’d pay me what I asked. It was lower than I’d wanted at the time, but I thought I could do the work efficiently, and I saw value in having regular, monthly work instead of chasing one-off assignments.

Best decision I ever made. Over the past 13 years, he’s broadened the work he gives me. I also moderate a monthly webinar for him, for which I also have a great system to get the work done. I choose the topics, find two panelists from among the sources I’ve cultivated over the past 13 years, and then moderate the hour-long webinar. About three hours of my time, for which I earn $600. I oversee another writer’s work for that client for $150 a month. Takes an hour to review her proposed topics and review the turned-in copy to provide feedback.

Long story short, I’ve earned more than $300K from this guy (much more, but that’s using a $2k per month baseline for 13 years). I was able to do that by sticking to my guns on my value and creating great systems.

On the straight-up word-count articles, my lowest is $1 per word.

How low would I go? Hard to say. But it ain’t $15 an hour. Sheesh.

P.S. Sorry for the long-winded example, but you got me going on this Monday morning!