Excellent breakdown, my friend!

You COULD earn that much, but hey, who are we to tell you what that entails?

The more disturbing trend these days involves the “full-time freelancer needed” bullshit. This is a company that needs you present for 40 hours a week — their stated hours, not yours. And guess what? They’ll pay you employee wages. But no benefits. That, friends, is called illegal.

There may be an hourly or per-piece rate attached to these claims.

“The rate for this work is $50/hour, which translates to a six-figure income for our top writers.” This starts out as really easy math, because $100,000÷$50=2000 hours. So you need to work 2000 hours a year to hit $100,000 at that rate. Let’s say you can reasonably expect to work 48 weeks a year, which allows two weeks for vacation and two weeks for holidays, sick days, and personal days. That means you have to have 41.66 income-producing hours every week for each of those 48 weeks to hit 2000 hours and $100,000. Not 41.66 work hours a week, but 41.66 income-producing hours per week, and then you pile admin, invoicing/billing, client contact, marketing, email, and so forth on top of that. It’s because of all that other stuff related to running a business that the customary calculation gives full-time freelancers 1400 working hours a year, and 1400 hours x $50/hour brings you to $70,000 a year. In other words, the “can earn” number assumes that you’re putting in a ton of overtime.

“We pay a flat rate of $25 for 350-word posts, which works out to a rate of $75/hour for our best freelancers.” The math here is even easier. They’re telling you that their “best freelancers” speed-dial through 1,050 words an hour, because you can’t turn a $25/post rate into a $75/hour rate unless you’re cranking out three of those puppies an hour. And hey, most of us can do that in a pinch, for a short term: 1,050 words in an hour isn’t beyond the realm of possibility if you already know the topic and have the information at hand. But can you sustain that over the course of a business day? Can you write 21 350-word posts during a single workday to pocket $525 for the day’s work? If you can’t, or if the client can’t provide that volume of work, then the $75/hour rate is meaningless in addition to being fantasy.

For the most part, when you see these fanciful claims, your best bet is to kick the “can” to the curb.