Write Well But Do It Quickly
One thing I've already learned in the excruciatingly short time. I've been at this is that completing jobs quickly and managing your time are quintessential if you hope to get beyond your first job. In fact, what is most disheartening about beginning as a freelancer writer ex nihilo is that you find you are only able to secure the absolute lowest paying jobs out there. Now, I must qualify this by saying that this is the case for Odesk as I have only ever been successful there in my two weeks' earnest searching. Still, the fact remains that when accepting jobs to write 500 words for $2.00 (lest you were entertaining any romantic, get-rich-quick ideas about this) time is of the utmost importance.
Two Dollars an Hour?
Allow me to put it this: what job would you do for two dollars an hour? My guess is that you wouldn't, regardless of what it entailed. So, for any of this to make sense you have to try to get to the point where you are writing 2000 words in one hour. At present I'm making roughly 1000 per hour which is still less than minimum wage so this is clearly not a good way to spend your time if you have any pretensions of using this as an income source. And yet, there is another reason to do it: feedback.You see on Odesk, Fiverr and other freelance venues, you live and die by your feedback. So, having little or no feedback is tantamount to being dead in the water. My plan, then, is to take rinky dink jobs, network and build up my feedback until I can command more. If only I don't die of exhaustion first.
