Freelance Writing Jobs for Wednesday, October 22, 2008
October 22, 2008 by Jodee
Filed under Writing Gigs
by Jodee Redmond
Good morning FWJ Friends! I’ve got leads for technical writers, editors, and copy writer for your consideration this morning. There is an interesting opportunity for someone to work at a game design company in Seattle. There are opps for lesson plan writers, financial writers and political writers on today’s list as well.
Leads…
On Site/Contract:
- Technical Writer – Redmond, WA
- Programmer/Writer 3 – 5-6 Months Contract – Redmond, WA ($45-$60 per hour)
- Technical Writer 3 – Contract – Redmond, WA ($39-$55 per hour)
- Writer @ HowCast Media Inc. – New York
- Temporary Associate Editor @ Runner’s World – Emmaus, PA
- NY1 Bilingual News Writer (Spanish/English) – New York
- Freelance Copywriter with Agency Background – Dallas
- Website Copy Writer for Internet Start-Up – 1-2 Month Assignment – Soho/New York
- Freelance Copy Editors/Proofreaders/Typists @ ARTNews – New York
- Webzine Editor for Personal Style Site – New York
- Production Coordinator @ McGraw-Hill – Project Based – Chicago
- Technical Editor – Rockville, MD
- Full Time Editor – Contract – Rockville, MD – Employer Willing to Negotiate Telecommute
- Sr. Web Editor – Fashion – Seattle
- Storyteller/Scriptwriter for Game Design Company – Seattle
- Technical Writer – 7 Month Contract – Seattle
- Math Content Editor – Longmont/Denver ($20 per hour)
- Technical Writer with 3D Experience – Boulder
- Freelance Writer @ Pritchett, LLP – Dallas ($2,500 for a 25-page manuscript)
- Technical Writer – Temp to Perm – Boston ($25/hour while temp; $35-$45 per hour plus benefits once permanent)
- Spanish Proofreader Wanted – Contract – Vancouver, B.C.
Telecommute:
- Freelance Writers. Financial Journalists, Forex Experts @ FXDD
- Managing Editor for Asian Travel Site
- Freelance Writers for Education Association Magazine
- Technical Writer @ CyraCom
- Writer Needed to Create Lesson Plan in 30 Days
- Freelance Writers Needed for Neutral Polling Blog
- Fiction Editor for Electronic Publisher – Part Time
- Grant Writer
- Freelance Writer @ EBSCO Publishing
- Women’s Studies Student to Write About History of Sexuality
- Killer Copywriter Wanted
- Writers Wanted for Art Website
Blogging Jobs
Internships:
- Copywriting/Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Intern – New York – Paid
- Internship @ GK Training – Columbia/Fordham/NYU Students Preferred – Paid
Good Luck!
Please don’t get me wrong Jodee because I appreciate what you do for us. It seems that you’re having more on site jobs than work at home jobs. Plus I visit craigslist and I find so many jobs high paying jobs that aren’t featured here. I don’t have much incentive to visit if you’re going to have mostly on site jobs and you’re only bringing us a couple of the jobs from around the web. I remember when Deb used to post these long lists of 50 or 60 jobs from all over which was such a time saver. Now I’m back to doing my own searches again.
Thanks Jodee for what you do. I don’t mean to knock you. I just wonder why we don’t have as many good jobs as we used to.
@Kelly – Then it’s not just me? I was recalling Deb’s longs lists too. Jodee your lists are good too but there are more on site than telecommute and not as many jobs as we used to get. I know your busy so I won’t complain. I don’t come here as much anymore for jobs though.
Yeah, now I have to do stuff for myself. For MYSELF, for cryin’ out loud!
Jobs. Silver Platter. Now!
OK, guys, I have heard and understand. Less on site stuff from now on.
I’ve got a question for you, Jodee… How do you determine what goes on the On Site / Contract list and what goes on the Telecommute one? I’m asking because there are some jobs on the former list that I’d apply for, thinking that they’d allow for telecommuting. And further to that, there are some jobs on the On Site / Contract list that are contract AND have Telecommute: Yes in the ad.
I wonder if it would be possible to further break out the list, separating the ONLY ON SITE jobs from the ones that clearly allow — or would potentially allow — telecommuting?
I so appreciate all that you do, and all that you’ve done to make your list even better, and I’m just hoping for a clearer delineation.
@ D: I’ll see what I can do to make things clearer for you; some of them are hard to classify so I just put them in the categories that seem right.
Oh come on, Robbie. They couldn’t have been more polite with their requests.
I appreciate the categorization of the jobs so much, Jodee!
Yeah, Jodee, I know that some jobs fall in more than one category so it’s hard to decide which one to place it in. I totally understand.
All that aside, I think the current categorization is a great feature and I appreciate that you do it for us.
I have to back Jodee. I notice the quality of jobs in many places are not close to what they used to be. I applied to 25 on Monday from my own search and 15 of them turned out to be spam requiring you to either sign up first on some Web site, send a credit card number to perform a credit check before you could have the job or some other requirement that screamed potential fraud.
One really good listing offered a reasonable wage ($20 an hour) and what sounded like a great opportunity for research. I got this weird reply that was barely in English a day later. The potential employer said he’d decided to drop the originally posted pay rate because of the email he received from one interested party. She quoted him a price that was less than half of what he was willing to pay, so he copied and pasted her email and said anyone willing to top her quote would get the job. To beat her quote I would have had to charge less than $6 an hour and I wasn’t willing to bother.
With the unemployment rate in Vermont having topped 5% now, friends I know who have lost their jobs are staying at home and competing for jobs online rather than trying to find a job in this area. I think there are more out there doing this which is reducing the number of decent telecommuting jobs available.
Hello and thanks for everything you do, Jodee!
To say, I’ve been combing Boston and New York’s Craigslist/Telecommuting jobs for the past year and note that there’s been a huge dropoff in the number of job postings.
The economy is most certainly to blame, but I think that Craigslist’s decision to charge employers for posting job listings is a factor too.
Thank you again, Jodee!
Bobbi
Has anyone had experience with Content Quake? I’m wondering what their compensation looks like. I haven’t been able to find anything.
Thanks!
***And thanks, Jodee – good jobs here as usual!
Lela,
Here’s a link that will help:
http://contentquake.com/blog-jobs/
“Content Quake utilizes a pay per post compensation method for our writers.”
No dollar amount is specified, however.
Hope this helps–
Bobbi
Jodee, I haven’t had a chance yet to thank you for your new format. It’s great! I hope folks remember that this site is FREE for us to use…
I did want to comment on the “Writer Needed to Create Lesson Plan in 30 Days.” I don’t think this meets the basic payment expectations for FWJ. They want 25-35 single spaced pages for $250 and they want it done in 4 weeks. According to my calculations, that’s going to work out to less then 1 cent a word on average. And, you have to write based on a textbook, so it’s not a quick writing assignment.
Jodee I do appreciate what you do. I even know this is a free service. Things have changed so I wanted to express how I feel as a member of the FWJ community. Deb is always asking us to tell our thoughts and those are mine.
I like the new format but if you look there are more jobs for people to go to an on site freelance job and not a work at home freelance job. There used to be long lists of 50 or 60 jobs a day and today there are about 15 work at home freelance jobs listed. You don’t have to change for me and I know this is hard work. If Deb is wondering why the traffic is going it might be because there aren’t as many jobs as there used to be. This isn’t a daily stop anymore it’s a weekly stop.
I’m sorry everyone hates me for speaking my mind.
AGAIN I do appreciate all you do and I love the community but you should know what people think right?
@ Kelly: Of course you should speak your mind; otherwise, how will we know what the members of our community want and need? For every person who takes the time to comment, there are others who are thinking the same thing, so if you guys want me to focus on finding work at home freelance jobs, then that’s what I’ll do.
Contentquake pay = around .50 per post, up to 6 posts per week, plus a per-page-view compensation package.
I am a current blogger there, and not sure how they feel about me announcing their rates, so am going to remain anonymous.
The per-post rate is, obviously, very low. The per-page-view has potential. Both rates do increase the longer you blog with them.
Frankly, my blogging there is not for the money (which isn’t much at all) but for the exposure and experience.
Hope that helps.
If you’re going to apply to Content Quake, save your job app in Word or something. I applied for something a while back and my application failed to go through twice. They may have fixed the bug but better safe than sorry.
FWJ is still a daily stop for me. There may be 15 telecommute jobs today, but they made up half the listings on Monday. Thanks for your hard work, Jodee!
I tried posting and got an error the first time, so sorry if this is a repeat:
@ the detractors–I understand that you’re offering constructive criticism but I just want to throw some support Jodee’s way. This is a free service and always provides quality leads. I think anyone who needs work should be using several sites regardless. And even if there’s only 1 job posting here–that’s one less that we would have to go find somewhere else. While I agree with an increased focus on telecommute positions, I think complaining about the number of jobs is a little bit petty. I’m sure like the rest of us Jodee has a lot of work to balance. Jodee, thanks for all that you do and keep up the good work!
Since the topic of quality of jobs was brought up I’d like to ask others: Have you found lower-paying jobs to be more of the norm lately? I began writing about 2 years ago as a hobby/side job. When I started the first couple of jobs that I did paid around $30-40 per article. These were short articles 500-800 words or so. At the time I didn’t think these were stellar rates, but they seemed reasonable enough. Since I began freelancing full time and applying to a lot more jobs about 2 months ago I’ve had trouble finding work that pays even this much. It seems that $10-15 for 400-700 words is a lot more common, and $25 is on the high end. This is a generalization and applies to a broad array of jobs as opposed to specific cases, but just wondering if anyone else has noticed this trend?
@ Chris,
I’ve definitely noticed. The other day I got a job offer from a publishing company. Their pay rates were $75 for manuscripts of up to 300 pages and $85 for manuscripts of up to 600 pages. WOW! And on top of editing with Track Changes, they wanted suggestions on plot, character development, etc. included. I would normally charge at least 10 times this amount! I’ve also seen a lot of CL postings for $1 articles. For now, I’m sticking pretty close with the clients I have, who are at least willing to pay fairly. It’s definitely not just you!
Jodee,
I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to organize each one of these posts into categories! It makes each of the daily job posts such a valuable and easy to use resource!
So what’s up with associated content? I’ve submitted a bunch of stuff and, while the pay is substandard, I’m not well known so is it really a bad thing? If I can type 4 articles and hour and get them sold for 5 bucks that’s 20 dollars per hour. There are so many conflicting views out there so what do you guys think?
@Matti–In the end it’s really a personal decision. You don’t mention how long the articles are (# of words), but in general I wouldn’t write an article for $5–a blog, maybe if it was short and something I was very familiar with. But again this is just me. I have done some articles for $15 which is still on the low side and I’m sure there are some who wouldn’t take these on. What I would look for is the short-term benefit of making quick money v. the longer term possibility of saving those articles and selling them elsewhere. $20/hr seems like a solid hourly rate, though, so if you’re comfortable doing it then go for it. In general, I try to analyze if my time is being well spent or if I’d be better off focusing on looking for better work.
I’m not doing research or anything. I actually decided to do it becuase I have a talent of absorbing and remembering a lot of quirky things. I totally agree that I’m worth more, but I need to stop and add in the hours and days I spend just getting a job vs. just posting random articles that aren’t even top quality and being paid really low for it. Most of the articles are 300-500 words and they are about topics I am very familiar with.
I also want to point out (for my own sanity) that I just starte freelancing literally a week ago and need to build up samples. I don’t want to send stuff that might be stolen (already happened…) so having it already published, read, and paid for helps build my portfolio. I’m not just writing for associated content. I’m always sending out letters and am working on a job for a guy to write a 350 about me for his online dating profile for 50 bucks. I’m trying to keep a happy medium.
@ Matti: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with AC, as long as you are using it to supplement your income during gaps in bigger projects and not relying on it for a full-time income. I can write 4-5 articles per hour for AC (on topics that I know well) and make $20-25 per hour doing so. If it comes down to $25 or $0, of course I will take $25. One good thing about AC is that one of my articles reached #3 in Google just a few weeks after I published it. I’ve had 500 page views already (in just a few weeks) and am beating out authority sites like Web MD and MSN Health in the rankings. This has led 3 people to contact me through AC and ask me to write SEO articles for them at higher rates.
@ Christy concerning “Writer Needed to Create Lesson Plan in 30 Days.”
I used to work for them so you are right. It is not much money for so much work, and Guru takes their cut. It is like Cliff’s notes. I wrote about novels. I loved the work at first because I love books, and the first editor was easy to work with. However, the second editor was demanding, and I had to quit because the work was too much effort for the pay. I’m not saying no one should apply. That is just my experience. It’s been almost two years since I’ve worked there so I have no idea what it is like now.
Thanks Jodee very much for today’s leads.
I wish these flaggers would stop flagging “innoncent” looking ads like the higher educational magazines, which I missed copying the email address by an hour. Had I known people would be so greedy, I would have taken action right away. What’s wrong with these people?
Jodee: thanks for all the work. I like the changes to the division of telecommute and onsite jobs. I don’t know the way it “used to be”, because I’ve only been on here for a month. However, I link to a LOT of pages to search jobs, and I don’t find anything out there that pays better on average than what you are posting here. I assume like some of the others on here that it isn’t your “fault” the jobs here pay little. It does appear to be a market shift. Some of the best jobs don’t get advertised at all. I happened to know someone who got me a gig paying $1800 for 40 pages of educational based writing. I’ve only done two since August, as they are out of work right now. But, they don’t advertise because they have a network to draw from. I also just got hired for the job posted to write the lesson plans. Yes, it isn’t a lot of money, but I’m need extra money right now. We’ll see how it goes!
@ Leah: The wonderful thing about having a community here is that everyone is free to express an opinion, as long as they are reasonably polite. We are here for you and we want to give you the kind of information you are looking for.
I appreciate your taking the time to comment.