1. Don’t list the entry-level jobs.
2. Do a damn good job and let the quality of the work speak for itself.
3. Stop worrying about resumes and build your business to the point where people come to you with jobs–and pass on the ones that don’t meet your standards.

One of my very first articles was low-paying. I made $8 for 500 words on a town in Maine. However, a year later, a magazine saw it and asked if they could buy the rights to it and print it in their nursing magazine. I received a second, higher payment and had my byline in a magazine. Using the print copy, I went on to land many higher paying jobs, including another magazine article in a fashion magazine that netted me a few hundred dollars.

I don’t snub my nose at low paying jobs because you never know where they might lead.

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Check Craigslist and you’ll find staff jobs for writers paying $10 to $15 per hour. You’ll also find plenty of other freelance jobs in that price range that aren’t content mills. No one ever complains about a magazine paying $15 bucks for an article or a staff job paying $8 an hour. These have always been around. Back in the day we didn’t have Indeed or Craigslist so of course these jobs weren’t widely publicized, but writers took them or free work to get feet in the door.

Now, I don’t recommend every writer take entry level positions to get started and I don’t recommend every writer stay with entry level gigs forever, but I wouldn’t endorse certain jobs if I didn’t know a little about them. I also won’t knock any writer for his choice to take an entry level gig. I’m not going to defend every single entry level opportunity, but I don’t just go off on them without ever having worked for them, or without knowing a thing about them.

Star you’ve been coming to this blog for years and we’ve had the same conversations for years. I respect how you are so passionate and you have your standards. However, these entry level jobs haven’t kept you from finding work in your price range. You’re obviously successful in what you do or you’d be working at an office job instead of writing. You, of all people, should know these jobs aren’t keeping anyone from their goals or their dreams. Writers can do better and shouldn’t feel threatened at all by entry level opportunities. Use them, don’t use them, but they’re not going away.

This is different from these big, organized content mills run by rich ex-dotcommers and others, who pocket millions and pay pennies. Check out the Indeed listings and others-dominated by the content mills. The literary journals never occupied position one.

I’ve mentioned opportunity costs in several posts. If one is earning a low amount, let’s say $8 and hour, it takes twice as much time to earn $10,000 as the person who makes $16 an hour. In a very simplistic example, let’s say the person gave up 20 hours for two months (40 hours total or $320) to aggressively market himself/herself to land that $16/hour gig. In the next 10 months, this same person would earn $8 more for every hour worked. So he/she would cover the “marketing cost” in 40 hours and would have $8 in additional income for every hour after that.

But if the lower rate covers ones basic needs, one can fall into a comfort zone without spending a lot of time marketing for much better opportunities. It happens with regular jobs, too. I spent 11 years at a newspaper, earned a decent wage, but finally got out of my comfort zone and went to a magazine and earned $5,000 more in a year. Unfortunately, that job left me and my 5-month pregnant wife after a year, pushing me into freelancing. I stayed with two clients who covered my bills for too long. It wasn’t till they cut me back that I found better paying clients.

Another point…if at a low rate, it takes most of your available hours to cover bills, you may not take the time to pursue the other, higher paying opportunities. But bills will continue to increase, so you have to seek better paying opportunities as a result.

Have you ever noticed that the horror stories are always about some anonymous writer, not a specific person?

This is exactly what I had in mind when I mentioned the horror stories: they’re never too specific. Well, maybe I’d change my mind about this whole topic if one of the naysayers out there came up with a long series of interviews featuring freelance writers who actually had their careers “permanently hurt” or “destroyed” just because they took a few low-paying jobs.

Yeah, it might look a little weird if you went from writing $500 magazine articles to $10 posts for some random SEO website. But like someone said, you don’t necessarily have to list every single client you have on your resume, and you don’t have to automatically assume that you’ll never get a better-paying gig ever again. Maybe you write $10 posts for a month or two, and then land a great job later on at a higher pay rate.

But then…there is that issue of the low-paying jobs driving down the pay for everyone…Hmmm. That one makes me stop and ponder.

Do content sites lower the rates for everyone? In my experience, no. There have always been low paying opportunities for writers, for example the literary magazine paying five dollars or the newspaper column paying $15. None of these jobs lowered the rates. If anything I’ve seen rates go up. When I first began blogging for a living folks were paying $5 for a post now I see plenty of people offering $25, $50 and more. Still low to many, but a sign that things are improving.

I used clips from content sites to land a newspaper column and a job with Oxygen Media. The Oxygen Media job paid $500 a month for 200 words per week and my content writing experience didn’t take away from this at all. Not one person ever said to me, “Hmmm….you wrote for Wisegeek, I’m not hiring you.”

If you’re not finding work in your price range, it has nothing to do with people who are accepting lower paying jobs.

I think this is as much nonsense.

A few years ago, I took on a project writing promotional descriptions for a site that sells natural supplements. The pay was $10 per description. At the time, I was building my resume and was still amazed that anyone would pay for my writing. Admittedly, I also didn’t know how bad the pay really was. I did about 30 descriptions. This past April, I was hired by an agency to write almost the same type of material. I got the job thanks to the samples I had collected while working for the other client. The new client’s pay rate for almost the exact same material…$150!

On another note, I sometimes see job postings requesting a salary history. My first reaction is that it’s really none of their business (at this point, I’m only interested in taking on new clients that pay more than my current ones), but I’d be interested in hearing what others think.

Instead of bidding and searching for projects for about an hour a day and gaining about three projects per week, I now spend two hours a day searching for projects and only gain about one per week (or less). There’s so many “low-paying” gigs to sift through, it’s ridiculous. Craigslist seems to have more serious buyers than bidding sites like odesk but most people who post on craigslist do not respond. The only response I’d ever gotten was someone who ended up flaking out later on anyway. I keep trying though because I severely need the work.

People that accept low-paying jobs hurt the industry and make it harder for serious professionals to make a decent living.