Life As A Freelancer

A lot of people think it's an easy life working, as I do, (mostly) from home as a freelancer. What they don't see is the amount of hours you have to put in getting the work in the first place. Some weeks I'll spend as many as half my working hours pitching and answering questions from prospective clients, at least half of which  will disappear into the ether. Some will ask for interviews, portfolios, countless questions go back back and forth, sometimes even ask for a free sample (don't do them, folks!) and then turn round and offer minimum wage (or less). Worse still, like the prospective 'client' I've been 'chatting' to for the last couple of days, some are plain scammers.

You can recognise them a mile away. They will normally contact you via a freelancer site, but insist on emailing you instead of using the site's private messaging system, as 'it'll only end up in their junk mail folder'.

Okay, let's see what they have to offer. The email always comes from a generic domain, yahoo!, for example, and their name is equally generic and usually has a number at the end. Their English is appalling. They have lots of work, of course, and it's a good rate of pay (certainly for the US where most of them claim to come from). They might direct you to a couple of 'their' sites, which of course, once you delve into ownership, have absolutely nothing to do with them.

What they're hoping for is for some poor freelancer desperate for work to do a couple of articles in advance, which they promise to pay for. They get the work and disappear.

Generally, these are sweatshop operations for mass produced articles, run by people with a poor grasp of English that set up 'dummy' profiles on freelancer sites, then offer rates less than $1 per 500 word SEO article to snaffle up the work, then advertise the same work on a different site at a higher rate to con real writers people into writing the articles. In the process, they do 'real' freelancers out of business and devalue their work by making genuine clients believe that they can get quality work for next to nothing.

But my point is, all the time genuine freelancers have to spend weeding out the con-artists and cheapskates takes 'real' working hours out of our week. We have to make those hours back up when we work for real, so please don't ask me to write for minimum wage. Because it's not minimum wage, it's less than half that over the course of the week. Which means it would be much less stressful and I would be far better off working at McDonalds.