photo credit: twenty_questions

Since this is my own personal blog, I don’t have to worry about any mandatory number of posts per week with a specific number of words for each post. I’m glad.

As a freelance writer looking for ways to supplement my income, I often take a look at various freelance writer’s job banks. With the preponderance of new blogs popping up, freelance bloggers seem to be in high demand. Today I found a request that was unfortunately a good example of what is available out there.

This particular company wants a minimum of 3 posts per week of at least 400 words each. The posts had to be “lively” and “enthusiastic” and required a significant amount of research each week in order to come up with the type of content they are looking for. The pay offered was $84 per month.

Here’s the math. At 3 posts per week, we are talking about 156 posts per year. $84 per month = $1008 per year. That means a pay rate of $6.46 per post.

In order to earn an annual income of say, $40,000 per year (before taxes and expenses), a writer would need about 40 similar blogging jobs. 3 posts per week x 40 jobs = 120 posts per week! In order to do all that research and writing, I figure I would have to write 24 posts per day if I want weekends off. In a normal 8 hour work day, I would have to write and submit 3 posts per hour. That is only 6240 posts per year.

Excuse me, but that’s INSANE! The sad part is - this was one of the better offers. I’ve seen many companies that want bloggers, but only offer a penny per word (or less), and they want larger articles with photos and/or video - and they want you to send them two examples of posts you would write for them!

My understanding is that there are a few very rare bloggers that are making a living by blogging, but I suspect even these writers are living on a shoestring and have no life of their own. It’s all really pretty sad.