The Unemployed Writer

I haven’t really kept up appearances on the site in recent months - luckily, I actually have a good reason, so I don’t feel overwhelmingly bad about it. I have been quite busy as business had been through the rough, pretty much across the board. Lots of new clients, lots of repeat business, and about a 60% off-Elance rate.

Ideally, all projects come in off of Elance and there are a few good reasons for this. First of all, they are not subject to the hefty 7.75% fee that Elance charges. With the taxes I already pay on my income (including the hefty 15% self-employment tax),  that makes almost 30% of my income almost immediately disappear - not a pretty number, especially when self employed.

Second, it gives me a great deal of freedom in how I develop projects, how I communicate, and what rates I establish. Stand alone projects also seem to have much higher referral rates as people are usually working with you on a more personal basis. Elance is great for meeting people if you need work, but if you can develop a stream of new projects and clients elsewhere, the results are almost infinitely better.

That said, things have been chaotic as I have more than tripled my workload (thanks in part to a second writer being added to the team) and bogged myself down with hours of work each week. It’s a good thing, especially as things start to accelerate much faster. It’s like a exponential function, ramping up slowly at first, and then suddenly taking off. I swear, I had no idea when I first started writing online in November of 2006 that there was such a large market for it. Ironically, when someone says to me, “Really? There’s a market for that?” I look at them like they’re stupid. Honestly though, it’s hard to envision such a massive business opportunity in writing solely for the Internet.

But, there is and a major reason is that in the last three years or so, the Internet has developed into something completely different. For the entirety of the 1990s and the first half of this decade, it was a novelty, a tool that everyone was interested in the technology behind. People would dream big, elaborate dreams of what might be done with the framework it provided. Other people would look at the Internet and see only potential.

Today, only scientists and engineers look at the Internet in those terms. Everyone else looks at it as a part of everyday life. No one sees a website and wonders what amazing things it might offer next - they look at it and wait for the next story to break or for the next band or friend to come along. And that’s where we come in - writing chunks of the billion-word industry that is Internet marketing.

Once I realized that this was the case, I started thinking beyond the simple $5 coffee maker reviews I was so excited to be writing. I started thinking of larger projects, of opportunities outside of the same old spamming techniques and article marketing projects. There’s a lot more going on here than you can see when you login to the Internet.

Even the way I talk to my friends and family about my job reflects my realization. I was embarrassed at first. I went to college thinking I would be writing novels or newspaper articles. But, novels and newspaper articles only make up less than 1% of the text written every day. Everything is about content these days. Images are important online, but they don’t index in search engines, they don’t speak to what people are looking for, they only compliment it. Where print media may be dying (and I was nearly apoplectic thinking I would never find a job because of it), online media is larger than ever and billions of words of text are uploaded every month to sell products, promote people, engage communities, and much more.

When those realizations developed, I knew I could move on to the next level, expanding my work to include much more than those $5 puff pieces on the newest dog collars. It was time to become a cog in the workings of the world’s largest information producing machinery. I understood how it worked; now it was time to start helping it grow and making a living in the process.

And while I can claim I registered my domain name in July and I started contacting writers in November, I didn’t actually build my business until now. I needed the time to see what I could actually achieve. Risks are all fine and good, but I still need to pay my bills. Fast forward to April, 2008, and that’s not an issue anymore - now it’s a matter of stepping up and building a successful business with a wider reach, and doing it in a way no one has done before. I don’t want to be just another copywriting firm that sells cheap words for crappy products. I want to be a piece of the machinery that works to promote the essence of online commerce and socializing.

Enough preaching though - it seems like every time I return to my blog after a long hiatus, I just preach on some deep insight I have discovered that hundreds already uncovered. But, it’s always a good practice to step back and look at what you’ve done as a writer, to see the development and growth in yourself and what you do for a living. Only then can you realistically take stock of your capabilities and look toward your long term goals and how you can get there. I’m at that point and it’s a good place to be.