Please Note: If you are a 2 or 3 star author, the following tips may be useful, but your primary focus should be improving the quality of your work so you can become a 4 star author.Because this is piece work and not wage work, your hourly earnings will vary. If you have health problems, special needs kids or other personal burdens, it might take you all afternoon to finish a piece that will pay you $5. I have absolutely done that in the past when my health was worse than it is currently. If so, your hourly rate for that piece on that afternoon may come out to $1.25 (or less).
I realize that if you desperately need money and are a 2 or 3, you may feel very pressured to churn out as much work as possible because the pay at this level is very low. I am also well aware that 2 and 3 star articles disappear from the queues rapidly, so there is a lot of pressure to just grab what work you can and finish it as quickly as possible. But, in the long run, you will be better served by doing what you can to get your quality up to the 4 star level first and then worrying about how to be more time efficient so as to improve your effective hourly rate.
But, it is $5 more than you would have otherwise had and no one will fire you for being so slow. All they care about is: 1) Did you follow directions? 2) Is it grammatically correct and typo free? And 3) Did you turn it in before the deadline? Yes, yes and yes? Then you get paid!
So, I was absolutely OK at first with having an incredibly low hourly rate because of my difficult personal circumstances. But I could readily see that this could eventually be improved. I was clear that this work had the potential to turn into a middle class income with very flexible hours and a high degree of control over my work conditions. This is exactly what I need, so I stuck with it.
Everyone talks a lot about the per word pay rate of online freelance writing. Although it certainly got a lot easier for me to make a decent paycheck after I got access to work with a better per word pay rate -- not just 4 star work, but also teams and direct orders -- there are a lot of other factors that influence your effective hourly rate. To a surprising degree, your hourly rate can be improved by making judicious choices regarding the following factors:
Type of Writing
Writing about familiar subjects will take less time and produce better work than writing about unfamiliar topics. Sticking to subjects you know well or developing a niche can help you increase your effective hourly rate.
Time spent choosing an article
If you are new to Textbroker, it is a good idea to go through all available work and at least skim titles and article length, and read the instructions from some representative samples. It is common for a large number of articles in a category to be submitted by a single client. They will tend to have similar instructions. It doesn't take long to start recognizing patterns, so it isn't necessary to read every single set of instructions to have a good idea of what is available.
After you are generally familiar with what the pool of articles looks like, you should make an effort to get efficient at quickly picking something to work on. In order to make money, you must choose articles to write and choosing well can make a big difference, but since this is not wage work, you are not being paid for time spent on the selection process. Thus, you want to do as much as you reasonably can to reduce the amount of time it takes to choose something to work on. You want to develop some best practices for quickly selecting something you are well suited to write.
There are four or five categories I check first. Because I have been doing this a while, I know from experience I am more likely to find work in those categories that is a good fit for me. I used to comb through every article every day, but my rule these days is to quickly skim my favorite categories and to go ahead and grab an article if it looks like a good fit (so it doesn't disappear -- other people are also looking through them).
If I don't see anything particularly compelling, I check some additional categories. But I try to not spend too much time on this. I want the majority of my time to be spent actually writing, not spent endlessly looking for an article.
Pro tip: Teams and direct orders can substantially reduce time spent looking for work. For team orders, you already know what the instructions are, so you only need to worry about evaluating a shorter list of details, like the specific subject and the key words. In my experience, direct orders are typically a good fit for me. The client has usually chosen me based on similar work I did for them in the past or based on my profile. Direct orders in my account pretty much equals work I will start on promptly.
Instruction Overhead
Reading the instructions is a required part of the job. But, again, you don't really get paid for that time. You get paid for the writing and it needs to comply with the instructions, but time spent reading instructions is not time spent in production per se.
There are a few points to consider here:
- Article length
- Instruction length
- Persnicketiness
Article Length
I like pulling articles from the 4 star general author queue that are between 400 and 1000 words. At the 4 star level, if you write 500 words, you make $7.00. You make the same whether that is one article at 500 words or 10 items at 50 words apiece. But 10 shorter items will require you to read 10 sets of instructions, plus just pulling them takes time.
So, generally speaking, a single 500 word article will tend to translate into a higher hourly pay rate than 10 smaller pieces that add up to 500 words. Articles longer than 1000 words are more likely to require significant research or have more persnickety instructions. Thus, in my experience, that mid range of article length seems to be the sweet spot.
If I pull a 500 word article that has short instructions and requires little or no research, I may be able to finish it in about 30 minutes. If so, my effective rate for that article is around $14/hour. That is a respectable pay rate. At this point in time, I cannot yet sustain that for 40 hours per week. But, I can achieve a pay rate of about $14 -$17 per hour in fits and spurts. This is definitely causing my income to trend up and making my life more comfortable.
Instruction Length
When you open them up, some articles present a giant wall of text in the instructions section. But don't promptly nope out of it. Sometimes, only a portion of the instructions are relevant. At other times, it is a rewrite and most of that text is the body of the article they want rewritten.
So, shorter instructions are generally a better deal for the author, but it isn't always quite as straight forward as it seems.
Persnicketiness
Length of instructions and pickiness of instructions are often separate factors. Some articles specify key words and some don't. Some key words are harder to work with than others. Some key word instructions are more rigid ("this exact phrase") and some are more relaxed ("this phrase" but it can vary in specified ways). Generally speaking, it will take more time to comply with pickier instructions than with instructions that give more latitude to the author.
Writing Process
Develop some good habits. If you pull an article before lunch, thoroughly read the instructions and do any necessary research, then go to lunch. This can give you time to digest the information. When you come back, you will likely be ready to set to work promptly. This can be especially helpful with more challenging work with a substantial research component.
Also, it can be helpful to just copy and paste all the key words into the body of the article. Post them as many times as they are required at the very top of the article, then cut and paste into the sentence when you want to use one. This makes it easy to keep track of them. This is especially important for articles where they ask for key words, but those key words are not entered into the instructions in a way that gets them automatically tracked by the Textbroker system.
Before you submit the article, do a quick scan of the instructions to see if you missed some detail. Also, use a spell checker, grammar checker or other tool to "clean" your writing. Remember to not write anything at all in the "Title" box until you are done with all your writing and checking. This will prevent you from submitting by accident.
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