I came into freelancing on the heels of an unusual job writing item copy for an adult product store. Naturally, I was a little embarrassed when I first started there, but a few items in I realized that even “marital aids” were products when all was said and done; the same formula applied to writing about unmentionables as it did to, say, a flower vase. What does it look like, what does it do, why does a customer need it – the holy trinity of product description questions helped guide me past my initial shock and I became very quickly comfortable with the subject matter. Hundreds of descriptions later it became time to find a new job, but I went out with an unusual skill set to my credit.

Now, I’ve written for distributors, manufacturers and even performers in the adult industry, all without batting an eye. I noticed that other writers in my position erred towards brash and filth. This was a perfectly legitimate approach in some cases, but used too broadly it ran the very concerning risk of alienating shy buyers. I crafted a classy and sensual approach to the descriptive words and turns of phrase I used, and it opened – and continues to open – many doors for me.

Naturally, I had to weigh my options about being “out” and admitting I wrote these sorts of things, which in turn put me at a risk for alienating potential clients and companies because of the sort of work I was attached to. After I considered the pros and cons, I decided to be somewhat discreet but still include the work in my public profile. I don’t use my byline in work I do for clients, so the risk is minimal to them while the chance to get my skills advertised to the public puts me in a good position to gain more niche clients.

My advice to new writers is to pick a niche or specialty that they already know a great deal about, or one that interests them. Certainly there are popular topics right now, such as selling gold for cash online, but choosing that means you’d be competing against all the other writers who have discovered the same trend. Model trains, breastfeeding, even cooking on a budget can all be areas of expertise if developed and marketed properly.

So – what’s your niche?

After being bombarded by ads for the Dragon NaturallySpeaking program, the part of my brain that had relegated Dragon to service in the court reporting and medical transcript sectors started pondering a little deeper. I can certainly talk a great deal (just ask my husband!) and I began to consider the usefulness it might hold for me. After all, I owned a set of headphones with a swing-down boom mic for my video gaming habit (even a writer needs to take a break!) and it certainly couldn’t be that hard to set up.

However, Dragon NaturallySpeaking costs money. When you freelance for a living, you learn to do without a lot of bells and whistles in the lean times, and a fancy program was not a strict necessity. I hit the trusted roads of Google to seek out a free alternative, and was delighted to discover my computer already held a speech-to-text gem of a program called Microsoft Speech Recognition. I booted it up, strapped on my headset and waded through an especially trying tutorial before I got to dip my toe in the futuristic waters of talking directly to my computer.

I didn’t imagine it would have more positive implications beyond staving off carpal tunnel, but boy was I wrong. Even with my 65+ WPM typing speed – a fairly impressive rate, in my opinion – I can’t keep pace with this wonderful program. It’s intriguing to watch the words simply pop into existence as they leave my lips, not form slowly letter-by-letter as they do in manual typing. I timed a few pieces and was surprised to find that I was finishing assignments faster by using Microsoft Speech Recognition. I could select, delete and even replace words with a simple spoken command, jump to the end of the document, and even spell out words that my muddled former-jersey accent couldn’t communicate properly.

The best part of the program is that it learns. While this does not bode well if Terminator ends up being prophetic rather than simply an entertaining movie franchise, in the short term it makes my life easier. Eventually “are roddick” became “erotic” consistently and I was making less and less corrections to the sometimes-hilarious and autocorrect-like renderings of the program.

There are times, such as this one, where I prefer the “old fashioned” way of typing, but for my work it’s become a 70-30 split between Microsoft Speech Recognition and manual typing. If you freelance, I highly recommend you try it out!

When you spend hours in front of a computer every day, especially while working from home, breaking up the monotony with delicious snacks becomes that much more important. When procrastination threatens to send me rooting around in the fridge, I tend to buckle down and invest in some tasty snacks to keep my butt in my chair and my brain focused on the task at hand.

A recent transplant to NC from NJ, I’ve come to enjoy the plethora of Farmer’s Markets my new southern living affords me. It was at one of these markets that I ran into the affable and eponymous Chad, who so kindly insisted I sample some of his popcorn. There were a lot of flavors in his booth, but my inherent need to smack around my palate now and again drew me to the dill pickle version. I got a little dixie cup and munched on my sample on the way back to the car. Halfway home, I regretted not springing for a bag.

Dill Pickle Popcorn from Chad’s Carolina Corn is the best thing to happen to popcorn since caramel, and that’s saying something. The light, crispy crunch of well-prepared popcorn meets the salty, tangy kiss of a really good deli pickle, with none of the “pickle juice” cleanup to contend with. You know how really great popcorn starts out piece by piece and ends with cramming handfuls into your mouth like someone’s going to take it away from you? Chad’s Dill Pickle is like that, only you’re further moved to growl, doglike, at anyone that comes too close to the bag.

I killed damn near half the foot-and-a-half high bag on the way home from the market, and my partner and I made quick work of the other half while I was typing out some articles. With our propensity for food experimentation, I would love to pair this up with something else in the near future – maybe a dill-pickle-popcorn covered apple, or chocolate covered dill pickle popcorn for when I crave a bunch of different tastes at once.

Bags start at an astoundingly affordable $5, so pick up your bag (and your newest addiction) asap.

Ultimately, working with large, national businesses provides me with stability, but it sometimes lacks the personal touch and unique experience that drew me into freelancing to begin with. That’s why, living in a town full of farmers markets, festivals, and street fairs, I’ve taken a slightly more unusual tack with potential clients – beyond the usual brief pitch, I offer an unusual alternative that many other freelancers haven’t considered.

I feel passionately that it’s important to balance shopping at mega-marts with patronizing local businesses, both for financial and ethical reasons. That’s why I almost always offer a barter for my services, right out of the proverbial gate. The benefits are many – I get food, soap, services, car repair, even rent discounts for something I’m familiar with, the client is more likely to hire me if they can “buy” my writing services with stock on hand, and I typically get some word of mouth advertising in the deal as well. I’m supporting my local business, and it’s considerably easier to write about something I can physically eat, experience, or visit over something I have to examine through the internet.

The next time you’re looking for clients, take a few cards and be willing to give a nod to the very beginnings of commerce – item for item, skill for skill. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you end up with!

While it is true that a writer, novelist, copywriter, copy righter, designer, and freelancer can all be facets of the same person, it’s considerably more likely that only one or maybe two apply when speaking about a single entity. I’ve decided to clarify a few terms in this post so those that may be confused as to the meanings can get an easily broken down guide.

Workers of any sort: as with any potentially business-related interaction, bear in mind that you are in a position to gently (and without condescension) educate, but should always refrain from taking offense over a simple misnomer. It’s a positive thing to be proud of your work, but a negative thing to let it go to your head!

The terms are below, for your reading pleasure. Anything in italics is courtesy of Dictionary.com .

Writer: A person who writes. Period. This can reference anything from limericks written for personal enjoyment only to giant ad campaigns for million dollar companies.

Freelancer: A writer, artist, or other skilled tradesperson who sells services to different employers without a long-term contract. A freelancer will often be doing several small jobs for different companies at the same time.

Copywriter: A person who writes copy, typically for the purposes of marketing and advertisement.

Copy: the text of a news story, advertisement, television commercial, etc., as distinguished from related visual material.

Copyright: the exclusive right  to make copies,  license, and otherwise exploit a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video, etc.  A good way to distinguish this from a Copywriter – a writer of copy – is simply to break down the word. Someone who has a copyright has a right to make copies!

Now I’ve got that creeping feeling of being really taken advantage of, one I haven’t felt since I left e-Bay over their unconscionable ever-inflated fee structure. Apparently freelancer’s introducing what is essentially pay to play – where once the bids were ordered by time (i.e. first to bid showed up first), then number of ratings (fair in theory, but how can a beginner hope to be heard when some users have ratings in the hundreds and reply to -everything-?), now they are charging for the privilege of getting your bid first.

They’ve made similar moves to eBay’s comedy of errors, going so far as to introduce essentially nonsense features for real hard-earned money. Want to put highlighting on your bid? That’ll be $1. Want to take one of our tests to prove you know English, even though the timer totally gives you time to cheat/google – making it essentially worthless for actual assessment? That’ll be another $2. Want a special profile page to show off your portfolio? That’ll be $15 a month. Oh, and by the way, most of that’s on top of the 10% we take from every bid you win.

Now, if I’m understanding this crazy concept correctly, you put in a “bid” for how much you’re willing to pay to show up on top. Freelancer even helpfully tells you, much like eBay, how much more money you need to pay them to be on top. The top 3 bidders have to pay freelancer the amount they “bid”. The TOP bidder gets their money refunded when they accept and complete the project. The other two? Well, they’re just out of luck, aren’t they?

This structure is designed to invite a “bidding war” in which no one really wins except freelancer. They not only get to keep the ever-increasing bids from the two losers of the top 3, they get to keep, at the least, the money from the top bidder until he or she completes the project, and possibly forever if the project never goes to fruition. This is, of course, in addition to their normal fees.

My problem is this – being in the top spot hasn’t, and never will, guarantee you the job you’re bidding on. In reality, the first bidders in are usually foreign copy pools that dramatically underbid domestic writers and often have glaring spelling and grammatical errors in their bid text. The time difference gives them a leg up on US-based writers when jobs are posted at odd hours, but overall they will generally leap on just about anything posted. Employers don’t take something just because it’s at the top of a list – I’ve been 15th, or 20th and still grabbed jobs because I’m polite, well spoken, and I don’t mind following through. I bid only on jobs I want and can handle, not every blessed one that shows up on the site. This “bidding” system does nothing but take advantage of existing site users that are either disadvantaged by the shift to reviews-first sorting or aren’t of the right caliber to be seen and triumph on their own merit otherwise.

My mother always told me never to take a job that wanted you to spend money to start earning it – and unfortunately, it was bad faith actions like freelancer’s she was warning me against.

Kitty Coffee Mug, $21.50 at CabinPottery.com

I may not be the charmingly earthy writer holed up in a sweet little log cabin working on the great American novel, but I do like to feel the part now and then. Hailing from the land of log cabins and charmingly earthly writers (at least according to the happy half of most Stephen King novels), the aptly-named Cabin Pottery adds a little Maine magic into their awesome stoneware. Producing everything from platters to steins, they have a unique method that leaves striking silhouettes of animals like cats and herons in organic browns against blue and greens.

I was given a green cat mug in a secret Santa swap a few years back, and damned if the thing hasn’t towed the line every day, taking cup after morning-motivating cup of tea without complaint. While its lesser mass-produced cousins have fallen in the line of duty, chipping and cracking under the pressure of my tea addiction, my cat mug has stood firm, issuing forth just enough warmth to the surface to soothe my keyboard-strained fingers. I love everything about this little sidekick of mine, from the thick sides to the pawprint-embellished thumbprint at the top of the handle.

If you only get one mug for your coffee/tea habit, you want one of these babies hanging out beside the keyboard, trust me.

This mug, with motifs that include lobsters and maple leaves, can be purchased over at CabinPottery.com for $21.50 – $24

Features

Textbroker.com, or TB as users often call it, has added a forum on the writer side that is flying in the face of basic forum logic. Since time immemorial, putting up a forum has lured angry, hostile, and often ignorant people in droves. Strangely enough, the site users have circled the wagons and made a firm stance that they will not tolerate or participate in non-constructive arguments, snark, sarcasm or other tools of the much-feared forum troll species. Being that the forum is still new, only time will tell if they’ll be able to keep the proverbial walls up, but I’m rooting for them something fierce. It’s a great place to exchange information, and even your super-observant WordChick has been schooled in a few things there.

Textbroker has also added a proofreading option for work. A very difficult test, based on the AP style guide, is necessary to gain entrance – not one, but ALL possible correct answers must be chosen for each question, and a 100% score is needed. The common consensus seems to be that the test is hard enough to stump even veteran TB’ers, and with the pay set at .003 a word, most are opting to pass it by and concentrate on articles.

Presence

TB Brass has made a strong showing on the forums, answering questions and participating in discussions alongside writers. We’ve been given peeks into what their development team is up to, and it mirrors a lot of the wants and needs of the community. This, to me, shows a level of intuitive forethought that sides heavily with writers – a refreshing change in an industry where we are often ignored and swept under the rug in favor of clients. I’m eagerly awaiting what the future will bring for TB, and have every intention on being there to enjoy it.

Payment

It appears that payment can now be given in the form of the aforementioned “debit card”, paypal, moneybookers, or wire transfer. Naturally, I opted for paypal (better the evil you know than the one you don’t, I figure) and my payment requested on the 1st was in my account on the 5th. There are limits – your withdrawal must be more than $30 and less than $10,000, but the vast majority of amounts that freelancers have in those accounts are going to be well within those limits anyway.

Site Organization

I still feel their user interface needs work – the payment/account button should be more prominent, for starters – but it’s a lot cleaner and easier to use now. I can’t put my finger on exactly what they’ve changed, but I think they tidied it up because they appear to be merging several sites together to boost their membership numbers, such as a UK and Aussie based branch. The job listings are less of a headache to read, and being that the job listings are the reason we’re all there, it’s a step in the right direction.

Features

Freelancer.com has incorporated a “test” system, where freelancers can go through a site-hosted test on everything from grammar to English to freelancer.com orientation. Naturally, these tests cost money – real, actual dollars – which I think is a little ludicrous. Once you’ve shelled out your money to take a test that proves you can effectively use the language you’re supposed to be writing in for 99% of the site jobs, you get a little icon that shows up beside your name when you place bids. I took the English proficiency and Freelancer proficiency tests, which proved I had mastered my native language and basic comprehension skills – hooray! Honestly, these tests should be FREE and MANDATORY, placing users into proficiency levels that clients could specify. That way, it would weed out the parasitic “writers” that couldn’t put a sentence together with a tub of glue.

The site has also apparently made room for a portfolio page for writers, which is indicated by another icon beside your name. I went to make my own last night and got the unpleasant news that one needs to be a “gold member” – at a cost of $25 real, actual dollars per month – to make one. The benefit is mainly that I get a 3% chunk taken out instead of a 10% one when I win a bid, but I’d need to win a lot of bid money just to break even. I’m skipping for now – as you can see I’ve done just fine setting up my own portfolio on www.ThatWordChick.com!

Conclusion

Jury’s still out on Freelancer. I want to love them, but they have to make some changes that benefit the freelancers – instead of themselves, monetarily – first.

Starting

Thanks, at least in part, to a popular name, Freelancer.com is one of the most well-known sites for freelance writers. They have an almost dizzying array of categories, no shortage of available projects, and in general offer a lot of opportunities. The first freelance site I joined, it isn’t a bad place to supplement one’s freelance income, but it is definitely not at the top of my list. Here’s my review of Freelancer.com, as a writer.

Pro: You sign up as you would on any other site, no filter to “prove” you are a writer.

Con: Other people also don’t have to prove they’re writers.

Rates

This is one area that Freelancer is unique in, as the entirety of the site is based on a bid system. A requester will post the job they’d like to hire for, along with a budget. The budget will be expressed on the bid screen  as “$30-$250″, or something similar. The freelancer can then browse through not only bids left by other freelancers, but their specified time period as well. If the lowest bid is $100 to be completed in 10 days, you can try to outbid by placing a bid for $90 to be completed in 9 days, and so on.

One perplexing (or perhaps not so perplexing, when one considers the cut freelancer.com takes) thing is that no bid under $30 can be placed. Frequently, and maddeningly, you’ll see small projects where the requester passionately explains that they can pay no more than $20 or $25 for a very small project (sometimes this is reasonable, other times not so much) and can’t accept bids for more than that amount. With a bidding system in place that literally won’t allow that, you have an inherent problem.

Additionally, bidding over the amount you’ll actually accept poses a problem to the freelancer, as the fee taken out reflects the larger amount, not the amount in private agreement between you and the requester.

As an aside here, the bidding process on freelancer.com is much like getting bodily hurled into a tank of angry, toothless sharks. You’ll see the majority of bids come from (and this is being kind!) illiterate “writers” – most of whom are foreign – that cut and paste completely irrelevant information or very poorly spelled text in their bids. I’ve seen excerpts from a dating ad, acai diet drink, and even a list of skills utterly useless for writing, such as a fondness for astronomy and violin music. They will put a vague sentiment, such as “I am ready to work project 4 u. I am Rameesh and I write very good sentences so fast. Please to choosing me4 ths projct” – complete with text-speak and bad spelling intact. Additionally, there are writing “houses”…literary sweatshops, a term I often reference..competing, with hundreds of feedbacks that the individual writer couldn’t hope to go toe-to-toe with. You see, the more feedbacks a writer has, the higher he or she is shown in the bidding list, regardless of what they bid.

Pro: Budget and competing bids are clearly visible.

Con: Can’t bid over $30, Absolute mess of fellow bidders, Heavily skewed towards those with feedback.

Payments

This is easily the worst feature of Freelancer.com . For anyone using this site as a first foray into the world of freelancing, don’t be surprised if you get so disgusted you consider just walking away. Writers doing these freelance industry gigs make little enough, but Freelancer.com holds up a multitude of flaming hoops to jump through before you even see what little of your money there is left.

1.) They take your money. Freelancer.com skims 10% off the top of YOUR money, in addition to what they take from employers. If you win and are awarded a bid for a $100 project, they take $10 right away out of your “Freelancer Account” – an in-site tally of what you have. Don’t have anything in there yet because it’s your first job? Well, then you’re looking at an ugly red -$10 before you even write your first word. After you write your piece, give it to the requester, and they approve it, they’ll pay you through the freelancer site. Then, using our example above, your account will show up as a nice green +$90.

2.) They won’t give you your money. Okay, so we have $90, great! The cable bill’s due next week, lets take that sucker out. Uh-oh, what’s this?

CUTOFF TIME
After consultation with our users, we’ve moved the cutoff time for weekly withdrawals from 10th June 2009 onwards to 5pm Sundays EDT (New York), corresponding with 7am AEST (Sydney). For your payment to be processed on Mondays/Tuesdays, please ensure your withdrawal request is lodged before then.

IMPORTANT
The very first withdrawal is delayed for security reasons. First withdrawal by any method is delayed for 15 days since the day, when funds were added to account. Next withdrawals are sent without delays.

Leaving off the fact that it looks like they hired one of the incoherent toothless sharks from the bidding wars to write the thing, from what I can gather this says that the first time you want any of your money, you have to wait for over two weeks.  After that, it looks like they have restrictions on what day you can even request your money to get it in any sort of orderly fashion.

Oh, but what’s this? A page to sign up for a pre-paid debit card I can use to take my money out? Well that’s fantastic! Wait, no it isn’t.  It’s a scam that charges fees for everything under the sun and takes upwards of a week or two to even give you your money.

Oh, and to add insult to injury? Freelancer.com charges YOU a DOLLAR every time you transfer money to your paypal account, a process that will still take more than 2 weeks, at least initially.

Pro: There…really isn’t any.

Con: Ridiculous wait times, alliances with strange scammy “credit card”, their fees are taken out before you are even paid, fee to transfer your own money to paypal.

Layout

This is another real downside to Freelancer.com. Oh, sure, there’s tons of jobs, but if you didn’t have the foresight to select the category that job is in, a minimum of 48 hours beforehand, you can’t bid. Sign up after? Still can’t bid. When you’re signing up, you have to literally click everything you can possibly imagine that relates to your skills – and with a restriction on how many you can select or change (unless, of course, you shell out $20 / month to be a “gold member”) this can be tricky. Say you write marketing copy for the IT industry. Well, if the requester wants copy written, he or she may put it in an IT section because they think, “Hey, this has to do with IT, it must go here!”; obviously, you wouldn’t have signed up for IT work, and you have no chance at that job now.

On the bidding page, there is a “project clarification board” where people post writing samples sometimes, and a way to contact the requester via private messages. I was on the site and had done several jobs over two months or so, and bid on about three times the ones I actually won, and I had no earthly idea how to send these private messages. Eventually, I got hold of support, who guided me to the “Inbox 0/0″ beside the requester’s name and I figured it out. However, it shouldn’t take a reasonably intelligent and adept woman that long to find something she was looking for – how about a “send a private message to this requester” hotlink, guys? Don’t you think that’d be slightly more intuitive?

In addition, despite recent posts claiming they are fixing the problem, scam requests like “Need 50 high quality credit card numbers” and countless “jobs” for people to post on craigslist, list on eBay, transfer funds through Western Union, etc abound, making it an unfriendly and dangerous place indeed for the naive newcomer to the site. As a rule of thumb, no requester should EVER ask for your real name, address, phone number, login codes  or “act on my behalf ” requests to ANY site, or essentially anything personal about you. If they do, it is a scam to steal your identity.

Pro: Again, not really any to speak of.

Con: Hard to navigate, Have to choose your available skills very carefully, no way to add a skill in order to bid on a job you find, lots of illegal/hacker type jobs listed.