One Month as a Freelance Writer

Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of my freelance writing experiment. Having reached that goal, I thought I would take some time to reflect on the past month.

This graph shows the number of articles that I have written over the past month broken down by day. It’s fairly easy to spot the weekends, since I usually don’t write on Saturdays or Sundays, though I did the first weekend of the month. The total number of articles that I wrote equals 94, which isn’t a bad start I think. The average number of articles written per day was 3.25, which is a number that I would like to increase. I hope that by next month I will have an average of 5 or better.  

In terms of money, I did not make my goal, which is about $50 more than I need to make to pay bills and pay for other routine expenses like groceries and gas. In fact, I didn’t even make half of that goal, but I’m still optimistic. The average price per article increased over the course of the month, and I now have three (and I’m interviewing with a fourth) clients who pay an average of a $1 per 100 words, which is quite a bit better than $0.30 per 100 words. I even got one contract where they paid $10 per 400 word article. Sadly, they only needed ten of them. Still, I made as much in week 4 as I did in the previous three weeks combined. If the trend continues, I could possibly hit my goal by the end of month two or three.

Nonetheless, the benefits far outweigh the meager salary. I enjoy making my own schedule, and I really enjoy having the time to do things like clean my house (yes, I know that sounds terribly exciting). Overall, I’m looking forward to next month and the months that will follow.