How long does everyone else spend writing their articles?

[JakeStratham]

Don't charge by the word. Get the hell off of forums and contact potential GOOD clients who pay well (I charge $3-5k+ a sales letter), market yourself, specialize and quit settling for slave wages.

I'd rather be a greeter at Walmart than churn out content for .03 per word. Uck. (And I've been there before, the .03 per word, not Walmart).

You can find "some" good business on forums, but if you want a REAL business, you need to treat it like one, learn how to charge what you're worth and find clients willing to pay it.

This man speaketh the truth.

For every 10 freelancers who read it, 1 will consider it.

For every 10 who consider it, 1 will do it.

That one freelancer will look back in a year and wonder what he or she was thinking by fighting for table scraps. The others will still be fighting, or will have gotten burnt out.

 

[Zsaleem]

It takes me 3 hours to write a small article (less than 1k words).

 

[thebigo]

About an hour but most of the time i just outsource it out.

Title is the most time consuming as you need to do your keyword research to nail down the best word combination. From there create a quick outline...perhaps 3 to 5 points you want to touch on.

Break it down into pieces. At least that has helped me speed up the process.

 

[CoolHandLuke]

I'm at about 15-20 mins for a 350 +/- word article. Generally, I don't really care what the articles have to say as long as they are somewhat related to what I'm trying to promote. I'm good at bullshitting, so half of an article is based on my 'personal experiences'. The content doesn't really matter for article submission as long as it's approved and I get a backlink from it.

Content on my websites takes a bit longer, besides the fact that the articles themselves are much longer. I tend to do a lot of research, organizing and editing. If people enjoy the content on the main page it has a great chance of being syndicated.

 

[arnoldblack]

much longer than i used to spend on my school homework

 

[greyaisha]

To all of you content writers complaining about how you can barely charge $1 per 100 words or whatever scraps you guys are fighting over, here's something to think about...

good post!

I've had to make a living as a writer on a few occasions and I was always able to find clients that would pay me $15-20/500 words -- when I was starting out!

Good writers can charge insane amounts for sales letters, website copy and press releases. I really hurts when I see native speakers writing ezines for $2.50 a pop.

But back on topic:

If I do all the research first, then I can crank out my articles in 15-20 minutes if I'm focused. Then I leave them for a bit and come back to clean them up once my head is fresh. If it's content that I care about, then I won't write for more than 2 hours a day in order to keep the quality high.:rasta: