Clement Chee

Over the past two months, I have been bidding on many different writing projects. I have tried in Rent A Coder, Guru, Get A Freelancer and also Elance. Among all, I like Elance the most.

However, I am not here to tell you which one works the best. I want to share with you what you can do when you do not have enough time to write articles.

Now I want you to understand that I am not only a freelance writer. I am also a virtual assistant and at the same time, I am in the midst of building my own niche websites. I found out that being a freelance writer is really eating a lot of my time. With the topic I am not familiar with, I will need about one hour to write a 500 word article and each article is only $1.75. Yeah I know, I am a bit slow. When I am doing work as a virtual assistant, I am actually charging $10/hour and if I work for 5 hours a day, I will have more than enough to pay up my bills.

Since this is a new revelation to me and I cannot be so irresponsible to ignore the existing projects I have in hand, I have finally come up with a method that helps me to earn some money and yet I do not have to write the articles myself.

The secret is using the power of outsourcing.

I have recently received a project that requires me to write 100 articles at $1.75 each. After writing some 33 articles, I realized it is taking me a lot of time and I am actually not earning a lot out of it. When I told my friend about the deal, he told me that I have to learn to work smart, not only work hard. He just thought the deal is too small for a writer like me.

Lesson #1: Work smart rather than work hard. When you are smart, you will also work hard.

After thinking about it and finally had enough of it, I have decided to post a project on Get A Freelancer with the offer of $1.30 per article. Amazingly, there are writers who bid for the project and I randomly picked one. I asked for a sample and I glanced through it. I thought it was okay. However, when I received the remaining of the articles, I was really disappointed that I had to rewrite all the articles for the writer. The worst thing is that, I have even paid her for all those articles.

Lesson #2: When you ask for a writing sample, make sure you really go through it, even you do not have much time.

After that, I chose another freelance writer and this time, when I received the sample, I really went through the whole article and make sure the grammar and the sentence structure are fine. This time, I am paying him $1.50 per article and I am earning $0.25 out of each article by being the middleman.

I am not writing this blog post to complain. I just want to tell you the importance of outsourcing. By getting someone else to write me the articles, now I have more time to do my VA work and also building my niche sites. Not only that, I also get to earn a lot more rather then bidding and fighting for the low-pay articles simply because I was desperate for money.

Lesson #3: Know exactly how much you want to earn in one hour. It will help you to decide whether the project is up to your standard, or not.