It isn't all as bad as the title of this post sounds. Actually, my Buildipedia.com writing goes well. I had a conference call with the editor this afternoon, and he gave me another assignment. Don't know if it will be a $100 or $250 article, but I suspect the former. Ah well. But, with the articles already turned in and in the queue to publish, I've earned in the four figures there in just two months of publishing, three of writing. This new one and the one on asphalt pavement solar collectors will make it all the more. Can this continue? I hope so.
Unfortunately, Suite101.com does not go as well. Page views have recovered. They are up 46% in September over this time in August. September revenues, unfortunately, are barely ahead of August. I guess students clicking on my history and poetry articles don't click on ads. Oh, for the detestable flat belly ad to come back, and a bunch of anorexic high school girls viewing my poetry articles to click on it!
There's something I'm not getting about web writing for profit. For fun, yes; all my articles are enjoyable to write. But either I'm not getting the concept of search engine optimization, or writing to lead people to click ads, or finding profitable niches. The graph I've added to this article is a new stat I'm tracking, page views per article per day, for 2010. It's now below where this was in 2009.
I could accept this easier if my page views were strong and growing. But they are not. In this blog post I gave the same stat. Comparing the two graphs you can see I'm no where near the peaks I was at late last year. If I grasp for a silver lining to this cloud, it's that I'm about equal or a little ahead of last September based on page views per article per day. I guess I can get motivated for a while based on that.
The most disappointing aspect of freelancing is complete absence of any work other than these two gigs. The one I thought I had in March fell through. I find solace in that it wasn't for much money. I don't want to do more content writing. If I have to freelance to build a platform so that someday I can sell a novel or non-fiction book, I need more than what I've got. Why don't I have more? Mainly time, I suppose. Time to find and study markets. Time to formulate ideas geared to those markets. Time to prepare dynamite pitches. Could I get work—even print work—if I could find the time to pursue it? I think so, though of course I have no guarantees.
So maybe the bloom hasn't come off freelancing so much as it isn't reforming on life in general, as measured by time to do what I want to do. Not much I can do about that, I suppose, except to carry on and hope for a window, somewhere, sometime, that allows for a bit more of what is needed for a writing career.
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