Taking a pause on paid content writing

I recently changed the layout of my website, because 1) it needed to be updated and modernized, and 2) I refocused it based on my goals.

One thing that I removed is my SEO writing page from my homepage. It’s still available to view here, but I’ve recently been thinking about not returning to paid content writing.

Here’s my disclaimer: I’m not sharing this to throw shade at content writing or to discourage those who want to pursue this line of work. In my experience, it doesn’t align with my current writing goals.

All I ever want is to “live by my writing,” which is a romantic notion, really. Right after college, when I realized that writing fiction and trying to get published is not a traditional 9-5 where I get paid a bi-monthly salary, I applied to as many writing jobs as I could.

The job boards didn’t have any open positions for a Fiction Writer. But it had a deluge of editorial assistants, technical writers, and web/SEO content writer positions.

The first writing job I bagged was as a web content writer.

I wrote copy for small business websites and gained valuable insights into SEO writing. It was a decent writing job, it was easy to do, and there was a small requirement for being creative about it.

Somehow, I thought this was going to be it. This was the kind of writing that would feed me for a long time. Boy, I was wrong.

In the two years I spent there, I didn’t feel like I was moving anywhere. I wasn’t growing as a writer, and I wasn’t even close to writing anything that I thought was publishable. So I quit and decided to teach.

Fast forward five years, and I got married, moved to a different country, and needed a job. I tried teaching for a while, but I became jaded with teaching jobs and education in the U.S. as a whole (a story for another time).

At this point, my energy to work on a novel returned and amplified. I decided to look for a writing job that can help me improve my writing skills while also earning a paycheck.

I went back to content writing, thinking it would be different this time because I’m in a new country. I ended up working as a freelancer for two different creative agencies and accepted a couple of independent clients.

Working freelance would allow me to be more flexible with my schedule while still earning a steady income. At least, that’s what I thought.

While the work was similar to my early days as a web content writer, I was now writing articles of 600 to 1000 words that required deep, subject-matter research. My topics ranged from best dog groomers in the area and tips on saving money to comparative analyses of weight loss medications and the effects of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour on local economies.

The payment structure also varied by client: sometimes I was paid hourly, while others paid by word or by article. 

At this point, I realized that if I wanted to make $18-25 an hour as a freelancer, I’d have to write eight articles a day. Not to mention, revisions were not included in some of the payment structures.

It also opened up my eyes to the web content industry. It’s crazy to me how some of the world’s most popular, highly visited content sites also pay their writers with extremely low rates.

I tried to make it work for a while, continuing to write my own novel after hours. But I didn’t last long. Writing and researching all day was mentally draining to the point that I didn’t have the energy to work on my manuscript at all, let alone open a Google Doc over the weekend. Ultimately, I realized I wasn’t achieving my goal.

If I wanted to get any writing done on my own time, I had to make a conscious decision to stop pursuing content writing jobs.

Eventually, I quit and applied for a traditional 9-to-5 job. My mindset was that I would take any job as long as I got to write my novel.

It all worked out, though. I ended up landing a publishing job by accident and learning more about the industry, but I lost it due to downsizing. 

Nowadays, I work a tech job, which ironically, my web content experience (and tech savviness) helped me land. It requires a different kind of creativity, one that doesn’t really interfere with my energy to write.

I attribute my growth as a writer to freelance content writing. It changed the way I looked at technical writing, which I thought I could never do. It allowed me to appreciate the level of research writers do behind each article. It helped me respect those who do this as a full-time job, writing new and different articles every single damn day just to keep the web traffic flowing.

Despite all that, I consider my novel to be my top priority in my current writing, so I won’t be going back to working as a freelance content writer anytime soon. Not that anyone’s tripping over themselves to hire me anyway!