The Exorcist and Earning a Writing Wage

I just went through a bit of a lean period and was actually close to opening that emergancy bag of dried split peas we keep in the cupboard. Luckily, a few clients paid up and I avoided the dreaded Split Pea Soup. I just can't eat that stuff, its because of that scene from The Exorcist movie. You know the one where she vomits up all this green Split Pea soup. Uggh. I also have a thing about Spagetti, but that's a different post.

Working Wages
Just a week ago while I was going through this slump I sat down and decided what I needed to earn each day, month and year to meet my goal for this year of only $12,000-which is about a few thousand dollars more than I scraped together last year.

I would need to earn $50 a day for twenty days out of each month to earn $1,000 a month to get Ta Da! $12,000 at the end of the year. That's not so hard, right?

Weeelll, maybe it is a little bit. I'm still only making about .02 to .03 cents a word. On a 500 word article I should earn about $10. Okay, good. On most of my web content articles of that length I'm bringing in $12 per article. Still way below the recommended .10 cents a word minimum by those guys over at Six Figure Writers but still higher than $10.

But! I have to write 4-5 of those articles just to meet my $50 minimum for the day. That's about 2,500 words a day just to make less than minimum wage. Honestly, sometimes its hard to make myself sit down to write all that when I think about the low wages.

Once again I have shown to myself potent evidence that forces me to start looking for a higher paying section of the online market. There must be better paying online gigs out there, somewhere...

Just for Fun
I sat down and figured out what I'd need to earn per word to make varying amounts per year.

To earn $120,000 a year I'd need to bring in about .16-.20 cents a word and type about 60,000 words a month or the equivalent of 3,000 words a day 5 days a week at that price. Lot of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but not completely unattainable. Hey, I'd be writing the equivalent of a short novel every month!

To earn a comfortable $40,000 a year I'd need to bring in about .10 cents a word and type only 1,500 words a day. Much more comfortable and I'm only doing that 20 days out of the month. In other words I'd be making $165 a day or $3,300 a month. Obviously, to earn a $120,000 a year I'd have to make $10,000 a month!