Comments on: Applying for Freelance Writing Gigs—Popular because it Works

By: Trying to Overcome the Nerves - blog @ spacebarpress

Trying to Overcome the Nerves - blog @ spacebarpress — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 14:07:03 +0000

[...] in the open, let’s see about getting me over this fear. The other day Yolander wrote about applying for freelance writing jobs as part of a series she’s doing on the subject at All Freelance Writing. And I must say I was [...]

By: Carol Tice

Carol Tice — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:53:04 +0000

Hi Yolander –

I’ve taken a similar approach and gotten a high percentage of responses and good gigs as well. I find focusing on jobs that call for my particular expertise dramatically ups the response rate.

You can read about my system for wading through the online job ads quickly at My Online Writing Job-Search Rules and When To Break Them: http://caroltice.com/blog/20

Carol Tice
http://www.caroltice.com
http://Twitter.com/TiceWrites

By: Lucy Smith

Lucy Smith — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:31:42 +0000

I’ve often wondered about that age-old advice to apply for as many gigs as possible. Though I get the point that firing lots of bullets makes it more likely to hit the target, surely, if someone’s gonna hire you, it’s because you’ve put in a quality application and they think you’d be a good fit, which isn’t really relevant to how many jobs you’ve applied for.

It’s like all these recession news stories I’ve been reading over the last year or so where people moan about applying for 200+ jobs a month and not even getting an interview – in that case, maybe you shouldn’t apply for so many and focus on making sure you’re likely to be the best candidate?

By: Julia

Julia — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:24:07 +0000

One of the reasons I’ve been procrastinating hopping back onto the freelancing bandwagon is this idea that I needed to apply to so many jobs in order to find work. Since I’m working full time right now that’s just not feasible. But trying to focus on quality versus quantity, now that’s definitely feasible!

Thanks for the results on the experiment. I know it’s helped me out.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:29:13 +0000

I love when people test stuff like you did and talk about it. I’m stunned that the pay was so low for these people, however; that’s drastically low, in a way.

I say it that way because I’ve started a blog writing service where I charge a flat fee for the month to write someone’s blog. When I think about how much I’m actually getting per word I realize it’s relatively low, but blogging is easy for me and I like having a guaranteed amount coming in for the month. I need to up the number of blogs I’m writing for to get a bit more financial balance, but it works well in supplementing other things I want to do.

Thanks for sharing your tales.