Adventures in Freelancing
Jan 29th, 2010 by Carlos
As I mentioned recently, I am getting a little bored of personal finance and I’m more interested in something bigger. Something like earning more money on the side.
I’ve tried this before, but I wasn’t thinking big enough—so I figured I would share my previous attempts at generating some alternative income.
Freelancing
I found someone looking for a person to translate a medical book about something I knew nothing about to Spanish: IBS. I estimated the job at a month or so and asked for $250. And honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. The estimate was way off and the money was probably too low.
In the end, it took me about two months and a lot of back and forth with the client. But I did manage to turn it into a regular, monthly gig to translate the doctor’s newsletter. I was happy that it turned into regular work, but I again made the mistake of underpricing. I charged him $30/month for around three to fours hours of work.
Not good—that’s around $8/work.
Month after month, I did the work and got paid my $30. And every time I dreaded it—it was boring, monotonous work. Maybe if I was getting paid more it wouldn’t have bothered me, but when I realized what I was making on a per hour basis, I knew I had made a mistake.
So I asked for more money and the client balked. Then we went our separate ways. I learned a lot about freelancing and set myself up for a better experience if I decide to freelance in the future.
Online Tutoring
This was a while ago and I don’t know how I found them, but a Canadian site called Brainmass was out there that provided help for high school and college kids for their schoolwork. You had to be accepted into the program by proving your credentials in whatever field you had experience in (I did English and Writing).
Here’s how it worked: students posted their problems or questions and you “claimed” the problem by logging in and taking it. Once you did, you posted your solution for the student. Not bad. Every job, on average, was probably worth $10–$15.
You could also contribute to a “library” of solutions. This compiled common problems that students could “check out” like a book whenever they needed it. The best part was, more than one student could check it out at any given time and you’d get paid every time.
It was rewarding and matched my schedule. Because I was in grad school I had time to sit around and claim a bunch of work. But eventually all the “problems” students had were “do my homework” or “write my paper,” which I was not about to do.
Turns out I do have morals, and I quit the program. Total income: probably around $100.
Miscellaneous
- I’ve made $10 a pop on Usertesting.com
- I’ve made around $70 referring people to ING Direct
- Adsense has made me less than $250 since I started this site
- I make some money writing for Wisebread depending on how many pageviews my articles get
- Some ads on this site make me a monthly income, but not much
- I’m an Amazon Associate, so if someone buys something via a link on my site, I get paid a minute referral fee (last year I made $70).
What I’ve Learned
I’ve been thinking too small. Everything I’ve tried so far is too much work for too little a payoff. It’s just not worth it.
It’s time to start thinking big and put a lot of energy and thought behind it instead of getting nickel and dimed. Sure, my alternative income is diversified, but the income is so minute that it doesn’t really register.
Donate sperm so we see how much you can get.
WC – If you get in the Alexa Top 200,000, I’m pretty sure you will be able to make at least $300/month from your site. Once you crack the Top 100,000 it’s more like $1,000/month AT LEAST b/c everybody and yo mama will ask to advertise on your site. Trust me on this. If you want to join the Samurai Alexa Challenge, feel free.
I think it is absolutely FANTASTIC you are a regular Wise Bread contributor. I had that goal once, but my 2nd article got rejected for being too controversial, so I stopped. Since then, I’ve just written for myself. I hope you are making money from them, b/c I know they are making good money from everyone.
What about pitching some stories to Chicago magazine? I think you might be able to find people who have connections there…
I can empathize with your medical book translation experience. I do a bit of video work on the side (camera operation, video editing, etc.) and agreed to take on a small editing project. The pay wan’t much but it was a cool gig for what they were wanting to do.
However, the simple, five-minute video I initially assumed it would be turned into a TV-show length, extensively edited video that required 50+ hours of work… all for the earlier agreed upon price of “a couple hundred bucks”. Do the math.
I finished the first video, and grudgingly took on the second project thinking it would be faster this time. Wrong. The second video was even more time consuming due to poorer quality footage which I had clean up before I could even start editing.
I ended up dragging out the process further after I calculated the hourly wage and lost motivation to keep going. Every extra hour worked lowered the wage further. It was an enormous time sucker (I have a full-time day job) and the client was very high maintenance, and would disappear for a while without giving input then would show up and expect a 24-48 hour turnaround for new changes.
Worst of all, just when I thought the project was over, something else would need to be tweaked or changed or enhanced (“just one more thing…”). It was worse than Freddy or Jason; just when I thought it was dead, it was back in my queue!
I did finally finish the second video, after which we mutually (and amicably) parted ways. It was not a great experience, but I did learn a valuable lesson on what jobs to take and which to pass on in the future.