1.) Not getting a byline.

You know all of those ghost writing ebook projects you keep bidding on at Elance? They might be good for you now (they pay the bills), but they’ll come back to bite you in the future. Why? Simply put, you can’t publicly take credit for them. They’re attributed to someone else’s name, so it’s almost as if they flat out don’t exist in your portfolio. You know you did them, but your clients don’t, and that makes it hard for you to advertise yourself to others.

You need to search for opportunities outside of the bidding sites. They’re harder to get, but they’re worth it. You’ll get actual publicity that you can point to, live content that you can show to your prospective clients. It’s incredibly hard to build a portfolio on ghost written projects alone. Give it some hard thought the next time someone pitches one to you.

2.) Not building a website.

When all of your projects go through the bidding sites or Craigslist, you’re allowing those sites to control the conversation. That kind of sucks because I can tell you for a fact that a lot of people go to those sites to get a bargain. You can find good clients there, but the best ones are more likely come to you through your own website.

When you build your own website, you start to grab ahold of the conversation. You appear as an authority figure in your discipline. Add in a nice big portfolio, and clients will start to take you more seriously. Why get paid pennies for work you can’t be proud of when you can become a leader and truly get noticed?

3.) Charging too little.

I once spent nearly a month doing a project that amounted to 500 dollars. I will never ever do that again! Do you want to know what the worst part of it was? It was some stupid ebook project, so I never got a byline. I pretty much gave up a chunk of my life and walked away with nothing to show for it.

Think of it this way. There isn’t a chance in hell that a low-paying project will have any degree of prestige attached to it. Don’t think about how you feel right now. Think about how you’re going to feel in a few years. When all you’ve got in your portfolio are these low-paying article spam jobs, you’ll wish you’d spent your time doing something else.

4.) Burning bridges.

This is a hard one because you sometimes need to burn a bridge that’s genuinely making your life difficult. Just realize that there’s a cost attached to it, and it’s greater than the mere pay you’re getting. You want clients who will refer you to others. You want a badge of pride you can put on your website to show others that you did a great job. If you burn a bridge, you can’t do that anymore. What a bummer.

5.) Not being prolific.

I’ve already got 52 blog posts and counting. I keep adding more and more content to this website because I just have to do it. There was once a study conducted on artists. They found that the artists who made twenty paintings in a very short period of time had a better overall technique than those who focused intently on just one painting.

I think the same thing applies to writing. To get really good at it, you just have to write and write and write. I write at least a thousand words a day, and I think nothing of it. That’s the sort of mindset you need to have to be successful.

6.) Wasting time on uninspiring projects.

Have you ever had a project that just made you yawn the moment you began? That’s a big sign you need to do something else. My worst writing happens when I’m tired and uninspired. My best writing happens when I get the spark of an idea and just run with it.

Don’t do uninspiring projects. You’ll spend all day napping on the sofa, and you’ll have nothing to show for it.

7.) Not killing bad client relationships before they turn into something worse.

Some clients will drive you up the wall with multiple revisions and crazy deadlines. If I ever feel a constant pressure from a client, I think of a way to end the relationship. I want my clients to be critical, of course, but I don’t want them to be so critical that they’re tearing apart everything I write. If they’re that unhappy all the time, they should probably be working with someone else.

Don’t do what I’ve done and continue to work with these people, hoping everything will be fine. It won’t. You’ll just end up miserable when you get a project back and they’re angrier than ever before. These relationships are a cancer. They must die, and it must happen sooner rather than later.

8.) Not taking the occasional break from writing.

I started up an iPhone app development company because I wanted to have an extra source of income that wasn’t based on writing. I couldn’t be happier that I’ve done it. It’s made me more sane overall, and now that I’m back in the swing of things and blogging regularly, I feel a lot more inspired.

Writing is great and everything, but iPhone apps and computer code know no emotion. There are no revisions. They either work or they don’t work. If you get them to work, you win. Simple as that. I need more of that in my life.

9.) Freaking out when you don’t have any work.

Trust me, it’s going to be okay. The clients will come rolling in soon. If you don’t have any work right now, take your time and do something genuinely productive with it. If you sit around and worry about who is going to respond to your bids and emails, you’re wasting time you could be spending on more important things like building your web presence.

The Chinese have a saying. “No man who rises before dawn 365 days a year fails to make his family rich.” Just keep chipping away at this. Eventually you’ll get what you want, and it will happen when you least expect it.

10.) Not using the power of deadlines to work faster.

I am by no means saying you should procrastinate. What I am saying is you need to work somewhat close to your deadlines while spending the rest of your time on marketing yourself. I find that if I begin a project too early, I just end up doing it more slowly. I’d much rather feel the pressure of a looming deadline. It makes my time more productive.

Now there is one case where this doesn’t work to your benefit, and that’s when you’ve got a new client. New clients will want you to correspond with them right away. This is when you should impress them with your speed. Get it done as fast as possible, and there’s a good chance you’ll get more work from that client. If you wait until the last second, you’ll leave a bad impression.

At the end of the day, you have to think of your future self. You don’t want to find yourself looking through all the work you’ve done over the years, only to find out that there isn’t much you’re proud of. This is your career, after all. The projects you’re bidding on might pay the bills today, but what will they do for you tomorrow? You can’t build a career on spammy SEO articles. You need real writing samples. You need to work for companies and clients that matter.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to do a series on all of the different freelance websites, what’s good about them and what’s not so good about them. All of this is based on my experience working on each site, as well as a bit of research I’ve done on the side. Each site has its own strengths and weaknesses, largely based on the separate visions of their CEOs and management teams. Here’s what I’ve discovered.

What Odesk is trying to be.

In case you haven’t noticed, Odesk is the largest online freelance marketplace. To even say that they are a place for mere “freelancers” alone is a bit of a misnomer because I think they want to break free of that mold. I would say they’re trying to reinvent work as we know it. In the past, we called that freelancing. Perhaps we’ll continue to call it that in the future, but I don’t think the team at Odesk wants it to be limited to that.

Odesk grew to its size because it was the first of the online freelance marketplaces to successfully implement a pay for time worked feature. For many years, that was their unique selling point. Their motto was “an hour worked is an hour paid,” and it contrasted greatly with the fixed price projects you’d see on sites like RentACoder.com (now Vworker) and Elance.

Over the years, both Elance and Vworker built their work-for-time features in order to compete with Odesk. The idea was ripe for the times, but Odesk made sure to take full advantage of it while it was their primary selling point.

The key advantage of a work-for-time scheme is the ability to do virtually what most managers do in the office. They can hire a virtual team to handle whatever tasks they delegate, and they can do it in a secure way. If a manager wants to wean an employee onto the team, he or she can limit the amount of hours that person is allowed to work. Once the employee has demonstrated competency, the manager can increase that person’s hours.

Odesk’s goal is to make it easy to create virtual teams. For the most part, that goal hasn’t changed over the years, and it reflects quite strongly in the types of jobs you’re likely to find on Odesk. In my experience, nearly all of my Odesk jobs have been hourly. I join a team and get paid the hourly rate that I request. I have done a few fixed price jobs on Odesk, but they are few and far between.

The one thing I like about Odesk is that they seem to have built a better referral engine. That is to the say, the clients who are referred to me through Odesk tend to be pretty decent. I sometimes get a few bad eggs, but that’s usually better than searching through a bunch of project listings trying to find what I’m looking for.

By the way, there’s one thing you can do to stop the bad referrals from coming through. Just make your payment terms and minimum project size very clear at the top of your Odesk profile. Mine are in all-caps, and I give a strongly worded rationale for what I charge. If you do the same, you’ll get clients who understand what you expect from them.

The one thing I don’t like about Odesk is searching through the listings. It’s hard to separate the good ones from the bad ones, and once you’ve entered a bid, it takes you right back to page one. I’ve found myself going through numerous pages over and over again just to pick up where I left off. The listing section could use a site redesign for added simplicity.

What Elance is trying to be.

Elance started off as the premier place for online freelancers. They offer an hourly option as well, but it’s not as emphasized as it is on Odesk. The Elance site design evokes a more upper crust sort of feeling. This was more of a selling point in the early days of Elance, but it now appears as though the site wants to grow to be the size of Odesk.

One thing I really used to love about Elance was their enforced minimum project size for a fixed price project. They used to set it at $50, and it served to weed out a lot of bad listings. I also like that, as a freelance writer, Elance acknowledged that there’s a time cost to going after the smaller fish, and we deserve to be compensated for it (o.k. maybe that’s me putting words in their mouths, but it was nice).

Sadly, that $50 minimum is gone. I think it’s largely because Elance wants to expand, and they know they simply need more listings in order to do so. Some people are willing to go after those super small projects too, especially when it’s their first fish. It’s a double edged sword because Elance and Odesk end up annoying the crap out the more experienced freelancers who have a hard time finding what they want in an increasingly crowded sea of projects.

Hopefully, a better referral system will help both Elance and Odesk. I’ve gotten a few good referrals through Elance, but because there are less projects on the site overall, I tend not to get as many. I still find it valuable to go through listings on Elance when I’m running low on work. Elance’s site design is better for this process than Odesk’s site design.

Recently, Elance appears to be making more news on the technological front. They’ve appeared on several news channels to talk about the state of online freelancing (at one point mentioning my friend Ben Gran). Fabio Rosati, their CEO, talked about connecting Elance workers to telepresence robots to do jobs that might only require someone’s presence for a few hours. A person in Illinois could logon to Elance and hop into a robot (just like Avatar) to be the office receptionist. Pretty cool when you think about it.

Elance vs Odesk. Which should you choose?

It ultimately depends on how you prefer to work. If you prefer to clock in and work on an hourly basis, Odesk is the better choice. If you prefer to work more like a freelancer and take some risks on fixed price projects, you’ll find some good ones on Elance. I should also mention that Elance uses escrow, and Odesk currently does not. Escrow protects you from the clients who take a while to pay. They have to fund the project before Elance will allow it to begin.

Over the long run, you should have profiles on all of the freelance sites. Don’t just pick one. I spend more time looking through listings on Elance, but I get a lot of referrals through Odesk. To do well, you need to be everywhere.

I’d like to end by saying your online freelancing career doesn’t stop at Elance and Odesk. There are lot of other opportunities out there, and one of the best ways to get them is to start building your own website (just like this one). When you create content that targets the right keywords for your industry niche, clients will come to you on your terms. This is much better than getting clients through Elance and Odesk because you don’t have to pay any commission. The sale is 100% yours.

In life, the angry and the dissatisfied are the ones who ultimately run the show. They’re the leaders. Just look at someone like Steve Jobs. He was a complete and total asshole, and yet everyone respected him. Better yet, they downright feared him. His power over that organization, his unwillingness to settle for whatever was put in front of him, led Apple to create some of the best devices this world has ever seen.

I’m not so sure I agree with all this “professionalism” crap you keep hearing career experts spouting all the time. Maybe professionalism works for professionals, but I want to be more than that. I want to be a leader, and leaders are almost always total assholes when they need to be. They could give a rip about “professionalism.” Why? Because they’re the leaders. They get to do what they want.

Just look at a show like Shark Tank with Kevin ‘O Leary. I love that guy because he says exactly what’s on his mind, and he never apologizes for it. One time, a contestant appeared on the show, Kevin verbally ripped her business plan to shreds in mere seconds, and then she thanked him for his time. Kevin’s response was, “what are you thanking me for?”

When people waste your time, don’t thank them for it. Show them your anger. They just wasted your time. What are you going to do about it?

Oh, I can just see all the career experts circling up above. Here’s my advice to them. You’re career experts because you didn’t have the chutzpah to actually lead. So now you dole out advice on how to stay stuck in the same rat race everyone else is in. Those who can’t do teach. If you don’t do something to stand out of the crowd right now, you’ll be forgotten.

The world remembers people like Steve Jobs because he had the courage to offend.

And guess what, some of those people you insulted come right back to you with job offers. Why? Because they can see your passion. When you really know how to argue a point, to show them why you’re right, you are demonstrating the skills of a true leader. Sure, some of them will get really angry and walk away. They might even cry to their mommy and try to bring in Big Brother shut you down. But do you really need people like that in your life?

Get mad. Say what you feel. The world needs more of it. That’s the first step to being a real leader.

Now I’m not saying plagiarism isn’t awful and it shouldn’t be avoided altogether. It absolutely must be avoided. It’s highly unethical to take someone else’s work and pass it off as your own. It’s nothing any of us should stand for -not as clients, writers, or even casual readers. That’s not the point here.

I want to ask you this. What does your focus on plagiarism say about you? If it’s your primary concern, does it make you appear trusting and genuinely worth working with? I don’t think so, and I think a lot of other freelance writers would agree with me. When we’re looking for clients, we want to establish positive relationships right off the bat. We want a certain level of trust, and more importantly, we want to know that our clients’ heads are in the right place.

If you are primarily concerned about plagiarism, it says you deal with a lot writers who steal other peoples’ work. You could be any of these three, and we wouldn’t know it.

1.) You might be some college student looking to get a paper written for you. That’s unethical.

3.) The best case scenario. You’re a good client who lacks focus on what’s truly important when it comes to creating written content.

See where I’m going with this? If we know you have a solid business sense and direction, we’ll be more willing to work with you. Success attracts success. We want to hear about your plans to be unique in a crowded marketplace, to do something that hasn’t been done before. When you keep talking about Copyscape, we get a sense that you just want to be like everyone else.

So do us all a favor, and begin from a place of positivity. We aren’t children. We can at least be trusted not to steal someone else’s work. Hiring someone online is just like hiring them in the real world. You need to get to know that person. You have to develop a sense of trust.

I’m not saying you won’t get burned, but I think it’s better to take that risk than to automatically position yourself as a negative client. We have to take similar risks. It’s just the way the world works.

Start with trust, and you’ll always attract the highest quality freelance writers.

No, my issue is not with Tim Ferriss per se. It’s with the culture of raving idiots he has left in his wake. Hordes and hordes of spam creating minions have now become a daily reality for freelancers like myself.

The Dawn Of The Tim Ferriss Spawn…

How did all of this get started? It was a suggestion Tim Ferriss made in his bestseller, the Four Hour Work Week. He said it was a good idea to use Elance to find freelancers on a level of competence slightly higher than, say, monkeys with typewriters. Basically, if you want to promote your online health supplement business (nothing sketchy in the slightest by the way), your best bet is to hire an SEO article writer off of Elance for $10-15 per hour, $30 per hour if you’re really going for a good one.

And so the masses have responded in droves. They became “entrepreneurs,” inventing “products” and hiring SEO article writers to market those “products” through the search engines. There were those who so brazenly declared in their job postings that they were searching for a writer with a style like Tim Ferriss. From a distance, you could smell the suck-upery. Sometimes, when the air was right, I could detect a faint hint of douchebagery as well.

Here’s the crazy thing. Tim Ferriss did not achieve his success through merely delegating all of his tasks. He’s a pretty smart guy. When it comes to writing, it seems as though he prefers to do it himself. He wrote the Four Hour Work Week in his own time, all with his own words. Why did he do it when he could have been sipping martinis on a beach? Maybe he didn’t call it “work.” Much in the same way I don’t call snowboarding “work,” even though I’m doing double flips and corked things with grabs. Stuff kids are throwing in competitions.

All the same, there are now a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off. They’ve taken Tim’s message and interpreted it as a reason to hire out everything you do. It’s this crazy notion that you should delegate any and all possible tasks because any task is just anathema to you and your ability to live your life. A lot of people, especially the ones who troll the bidding sites, have taken this awful message to heart.

The More Than Four Hour Aftermath.

The good freelancers, the ones who want to make a decent living doing it, are left to wade through all the waste left behind by Tim’s little army. They create posts saying “article writer needed. 500 articles on weight loss.” or “200 SEO articles to market my internet marketing ebook product.” (Remember, one of the easiest commodities to sell, as Tim Ferriss suggests, is information. You just need to make up a bunch of facts and then spam every freelance site on the web to do it.)

If you’re using content marketing to sell a product, your blog should be more than some halfbaked attempt to score high for keywords. Don’t get me wrong. Keywords are important too. It’s certainly something I do and have done to get traffic and leads (my post entitled Elance Scam is among my most read). But here’s the difference between Tim and myself. I actually enjoy writing this stuff. I don’t need to delegate it out because I really like hearing the sound of my own voice. I think you should be this self-absorbed too. It’s highly rewarding.

Why should you hire a writer? I would hire a writer for the same reason I would hire a plumber. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing when it comes to pipes and water and turds. If you have the slightest inclination towards marketing and writing, by all means do it yourself. And if you can’t do it yourself, find someone who has a unique voice that’s ideal for your brand -not someone who can simply churn out dozens of articles for next to nothing.

Tim Ferriss, I respect that you’ve managed to free yourself from cubicle life. I do not, however, respect how you got there. Now that everyone wants to be just like you, they’re acting more like caricatures than the real thing. The real Tim Ferriss writes his own stuff. You know that.

Your stupid little army is pissing me off.

How Much Time Should You Spend On Bidding?

If you get really really good at it, you should do all of your bidding for the entire week within the span of just a few hours. I know that sounds crazy, but you’re looking through a huge pile of rejects here. The good ones will make themselves known with experience, and you’ll go right for them. I have a basic list of things I look for in a project listing, but it’s really an overall impression that strikes me. I could list all of the qualities of a good project. I just don’t think it would really help anyone. Each project is unique in its own way.

If there is one quality I’m looking for, it’s this mysterious sense I get that I can make somewhere near $100/hr on the job. Now I know you’re going to say I’m some kind of crazy extortionist, but hear me out. It makes total sense to go for $100/hr on every job. There’s a few good reasons for it.

1.) They aren’t paying your health insurance.
2.) You have to spend time prospecting.
3.) They aren’t paying your social security.

These costs add up. $100/hr needs to be the start of any negotiation. Sure, you can probably go down a little bit, but you aren’t being properly respected as an employee unless you’re making something near this amount. Now it would be different if the client were your only client, and he or she could give you enough work for an entire year. It would be different if they were paying your health insurance. It would be really really different if they could all pay their invoices early and on time. Sadly, our world does not work this way. $100/hr is your buffer. That’s the mysterious property you need to search for.

I also know that I realistically only have about 4 billable hours each day. That’s how most people operate too. Only a few of us can focus that much for hours and hours on end. If I’m not making somewhere near $100/hr for those billable hours, I’m selling myself short. I spend a lot of time working every day, it’s just that it’s not all billable time. It’s time spent on emails, pitches, and searching for new work.

I’m always on the lookout for the $100/hr potential. It means the client is serious.

What The Ideal Project Looks Like

The ideal project is a small fixed price project somewhere in the range of a few hundred dollars. It’s relatively small because the client isn’t an extortionist. It’s got a decent sized budget for what it is. It’s like a little nibble and usually nothing more. These types of jobs, in my experience, have always paid out the best.

The ideal job tends not to require a lot of research. It’s a short copywriting project. The big research projects tend not to have a big enough budget allocated to the research time itself. Somehow, to many clients, our thinking time doesn’t seem to have as much value as our writing time. I take it we’re being hired because of our brains, so I value it all equally. Skype, emails, thinking, writing – it’s all the same to me. It should be the same to you as well. Charge for all of it.

Be sure to be the first one to name the number too. That’s why I never bid on projects with a stated number that’s below my pay threshold. They’ve already thrown out the first number! The entire negotiation has been determined because they’ve set the context. Why even bother with that? You can’t win. The game has been defined so as to make winning impossible.

I’ve had clients tell me that freelancing should not be a lifestyle choice. Fair enough, but at the end of the day it all comes down to money. Some of them can afford your rates. Others can’t. That’s why you need to be the best. It means you’ll land the best gigs. You’ll get your rates because literally nobody can step in and do the job with the same presence and style.

So bid like a maniac! Look for that golden $100 per hour potential. You deserve it! Your kids deserve it! You are good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like you!

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m kind of bad at this one. You see, I like to woo my clients in with a freebee Skype conversation just to get things started. We’ll chat for a bit, and then we come to a decision on what to do next.

Now I’m beginning to rethink this position. It’s not that I don’t love to talk to my clients. I really do. That’s actually the problem. I like to talk so much that we often go off-task, and then I feel bad about charging them for the time. The truth is no matter how much I enjoy talking to them, my enjoyment has nothing to do with the business side of things. At the end of the day my time and expertise are worth money. I have to get paid.

Money has a funny way of organizing things.

My refined position is more like this. You should get paid for every minute you spend on Skype with your clients. Your getting paid is what keeps things on-task. You can spend a few minutes catching up here and there, but you’ve really gotta avoid these long conversation threads. They’re killing your day and making you less productive.

Watch out for these ones too:

The show-up-and-disappear client. These clients have too much going on at once to set a solid meeting time for Skype. They’re great if you can catch them, but the waiting really starts to drag.

The yak-your-ears-off client. Some clients want to get to know you… too much. They’ll yak and yak, but it doesn’t lead in any business direction. You’ve gotta bring things back on track or end the relationship.

The why-weren’t-you-on-skype client? And then there are those who expect you to be on Skype on command. They’ll give you no notice at all, and then ask you why you weren’t on Skype. My answer: I have a life.

Don’t be on Skype all the time. Get a life.

You have to take these kinds of clients with a grain of salt. If they say “meet me now,” and they don’t show up right away, turn off Skype, go do something else, and bill them for 15 minutes. It’s not fair to make you wait around like that. Over time, they’ll get the hint. Or they’ll hate you. Whichever comes first. (Hate is perfectly acceptable in this situation as it means you’ll be wasting a lot less time in the long run).

Don’t get me wrong. Skype is an awesome tool. It’s a great way to communicate with your clients all around the world. It can also be a monumentally huge distraction. I can’t actually do my work with Skype open because I know someone will inevitably interrupt me to talk about something. It’s not to say I don’t like being interrupted by my clients. I do. That’s the problem.

I now charge for all Skype conversations because I need less distractions in my life. If you’re reading this, and you are one of my many clients, you should be honored. It means you’re entertaining and interesting enough to distract me. Unfortunately, like all of us, I’ve gotta make money to do what I want to do. That’s why I’m charging you for my time.

Using arc4random().

Apple gives you an out-of-the-box random number generating function with Xcode. It’s called arc4random(). This function will generate any random number from zero up to the pre-defined maximum, which is 4294967296.

Now most of you won’t want to use arc4random() as is. You’ll want to use it to, say, pick a number between 1 and 10. To do that, you’ll tack on the modulus operator at the end. It looks like this.

NSInteger r = arc4random()%some_number;

So the following would give you any integer between zero and 3.

NSInteger r = arc4random%3;

In Snow Dice and Ski Dice, I use arc4random() to come up with a random number between 1 and some maximum. To do that, you just add one to the end of your function call.

This code gives you a random number between 1 and 3:

NSInteger r = arc4random%3 + 1;

Other uses of arc4random().

Xcode random number generation is the first thing you need to master if you want to simulate probability. Here’s a bit of code you could write to simulate the flip of a coin.

}

So you’re basically generating a random number between one and two. If the number is 1, then the coin is heads. If it’s 2, then the coin is tails. The probability for something like this is exactly 50% heads and 50% tails. It’s totally equal.

Weighting the coin.

But what if you wanted to load your dice? How might you go about adjusting the probabilities with the Xcode random number generator? Try out this code.

What does this do? First it generates a random number between one and ten. If that number is 1, we’ve got heads. But if it’s anything other than one, it’s tails.

Now 9 times out of 10, the random number won’t be one. It will be a number between 2 and 10. We’ve just weighted our coin. Tails occurs 90% of the time, and heads occurs just 10% of the time.

You can get as detailed with this as you want. If you want to give heads a 55% chance of happening, just change the range of the number generated up top to 100. Then any number less than our equal to 55 is heads and any number greater than that is tails. Easy.

Is arc4random() really random?

Is anything? I suppose we don’t really know, considering it’s not yet possible to take a complete snapshot of the Universe at any given moment in time. Having said that, random numbers in Xcode are not random in any real sense. arc4random() is what’s called a PRNG or pseudo-random-number-generator. It isn’t really random, but the program behind it is so complex that it looks random to most normal people.

The cool thing about arc4random() is that it never starts out at the same “random” number. Every time you start up your app, it comes up with a new random number. This is done via seeding. The first time you use arc4random(), it is automatically seeded with a number derived from the time and date you’re accessing the function. There’s so much variance in just a few seconds that you can practically guarantee you’ll never get the same sequence of random numbers over and over again.

Simulating probability is huge. It’s the only way I can keep skiers and snowboarders happy with the sorts of tricks Ski and Snow Dice come up with. Too much of one trick, and kids get bored. Too little of another, and they’re shaking for hours on end trying to get to their favorites. With arc4random(), I can tweak it to perfection. I’m sure you’ll find your uses too.

Like what you see in these tutorials? Got an iPhone app idea and need a developer? Contact me, and we’ll get started. If your idea is badass, I’m sure we’ll have an awesome business relationship.

Everyone seems to be under the impression that it’s easier to edit and shape someone else’s words than it is to write something new from scratch. Oh, if only that were so. The truth is, you have to ask whose words you’re editing. Were they written by someone who has experience as a writer, or are they the rambling thoughts of someone who is trying to get everything down as fast as possible?

I’m not at all opposed to people rambling. It’s quite awesome because it means the client cares enough to get involved in your process. But problems start to arise when the client expects you to shape and edit those ramblings in less time than it would take you to write a totally new piece.

Some editing is no different from writing.

When I’m working with my own words, I can generally edit them very very fast. There’s a simple reason for that. If my thoughts aren’t concise and clear, I don’t write them down. By the time they’ve made the page, they’ve already passed a number of my own personal tests.

It’s different with a client’s words. Not all clients have the ability to write clearly, and that’s a very good thing. If they could, there wouldn’t be a market for your skills. When editing your client’s words, you’re working with a lot of half thoughts, run-on sentences, and personal asides that can trash the flow of the piece.

Whenever I’m working with my clients’ words, I find myself spending a lot of time thinking up ways to bridge the gaps between sentences that don’t flow together. I’m deciphering half thoughts and paragraphs that don’t start out with a clear thesis statement. This is not the same as glancing over a bit of copy and finding a sentence that needs a comma. You’ve gotta think everything through.

Ironically, this process is actually a lot more time consuming than writing from a piece from scratch. That’s because you aren’t working with your own pieces of the puzzle. You’re trying to combine an incomplete thought with an aside, and that means you’ll need to make that thought complete before continuing on. At least when you start fresh, you get to design the pieces (your words, sentences, and paragraphs) so they fit together. Once you start, everything just snaps into place.

I usually spend at least the same amount of time editing a piece as I do writing it from scratch. You can love it or hate it, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Do I charge the same price for editing as I do for writing? Yes. It’s my time, and it’s valuable.

To be a world class editor, you need to be world class writer. Good editors don’t function as the comma inspector. They help their clients rearrange the piece (i.e. the puzzle) so it flows better. Quality editors take the time to organize ideas so they are more clear to the reader. This is not something you could program a computer to do (yet). It requires true creativity and a willingness to experiment with several different solutions.

Setting Client Expectations.

So if a client approaches you and expects you to do a quick edit, remember this article. Chances are your edit will take about as much time as writing the piece from scratch. In other words, clients get no clear cost or time savings from doing the writing on their own. The exercise merely helps them organize their ideas so you don’t have to guess what they’re thinking.

I tell my clients that editing takes about the same amount of time as writing. I tell this to them upfront, so the assumption isn’t hanging in the air. If they understand, great. If not, there are many others who do.