Before entering the glamorous world of mainstream journalism, I used to be a freelance content marketer. To those of you who are not familiar with the occupation, it's pretty simple. My job was to create content for websites and blogs and help market them to the targeted audience. I created web pages, wrote blog posts and designed graphic media for clients all over. Then, I helped them publicize that work online through the use of various publications, news outlets and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. All the work I did was anonymous, meaning I wouldn't be expecting a byline for all the good work I did. Instead, I was paid in cash. Of course, given the choice, I would take both the byline and the cash, but such was the job. And it wasn't perfect. It paid my bills, but thinking back, I realize that I primarily did it for the accomplishment. Being able to look at nice-looking corporate websites and online magazines and knowing within that despite never being officially credited, I made some contribution to their success. Alas, my fondness for my previous profession didn't last too long.
One of the conceived advantages of being a content marketer, since you don't receive proper credit for your work, you expect the monetary compensation to be more substantial. You would be surprised. It's not easy to get noticed by the right sort of clients, especially when you can't officially associate yourself with a reputed publication. As a result, most of the clients I would be called by in the beginning were ignorant webmasters, too busy to be bothered to write their own content, too poor to be able to hire full-time editors and writers to do it for them. They were mostly businesses, static web pages advertising products and services. And then there were some blogs that existed merely as secondary additions to the primary website that advertised some sort of corporate undertaking. Most of the websites were really small. Not surprisingly, the first job I ever got offered and ended up refusing, was for a mere $2/100 words. I was told that the payment was "quite decent." As you can tell, business wasn't great when I started out.
Starting out as a content strategist can be a daunting task at the beginning. Building up your own brand in a world of anonymity and competition can be dreary and exhausting at times.
There are a number of reasons behind that. Surprisingly enough, the fact that I was completely new to the profession wasn't even in the top ten. The real reason was much more complicated. It was the lack of unity amongst content marketers who never bothered to establish a proper acceptable payscale and enforce it amongst clients. There were some among us who wrote decently and charged a $150/500 words. And then there were those who worked way harder and delivered way better but still brought home a mere $10/100 words. I wouldn't call it bigotry, but there was some sort of pseudo-racial discrimination at play here. Generally speaking, people looked down on writers who came from non-English speaking countries, probably because the general idea was that they didn't know the language well enough. That conception didn't change even if the said "non-native"came with a PhD in English Language. People from Europe, Australia or the UK were automatically granted a higher position, even if they were just freshmen working their way through college. It eventually reached a point were clients would just "ask" these non-native writers to do their work for them, without any payment at all. Instead, the client would simply "recommend" this writer to others. To our utmost horror, some people were so helpless that they agreed. And I am talking about 2010. If you don't believe me, check out some of the job listings on Freelancer.com's Writing section and you will see what I mean. Maybe it didn't start out as racism, but that's what it soon grew up to become. It was unfair to the point of cynicism, and it bugged me.
You must be thinking, "But you are an American, aren't you?" Yes, but that didn't mean that this bigotry didn't end up affecting me. You see, after a moment, many clients realized that it was mostly foolish to hire a Western content marketer for $20/100 words when they could get the same quality of content by exploiting the hell out of a non-native at just $2/100 words. The situation was cross for us marketers, and some people decided to take advantage of it. My price was more than fair from my perspectives, but my clients didn't agree. It was either accept a lesser pay or be ousted out of the profession altogether. But I didn't lose my patience, yet.
I started out cherrypicking from the better ones amongst the poorly paid jobs I was offered at the start. At this point, I just wanted to build up a nice resume more than anything else, I would make money later. I decided that it was more profitable to partner with an established content marketer first and work for them instead of seeking clients on my own. The work flowed more steady that way. Unfortunately, that also meant that the pay was even lesser. My earnings ranged from $10/100 words in the beginning. I didn't lose hope. At least I could show off my work to future clients in the form of a portfolio.
And then came the Non-Disclosure agreements. This meant that not only did we receive no credits or bylines, we were now legally obligated to never disclose the fact that we worked on a particular project with a client at some point. All the better paid projects came with an attached NDA. Thankfully, I found home with a few large content marketing platforms by that time, and they gave me a decent salary without any of the NDA business. The problem? Since we had about 3 or 4 writers working on the same project, none of us got to claim the work as our own in a portfolio, rather, it belonged to the organization we worked for. No portfolio obviously meant a more difficult market seeking out new clients on my own.
In the cutthroat world of being a freelance copywriter, the only real way to survive competing with millions of faceless opponents is to create a brand of your own.
I struggled like this for about a year. Thankfully, with an occasional gem every now and then, I managed to build up a decent enough portfolio and launched my own website to seek out clients. I paid a huge amount of money to Google Adwords to advertise my services to potential clients. It wasn't very rewarding at first, but then it picked up. Now I had all sorts of high profile clients coming my way. A $500 project for creating a website that was about 3 pages long. Writing blog posts of just 200 words for about $50 per article. It seemed like my career had turned a corner. It was far from it. Since most of the clients were one-timers, and the content was to be delivered and accepted first before payment was made, some of them denied the moral obligation to pay at all after work was done. I lost hundreds of dollars this way. I worked days to finish up a complete project only to have a client run away on me with all my work. The less shady ones would at least come up with a pathetic excuse to pay less because they were "unsatisfied with the service". It was the internet after all, no way for me to pursue the client legally and seek justice. Of course, I enforced a strict code and asked for 50% of the payment before work was done once I had enough authority, but that didn't save me from getting robbed off the remaining 50%. Not all clients were bad, there probably were many more good days than there were bad days, but I soon decided that the bad days were just not worth it.
Imagine this: You are a competent writer who can write about almost anything under the sun and make it look like you actually know your stuff. You spend hours perfecting each project by creating quality content that people will enjoy reading. You spend even more time trying to publicize the heck out of it through every social media platform and publication you have access to. Then, after all this, you end up either exploited or cheated, let alone being appreciated with a bonus for your good work. Meanwhile, web designers made $$$ creating templates that look like this. It was just offensive. How long before you grew tired of such a pathetic work environment? I know I did, and it didn't take long.
As a marketer, I always knew that it was a better option to build a brand of your own, creating quality content for a reliable publication on a particular niche and becoming an authority in it. I was good at writing news, even better at op-eds. I remember growing tired of it all one day and sending an email to our very own Liz Heron, Executive Editor of the Huffington Post, with a pitch I had been working on for days. To my surprise, it was accepted. Despite all the rumors of how hard it was to become a writer for a quality publication, I was invited to contribute for a well-established news outlet and redefine myself as a freelance journalist. It was an opportunity that I would never turn down. That's how I began writing for the Huffington Post, but that's a story for another time.
Being a content marketer was hard for me. I am sure there are many who didn't share my horrible experience, but this was my story, my confession. What's yours? Let us know in your comments!