Do you want to be rich? Choose another job.
Take writing as a job has a little problem, all people know how to write, so some clients want to pay just a little money for a text. And, yes there are only a few people that know how to write properly, but sadly this is less noticed by these clients that look at write content as an expense instead of investment.
There are two kinds of clients:
The ones that don’t want to waste time in writing.
These clients don’t give to the writing the importance it deserves. They just have a lot of things to do, and want their website updated for a low price. They want to pay $3 per 500 words of original content, and they are doing you a favor when hiring you.
They want you to follow SEO rules, search and upload an images with the text, post in their blog both the image and the text, and maybe do their laundry.
These clients are not real clients. If you want to be a professional freelance content writer you can’t take these jobs. And, it is OK for them want to pay that little. There are people who have writing as a hobby, and maybe they are OK with these low fees. Market and world are big enough to all kind o clients and writers.
But, if you want to have a proper lunch each day with the money you are earning with writing, you have to skip these clients. It is likely that you even won’t cover the time of writing them an application for the job.
The ones that want a professional writer working on their content.
These clients won’t hire you if you offer a fee of $3 per 500 words. Why? Because they want a good text and they know you can’t be a professional with that price.
They want to pay as less as possible yes, but they prefer a little more expensive price and be sure you will be a good writer.
These ones are your real clients, the others are just a way to waste your time.
Think that if you work so cheap, you will need to write so many texts that you will hardly have the time to proofread your production. Work for nothing decrease your quality.
Take into consideration that whilst you are writing for almost nothing you could be looking for a real job.
Keep in mind that if you don’t value yourself nobody will.
I am not saying you have to be expensive, I am talking about a price that covers your costs. There are a lot of false advisers recommending writers to fix a high price. We are not talking about this, we are talking about to skip job offers for $2-3 because this is the price of your time to read the job bid and maybe write an email to the employer.
Here you can read some tips about what aspect you need to take into consideration when creating a budget.