Finding My Writing Voice After Being a Hack for 13 Years
After years of writing for others. It’s time to learn what it means to write for myself again.
I’m a hack.
I’ve churned out hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of words on everything from elliptical machines to artificial intelligence, quickly and for pay for the last 13 almost 14 years.
My journey into hack-dom started when I was in grad school, and I needed extra money to supplement my teachers assistant stipend. I begin writing for a now-defunct company that had a contract with ehow.com to write 300-word how-to guides for $10 a pop.
From there I joined Demand Studios (remember them) and begin churning out content for $15 an article and, through the writing company, was assigned to their new vertical Livestrong.com to write health and fitness content for $25 per 500-word article.
Through the years there were other, now defunct content mills such as break.com ($8 and article) and Today.com ($5 an article and bonuses for pageviews). There were private clients that paid $10 to $25 per article and a much longer stint with Scripted.com that only just recently ended.
Now, Scripted was a great place to work if you were a hack. They paid better than most content mills ($50 for 550 words), and you could also set your own rates and get private clients.
Through them, I regularly made 30 cents a word with clients who directly contacted me for work, and there was even a kill fee involved if I wrote for a client and they decided they didn’t want the article.
While Scripted paid much better than many other online writing sites, the work wasn’t any different than what I was doing when I was working for Demand Studios. I churned out content on topics that I knew very little about in a short amount of time for upfront pay.
And the truth is, I was good at it.
I had a system in place to get 500 words researched, written, edited and uploaded in no more than 45 minutes for new topics, 30 minutes for topics I had a passing familiarity and 20 minutes for those that were in my preferred niche.
Writing 3000 to 5000 words a day was a breeze, and I could determine how much I could make a day by how many articles I churned out. And best of all I didn’t have to pitch, cold-email, negotiate or hunt clients down for pay.
As far as I was concerned, it was the perfect type of writing for me. Unfortunately, businesses and Google algorithms change, and the golden days of writing surface-level content for upfront pay are over.
Companies now want longer more in-depth content to rank better in the search changes. These same businesses don’t want to pay for the longer, more in-depth content, wanting to stick to the rates they were paying when it was keyword-driven content they were after.
However, a good hack knows that writing for pay is a numbers game.
Either you are going to churn out a lot of simple content quickly for low or so-so pay, or you’re going to have to raise your rates and write fewer more labor-intensive pieces. Since I only started freelance writing out of necessity and I was never interested in being the type of writer who wrote sales letters and company blogs, I realized it was time to hang up my hack card.
And so here I am, after 13 years and an untold number of words later, asking myself what everyone does once their previous career is no more:
Now what?
Mind you, while I was a hack for my paid writing, I’ve always been a writer outside of the work I was paid to do. Financial responsibilities, being a single mom and the primary caregiver for an ill parent, necessitated paid writing work I could (mostly) count on.
However, in my free time, I’ve maintained several blogs over the years and took on projects that were more in line with who I wanted to be as a writer. I’ve been writing since I was seven — — it’s the one thing I know I know how to do.
But when you’ve been writing for so long in other people’s voices, for other people’s businesses to achieve other people’s goals, you sort of lose yourself and who you are as a writer.
I don’t regret being a hack. As I’ve mentioned, I’m good at it. But now it’s time for me to be something else. To fall in love again with the craft that had me spend hours upon hours writing stories, creating characters, and obsessing over dialogue as a child.
I’m currently on a mission to figure who I am as a writer, what’s my voice and what moves me to get up every day and put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard as the case may be.
It’s a journey with no end in sight, but I’m hoping somewhere along the way I discover the writer I once was or the one I want to be before I started writing such masterpieces as 5 Best Dog Foods For Your Yorkshire Terrier.
This is How I Made $135 Dollars in My First 30 Days On Medium
Only seven to nine percent of writers make at least $100 each month on Medium. I did it in my first month. Here is what I did each week to achieve my goal, hopefully, you can use my journey to $100 a month to achieve yours.
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