Why Freelancers Reject Low Paying Projects

Freelancers are a special breed of people – if they want to be successful, they need to combine technical expertise with sales and management skills. Choosing the clients you work for and the projects you work on are some of the critical decisions every freelancer has to make.

There is no doubt that everybody prefers high paying, interesting and easy projects but since such projects are not served all the time, you should consider other options. One of the most frequent options are low paying projects.

How Do You Define a Low Paying Project?

It is pretty subjective what a low paying project is. A low paying project might be a project that pays lower than the market rate for particular type of writing or lower than the money you usually charge for this type of writing. Having in mind that market rates for the same writing task vary a lot, not to mention the rates of different freelancers, it is impossible to say where the threshold between low and high paying projects is.

For instance, there are some forums and sites, where you will see article writing projects that pay $1-2 for original articles of 500 words or more. While many people, especially in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia, simply can’t afford to work at this rate, there are still freelancers, even from the above mentioned regions, who are willing to take such writing tasks.

I am not commenting on the fact that generally buyers get what they pay for – I am just noticing that for a professional writer these rates are unthinkable. I myself will never take such projects, even if I were starving to death.

A Low Paying Project Isn’t More than Nothing

Many writers are lured into a low paying project by the delusion that a low paying project is more than nothing. Seemingly this is so but is this really so? Nope!

“I can’t pay a lot but if I am satisfied with your work I can offer a steady flow over the next years”. Is this offer familiar? I occasionally get it and even though I try to decline it politely, I can’t always do it – some clients are such pests that they won’t stop bothering me. Their attempts to convince me that 1) They are offering great rates and 2) I am greedy, lead them nowhere because I know how much I will lose from a low paying project.

The major problem is that a low paying project takes time. And I get tired, even if I don’t make my best to please the client. Anyway, he or she is getting what she is paying for. But since I generally don’t kick clients in the middle of a project, I’ve got to finish the low paying task I have started. By the time I finish it, I usually get a couple of high paying projects. It is possible that the client with the high paying project can wait till I finish the low paying gig but this is not always the case and I can’t blame them.

If the low paying project is a big one, I might feel drained at the end. This means that I will need a day or two off, which adds additional losses for me, especially if I have a high paying project I must defer because of the low paying one. At moments like this, the only thing I need is a happy client, who is so satisfied with my work for cheap that he or she is willing to send me, let’s say 500 more articles at $1.75 each to write in the next week.

This is just my dream come true – low paying gigs that take me 24 hours a day and the promise that more of them are to follow. What a bargain! How can I miss it?

To some extent, I decline low paying gigs because I have the choice to do it. I hope I will never reach the point where I am happy that I can find any work whatsoever. When I don’t have a high paying gig, I prefer just to have some rest, so that I can work at full throttle when a good project comes my way, to devote time to my own projects, or to write a coupe of articles for sites such as Triond, the residual income from which will make me times more money in the long run, than the cents I will get for my exhaustion with a low paying gig. I know why I am rejecting low paying gigs!

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