Gather round dear friends, readers, aspiring and fully-aspired copywriters – for I come today
to deliver a grave warning. Beware of those who live by the wordcount, the hucksters who reward quantity over quality, those who seek only to fill space, not the hearts and minds of men.
I was in your shoes, once. Yes, yours – the gal reading this in her living room, wearing the blue shirt and old gym shorts, eating instant noodles from a cup. I was in your position. You had the smart idea to become a freelance copywriter – so what did you do? You took to the infinite notice board of the internet to find work. Like me, you probably came across a fair few jobs that looked something like this:
Copywriter Needed for Some Junk
Writer required for filling up space on our hardware/tech/angling website.
Fee 0.0047p/word.
These kinds of gigs can be tempting when you’re just starting out. While the pay is often criminally tiny, they also don’t strike you as fussy with the kind of content they’ll deem acceptable. But to me, the low pay rate isn’t the main issue. Even if a client wanted to charge you a tenner per word – do you really think at the end of it, you’ll have a piece of writing you’d proudly display in your portfolio? Let me explain.
If your aim is to produce a single paragraph of written content that contains as many words as is physically possible, takes up more space on a webpage than a pithy and well-edited line, and (as a happy byproduct) is also the most profitable for you as a pay-per-word writer – there is more than a good chance that your written paragraph will end up looking a little something like this. To make as much money as possible, just keep on stuffing every single sentence with unnecessary filler words. It can also be helpful to find multiple different ways to phrase the exact same point, then repeat it over and over and over again. Finally, and most importantly of all; never, ever use a single well-chosen word when five words, clumsily selected and placed in an order that barely reads as English any more, will do the job just fine.
Here’s my point. The above paragraph took me about a minute to write. All I had to do was put my brain on autopilot and let the words tumble out of my fingertips. And while the meaning comes across okay - it’s also messy, difficult to read, and a lot weaker than it could be if I put some more time and thought into it.
Counter-intuitively, a short and punchy piece of writing will take a lot longer to produce – and will stick in the minds of your audience far better than the above word salad. It takes time to find the perfect phrasing, and a keen eye to see which words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs are dispensable. Anything unnecessary is only going to lessen the impact of your writing – like a handful of sawdust stirred into a delicious chocolate mousse.
Whenever I see a job that pays by the word, all I can think about is how it incentivises this kind of sloppy copy. So if you truly value the voice of your business, you shouldn’t be paying per word. Likewise, if you as a copywriter want to demonstrate the value of your own writing, you need to be charging by the hour, by the day, even by the project. Don’t underestimate the value of your time and expertise.
Because on its own, a word isn’t a particularly valuable thing.
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