Sometimes the colors are even better after the sun has gone down. Sunday night I went for a run with one of my friends and then we grabbed a bite and a drink at an outdoor restaurant/bar, Loflin Yard. We made our way over to the river to catch the last light of day, and then I walked home to work on a freelance project.
Getting the ball rolling on the freelance work has been an uphill battle. Perhaps if I avoided cliche’s like uphill battle I’d do better at landing writing gigs – I don’t know. So far, I’ve bid on close to thirty projects. I’ve gotten two assignments and have three pending projects. The pending projects could very easily go away – I expect to land one that is a quick review and edit of a business letter. One of the two projects that I’ve been hired for was a quick app trial and review that took no more than half-an-hour to complete and they paid me like $16. If I could line my day up with projects that averaged $30/hour I’d do ok. Except there’s a whole bunch of time spent lining those jobs up and closing the jobs out, and well, I’ve only managed to line two jobs up so far. So right now, I’m pretty much working for beer money as opposed to rent money. I’m hoping that once I get a few client reviews I’ll be able to land bigger and better jobs. Building a living $16 per job doesn’t seem like it’s the way to go. As I’m learning, in order to get my bids in quickly, I have to be connected all the time – which is pretty much the opposite of having a more free lifestyle. All of that said, I’m hoping that with a little time and practice, I might get to a point where I get a good routine set up – or at least a routine that is better than spending a week bidding on projects all to earn about $100.
Reviewing the app was interesting because it shed some light on the world of online reviews. Basically this organization, a nonprofit I’ve heard of before, has built an app to deliver scientifically-based parenting content and tips. They were hiring 50 freelancers to write five star reviews of the app. As potentially shady as that sounds, they were clear that you would still get paid if you gave it less than five stars, and you were legitimately testing out the content. I watched the short videos (2 minutes each) took their quiz questions and wrote my review. The videos were easy to understand and the content was all stuff I had already learned about in my developmental psychology classes. I’d be curious to know their business model, because they just paid a grand to get a bunch of positive reviews of a free app that didn’t have any advertising on it. Perhaps, as a nonprofit, they’re work is grant-funded, and reviews are a deliverable… I was glad that it was a legit product and that I could give it an honest review. Though I do feel like I stumbled on to some underworld of product reviews that I was previously unaware of.
Speaking of product reviews… I just ate the store brand crunchy oat & honey granola bar with my afternoon coffee and it was barely a step above mildly flavored cardboard. There are some store brands that are as good if not better than the brand name brands (Kroger crunchy peanut butter is decent) but these granola bars weren’t even close. That is not the type of a review anyone is going to want to pay me to write.
I wish I had more to say. The weather is nice and I’m not taking full advantage of it. I had planned on having a productive day, but a potential client wanted something done in an hour and then said the info changed and he might not need me until tomorrow. I’ve done little writing of my own and little reading as well. I suppose if there’s a highlight, it’s that I cut up a watermelon yesterday – and it is delicious.