Well, I did something new recently – I made 9 squidoo lenses for someone. I don’t like to think of her as a client, because this isn’t my normal mode of business, so I don’t have “clients”. lol (she was wonderful to work for, so now she’s my friend) But, I wanted to try it and I am planning a trip to the Oregon coast soon so I could use some immediate money.
She gave me the keywords and instructions and I wrote the lenses and transferred them to her after payment with paypal.
I charged her $10 a lens. Each lens had an intro module, two text modules, a guestbook, and two other modules. The intro module and text module each had at least 200 words in them. So that’s 600 words. A pretty standard internet going rate for 100 words is $1, so translating that into 600 words would be $6.
Many writers can get a lot more than $1 for 100 words, and many writers deserve a lot less – but it’s a good starting point.
If we say the 600 words was worth $6 then creating the rest of the lens was worth $4 in this scenario. None of it was difficult and very little research was needed – I just read what was on a website and talked about it many times with emphasis on different keywords.
It’s definitely harder to make a lens for someone else though – I’m not normally a proofreader (I make very little mistakes when I write) and I never make an outline or anything like that (in school I used to write my papers first and create my outlines from my papers), but when I am writing for someone else I of course need to consider my words a little more carefully and make sure everything fits the tone and instructions the “client” (lol) wants.
So, I could have banged these lenses out for myself in about 20 minutes, but that didn’t happen here.
My fastest one was done in 36 minutes, using my secret weapon I’ll talk about in a minute. So, that’s almost $20 an hour. $20 an hour is not a bad hourly wage. In fact, I recently did consulting for a local businessman who wanted to set up his own affiliate site and I charged him $20 an hour.
However, it’s not what I am aspiring to at this point in my life, so I probably won’t do a whole lot more of these unless I charge more. If I charge more, I don’t know if I’ll get any takers 
How to Write Faster
I used Dragon Naturally Speaking, a dictation program. Now, I can type about 60 WPM, and that’s ok. But I can speak a lot faster. So, if those 600 words would have taken me 25 minutes or so to type (leaving time to think of what to actually say), I probably could do it in 15 or less with dragon.
I was a bit worried at first that I wouldn’t be able to get my brain going in writing mode without my fingers on the keyboard, but that didn’t happen. It was fine.
I also like dragon because there is no stress on my arms and fingers and shoulders and neck. I used to struggle with soreness after working a lot – but I don’t have that issue if I use dragon.
The only issue I have with dragon is it makes silly mistakes that aren’t that easy to pick up – like it would write close instead of clothes or leave off an s in a plural word.
Even with proofreading though, it’s still faster to use dragon. I wrote my entire Squidoo Shortcut to Money book with Dragon.
One more caveat I have about dragon though! You need a fast computer to run it. I bought it and tried to run it on my old computer – which was a 2.6 ghz with 2 gigs of ram and it was crap – it couldn’t keep up with me and it made a lot of errors.
When we got paid for christmas I took my squidoo money and bought myself a new wonderful computer and it is an i5 with 6 gigs of ram and it’s so awesome and it runs dragon like a dream. I love my new computer.
So what do you think? Do you make lenses for others? would you consider it? Do you use dragon? Are you thinking of getting it?
Keep making lenses! (p.s. I haven’t made any lately, but my pocoyo toys lens did pick up a little bit. It’s had 30 visits this week. All my avengers costume lenses are doing great. Still getting a few sales and plenty of traffic)
p.s.s. If you do want someone to make lenses for you, email me. I have a few friends who do it.
I have always wanted to try that software but I am afraid I will bumble through it if I speak and can probably type it faster. I should try it.
Yes, that was a major concern of mine too. But I was OK. That magical connection doesn’t just happen with our fingers
I’ve used the Vista built-in version, but it has difficulty with my Yorkshire accent – do you think that Dragon would be better? Cheers Janice
Dictating takes some practice. If you have Windows 7, you already have a great speech to text program built in to it. Try it out for awhile and see if suits you.
After some practice I found that it was all I needed. I have used Dragon and it is a good program. But again, play with the built in program to make sure you are comfortable with it.