How My Lowest-Paid Writing Job Got Me 5 Opportunities

The best thing I ever did for my writing career was stick with a low-paid gig.

Source: Discord bot. Prompt: 6 year old remebering [sic] what mother said about saving money — Upscaled by @Risuro (fast). Kind of a weird-looking kid but this is pretty much how I feel when I’m thinking about low-paid gigs lol.

I am a big proponent of writers getting paid what they’re worth. I do not advocate for platforms that require you to pay money to access jobs, nor do I encourage new writers to “write for exposure.”

Writing is hard. You deserve to be paid for it. End of story.

That all being said, I’ve been writing for a PR company for about a year now. They are by far my lowest-paying client — they pay me roughly half of what my next-lowest-paying client pays me per article, and other clients go well above that.

So why do I stick with them? I reflected on this for a while and came up with five reasons. I wanted to share them in the hopes of helping you figure out when it makes sense to stay with low-paying clients, and when you should go to greener pastures.

1. Get paid to expand your experience

I get paid to create ghostwritten thought leadership for industries like aviation, B2B SaaS, fintech, AI, health tech, martech, many other kinds of tech, etc. That means I get paid to get experience writing in all those fields.