Nobody else wants to call it. Calling it doesn’t solve anything. But it does help the millions (now) of individual freelance contractors understand what’s going on.
The inexperienced reader will glance at the title and suspect me of hyperbole. The veteran readers, who have been following my work since the turn of the century, will appreciate that this is 20+ years of exclusive work as an eCommerce contractor talking.
Freelancing, so that we suffer no crisis of clarity, is fucked.
And to be more clear: I speak of eCommerce as the vast majority of online-only businesses; websites and channels supported by ad revenue, referral links, subscriptions, etc. From 20 years back until just a few years ago, you could set up a web domain, plug in a CMS, plaster it with ads, and make money provided your content wasn’t just useless spam. None of this applies to brick-and-mortar commerce, nor to selling physical products or paid services. THOSE markets are all doing fine, albeit with their own hangups.
But – eCommerce as in BLOGS, and the blogging bloggers who write them, are dead and buried. Not only do I feel confident that eCommerce as a stand-alone industry is in recession, but it might be in depression or even killed entirely and only come back in some other form someday – perhaps subscription services will take hold in its place.
The eCommerce recession, as I’m calling it while summoning all my remaining optimism, was the result of a perfect storm of clashing catastrophes, and indeed, the global market isn’t looking that much better. Just rest assured, Work-From-Home / remote job seekers / freelancer veterans: You’re not going crazy. It isn’t just UpWork or Fiverr or Linked-In or Indeed or whatever. It’s EVERYTHING! Nobody is getting any work, no money to spend to hire, no work to do.
After the jump: The Perfect Storm that Recession’ed eCommerce:
Ugh. I live in Iowa, Des Moines, mere miles from the incident which I am about to recount. The incident being the holiday destruction of one Baphomet statue at the Iowa state capitol building. This drew national attention, and here I’m obligated to speak up. This is because I am the only person you will ever get the sane version of this story from.
Everybody else in this story is a goober.
Spoilers: They Caught the Guy
The man who busted up the statue has, as of the very week of this writing, been identified, apprehended, and charged with a hate crime. The fellow happens to be 35-year-old Michael Cassidy of Lauderdale, Mississippi, this goober.
Who just so happens to have run for office in Mississippi, and possibly might yet still. No really, we live in a country where a guy charged with masterminding insurrection against the nation while in office as president is running for president again, the rulebook is all torn up and fit for fireplace kindling now.
I would be tempted to pour more derision upon his head were not everyone else in this story a goober too. Certainly goober Governor Kim Reynolds shares some blame; she spit out the following statement after the goobers at the Satanic Temple, tongues firmly in cheek, managed to file the right forms to get the statue erected, as they have on other occasions and capitols.
While she didn’t explicitly say “somebody come out here and maul this scary goat-man with a baseball bat,” she didn’t make it sound like removing the statue would ruin her day either. That could be taken as invitation, verily incitement. Indeed, it turns out Iowa’s code on hate crimes
729A.2 Violation of individual rights — hate crime. “Hate crime” means one of the following public offenses when committed against a person or a person’s property because of the person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability, or the person’s association with a person of a certain race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability: 1. Assault in violation of individual rights under section 708.2C. 2. Violations of individual rights under section 712.9. 3. Criminal mischief in violation of individual rights under section 716.6A. 4. Trespass in violation of individual rights under section 716.8, subsections 3 and 4.
is almost specifically aimed at punishing this kind of thing. I’m pretty sure goober Kim hadn’t read this code at the time of her statement.
Anyway, despite the possibility of pardon from one hard-orange-R to another, readers may rest assured that justice of some degree is, if not served, at least warming up in the microwave.
Yes, I said the Satanic Temple are goobers too. Don’t cry tears for me that they’re trying to push back against theocracy blah blah, they do a shit job of it. Pulling clown stunts like this does no favors for Civil Rights. I wouldn’t want the Satanic Temple to be a theocracy either; they get everything as wrong as the Christians do. Before you take these modern-day Yippies too seriously, remember they sell branded hot sauce. How pious.
BUT we have to back up here first…
I’ve had a dozen conversations by now with my fellow Iowans that boil down to:
ME: (spots religious pamphlets at cash register) Can I bring in some Baphomet pamphlets too?
Cashier: NO! Baphomet is in league with Satan!
ME: Um. He is? Where does it say that?
Cashier: (throwing me out of store)
Well I’m right, dammit, and when it comes to religion, when I say there’s no such thing as an American Christian, it’s because I’m sick of arguing with goobers who think Jesus was white, blonde, American, owned a gun, and hated everybody but rich white male Republicans. These same goobers insist that Satan has red skin and pointy horns and a trident.
This is bad:
But the answer is not this:
After the jump: Your complete schooling on Baphomet:
Take a look at the map at the top of this post and tell me what’s wrong with this picture. That map shows all the countries in the world with FREE university tuition. The United States, the richest nation on Earth, is not one of them. The nations which provide free college extend beyond the usual northern European utopias which typically best the United States on every aspect. Even nations like India, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, those all have free tuition.
Somehow, all these Republicans come out of the closet, soapbox underfoot, to talk about how bad Student Loan forgiveness is for the economy, while also having had their own PPP (the Paycheck Protection Program, circa COVID-19) debt erased. Naturally, we’re all having a social media fight about it.
For example, in that thread, Representative Vern Buchanan brags that he was “a blue-collar kid who worked his way through college,” while neglecting to mention the boon that most blue-collar kids don’t get, $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven. This hypocrisy goes on and on, Republican after Republican…
The American public is finally waking up to this inherently stupid state of affairs, where 3 generations of American professionals have been railed by the education financing system. And yet, as mad as you all are (good for you, my cosmic blueberries) you have no idea how much madder you should be!
Good morning, and how are all my cosmic blueberries? Here, if you need a mood fix, there’s a gallery of hippie New Age good vibes I threw together on an old IMGUR post.
Sorry for not catching up more, but things have been busy. Blah blah blah, Pete doesn’t blog enough, blah blah, I don’t have time to boost my own site because I’m too busy boosting my clients’ sites.
I’ve also been hypnotized by the endless Doomscrolling feed of world news like the rest of you. Ukraine Putin Russia COVID climate change. Bad news all around. I’ve been telling you all it would get this bad years ago.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much of the year 2022 I prophesied, years and years ago. I’ve been tracing this line between Trump and Putin since Sally Yates got fired – yes, remember her, New Years’ Eve, 2017?
Oh, I am sure that we are all shocked at Vladimir’s Putin’s INSANE and senseless massacre of Ukraine, as well as his own soldiers, citizens, economy, etc. But, boys and girls, I have been following this yellow brick road a long ol’ time. Won’t you join me on my adventures?
Who the bananas has time to blog on their own site this time of year? In between tying off the big holiday rush and jamming out my vanity projects, any non-compulsory work falls behind in priority after my dedicated #GenX slacker lifestyle.
Yeah, right. Actually, folks, in the content marketing / online blogging business, I type all day and all night until I fall asleep with my beak on the keyboard typing “zzzzzz” and then my adorable wife drags me to bed, from whence I spring into action hours later to gargle espresso and run back to the keyboard. How can you turn down extra money this time of year?
Video Review Debut: Boom! (1968)
When last we joined my escapades, I was as amazed as everyone else to have pulled off my first video review for 366 Weird Movies, with Legacy of Satan. Well, hold your horses, because I videoed again this month with a video review of Boom!(yes, it’s spelled with an exclamation point, like Yahoo!) (1968), Liz Taylor and Rich Burton.
Because those 2 movies will totally have fan overlap, right? Don’t leave now, I have done much more than this in the past month, after the jump.
Howdy gremlins and goblins! Just a minute while I talk to some old people:
(This domain goes back to 2006, and I still get fanmail from my old material, so I know some old-timers have followed on. You folks know that my longest-continuous blogging gig is 366WeirdMovies. So if you know my review history, you must be on pins and needles wondering which film I selected for the very first video review. (Actually I know you all are wondering, I’m just stalling for the suspense.)
Anyway, for the rest of you: Hey kids I video-reviewed an old horror movie! It’s 1974’s Legacy of Satan, a movie not quite weird enough to be honored on The List, but worth an eyeball that seeks out weirdness. Made in partnership with some colleagues of mine from there, Giles Edwards and Greg Smalley.
But let me back up a bit here while the piano player warms up the lounge for me, because the story of how this project came together is gonna blow the training wheels right off your unicycle…
It’s impossible to avoid now, but for future generations: Squid Game was a TV series on Netflix. It got a viral marketing boost and now all of social media is teeming with foaming-mouthed fanatics insisting that everybody MUST WATCH this show immediately or there will be consequences.
Now I will tell you why, not only am I not watching Squid Game, but you should not watch Squid Game either.
We’ve seen enough class-struggle dystopian sci-fi
The first 10 times I saw a class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie, I thought, “Yeah, great socio-political commentary!” The next 50 class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movies I saw, I thought, huh, neat take, but it’s been done. After that, every class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie gives me the kind of heartburn you get from too much grease and not enough substance.
Let me save you some time and tell you all about every single one of the above movies. This is the entire point:
“Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie”
There are RICH PEOPLE, and they are EVIL for the sake of being EVIL!
There are POOR PEOPLE who suffer because they are POOR!
The RICH stay RICH by exploiting the POOR people and keeping them POOR!
Nobody can seem to do anything effective about it.
You should be MAD about this! MAD MAD MAD!
That’s all this is. A class-struggle sci-fi movie is not inspirational or instructive or educational or witty or original. It is not deep or profound. It’s not even a story. The entire point is to invoke the Krodha rasa and turn the viewer into the Incredible Hulk. Hulk hate rich people now!
Not only that, but we have a whole wing of literature devoted to the exact same effect, called dystopian literature. They include The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World, all of which are at the top of the list of most recommended books for required reading in school. I’ve written this same blog post about why force-feeding students these novels is a crime against intellect.
But we’ll go over it again, this time with movies and TV, because what I am saying really IS an original thought which is currently absent from all of world culture.
Blah blah blah Pete doesn’t post often enough, blah blah blah I’m too busy working for clients to look into my own website. My own site is so neglected it’s a wonder they haven’t opened a Spirit Halloween here yet. Blah blah blah there I’m blogging now.
I see tweets like this all the time:
#writingcommunity post your books, what you're working on. I'll help you with #writerslift share your links below. Hoping you all have a great day! Don't be shy, say hello 🙂
Forgive me, I should have written this guide sooner in the pandemic. Just didn’t think it would really be needed. But now that the global pandemic is a permanent thing for a while, and so many of you are clamoring for some of my work-from-home magic, I will share my tricks of the trade.
While a 9-5 job wage-slave working remotely can benefit from some of these tips anyway, this guide is written for the freelance / professional point of view.
[1] I’m sorry, you need self-discipline.
Do me a favor: Take a deep breath and then scream “GATEKEEPER!” at me as loud as you can. Now that we have that out of the way, I’m sorry, but nature imposes this gate, not me. Either you are a self-starter and able to discipline yourself, or you will fail. If you say, “I can’t self-dicipline,” make yourself do it. Learn how. Give yourself a new chance, maybe things have changed.
Of course, there’s days when I don’t want to work, there’s tasks I dread, there’s deadlines that I procrastinate because, to be frank, it’s fun and I perform amazing under pressure. But I get the thing done! It always eventually comes down to “it is time to sit down and plow through this unpleasant task.” There are no shortcuts, no tricks. Just start doing the work and let the momentum carry you. Really, you were doing the same thing for a boss when you worked 9-to-5. Now you get to reap the full spoils of your labor, so that’s even more motivation, right?
Wanting to work from home without self-discipline is like wanting to be a lifeguard without learning to swim.
Work From Home is the new hot trend in the COVID era. After my 20+ years in freelancing over the Internet, you’re all finally catching up to me. Good (at least I think so)! For freelancer content writers who are just starting out, the #1 most common question I see asked is about how to set rates.
I’m going to try to tell you in the clearest possible way how to set your rates as a freelance writer.
How Much To Charge For Freelance Content Writing? (short answer)
The short answer to how much to charge is a simple formula:
a: Your rate per word
b: How many words you can write per hour (reasonably)
If A x B = a decent hourly wage for where you live, that’s a reasonable rate to charge. As a basic rule of thumb.
There’s a lot of fudge factors that affect this number, however. The content you will be writing may be faster or slower going due to the need for extensive research. The amount of non-writing effort you have to put into the project (spreadsheets, managing WordPress, communicating with the client’s team, etc.) may take up some time worth billing for too.
If I’m just raw typing on a subject I already know pretty well, I can easily do 500 words per hour. Nitpicky research, needing to format things in HTML, having to provide images, those slow me down to an average of about ~200 wph. By that point, I tend to bill by the hour instead.
