WWW – Wanton Waste of Words

First of all, that’s nice alliteration, huh? Anyway, I stumbled across a couple of study reports in my regular daily rounds and couldn’t quite believe anyone would need to know the information contained therein. Well, it’s all good to know, but, unless you’re an idiot, you really should know it already.

On the plus side, it does provide freelance writing work, and it just goes to show that there are so many places you can look for possible writing projects, because there are people out there willing to pay very good money for completely needless studies to be carried out that then need writing up.

Study 1: This was a medical investigation that concluded victims of heart attacks are more likely to survive their ordeal if they are already lying in a bed in a hospital intensive care unit.

Gosh. Who’d have thought? You mean if I have a heart attack in the middle of the Gobi desert with no one around, I am more likely to turn my toes up than if I have a heart attack in a specialist medical environment hooked up to high-tech equipment and surrounded by highly-trained physicians who are already monitoring me for some prior medical issue. I should bloody well think so, too. What do I pay my taxes for?

Study 2: Another medical enquiry that looked at the risk factors of drowning in cold water. Three aspects were highlighted: age of the victim, water temperature, and length of time underwater.

Right. So, if a 90 year-old woman enters minus-10 degree waters and spends 15 minutes totally submerged, she is more likely to die than a 10 year-old boy whose bathwater isn’t quite as hot as he’d like and who dips his head under water for 5 seconds to clean off the shampoo. Damn, if only I’d known that before I laughingly shoved my grandma through that ice-hole in that Norwegian lake. She’s been down there 15 years now. She wasn’t a big woman; my guess is she can’t hold her breath that long. But just let me check that pie chart to more accurately assess her likely physical state.

I have now started my own freelance study service. I will research the facts and write the reports and sell them to the highest bidder. First of all, I am going to investigate how much more likely you are to die in a plane crash if you fly everywhere rather than take the train. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I feel I know how this one may pan out. Then I will be looking into the probability that you are more likely to survive a bungee jump if you attach elastic to your ankles rather than rope to your neck.

So (he said, trying to pull it back round to freelance writing), what should you take from this? My feeling is that you can never second-guess whether anyone requires a freelance writer. Google said back in 2008 that it had indexed over 1 trillion unique URLs. That’s a lot of websites. Between the one-man Bob’s Fishing Emporium and the multinational American Express, you have plenty to go at.

Never assume that any industry is beyond you, or a that a company is too big or too small to require your services, or that any website has no need of a writer. I know a website owner whose site is but the tip of his iceberg. He’s a chiropractor who provides a huge volume of SEO articles to many others in his industry but doesn’t have the time to write them himself. You wouldn’t know that from his website; you’d only know that from posing the question. And he’s been very unhappy with the quality of the writing out there.

Much also depends on how you define a freelance writer. Is it just the “sexy” gigs you’re after, or would you accept merely working with words? I work with words in my job. There’s not much in the way of freelance writing, but my freelance writing skills make all the difference – and they’re what got me the job.

If you’re struggling for work, start hitting some of those websites out there. You don’t know where to start? Think of a subject you know something about, or have an interest in, put a related search term into Google, and hit the search button.

Every website on the www is a potential client. That’s over a trillion.

There. That should keep you going for the rest of your life.