The internet has put a new face and a new level of efficiency for one of the oldest work at home jobs in America — writing advertising copy, or proofreading copy, for other companies. While not precisely new, with copywriting and proofreading jobs pre-dating commercial internet service providers in academic circles in the 1980s, it has turned into a growth market for job seekers since roughly 2000, when web search engines started doing context sensitive search parameters for page ranking.
Typical rates for advertising copy run at 1 to 4 cents per word, many places will post jobs that pay more but require more in depth knowledge of the market being written for, or technical information about the job. Copy editing runs at about a penny per word, but is a faster job with a quicker turn around time.
Transcription work is a related field to both copy writing and copy editing; with Windows media player and similar software, it's now possible to slow down MP3 audio files and transcribe them. Typical transcription rates are billed by the minute of tape being run, with the going rate usually in the 40 to 60 cent per minute range. As with copy writing or copy editing, technical expertise, and knowledge of specialized fields can increase your asking rates considerably – being able to identify medical terminology and spell it correctly is currently worth an extra 40 to 60 cents per minute of transcription work, and engineering or scientific terminology is usually worth a 20 to 30 cent per word premium.
Most people speak at 100 to 120 words per minute; transcription software lets you slow down the play back speed to 40 to 60% of normal, which means that a minute of transcription source often takes 2.5 to 3 minutes to transcribe; this translates into somewhere between a $7.00 to a $20.00 per hour position depending on your technical vocabulary and typing speed.
For copy editing, the rate of pay depends largely on the quality of the material you're editing – material that's passably written and just needs a polishing draft can go very quickly. Material that has more errors, or badly written sentences, can turn into effectively a redrafting process (which is why we list both copy writing and copy editing as extensions of one job along the continuum.)
The most obvious skill you will need to have to succeed in these types of position is the ability to type. The faster you can type, the more money you can make. The less obvious skill (at least, based on the samples of writing and copy editing we've seen) seems to be the ability to write well – constructing well made sentences with a sense of cadence, that convey the subject matter clearly and cleanly. Writing well for other people includes identifying who the reader is and what they'll want out of the piece of writing. Someone who needs a press release punched up (or written from existing marketing materials) needs something that's different from an academic paper getting polished, in turn, has different needs than a person who's looking for sizzling marketing copy. Regardless of what type of writing you're doing, you need to have a natural facility with the written word; when writing, if you can “hear” an authorial voice in your head, you've probably got a good start on this.
Another trait that is necessary for the successful copy writer, transcriptionist or copy editor is good time management. Nothing in the world is as hard to get started on as copy that you don't want to look at; especially if your job requirements require research on the internet, it's incredibly easy to get distracted, particularly when you're working from home, and there's no risk someone will come breathing down your neck if you start surfing the web, reading web comics, or surfing for old music videos on YouTube.
The writing (or fact checking) of articles is what consumes the time in the job; writing a 500 word article once you know the subject well often takes as little as 6 or 7 minutes. It's the ten to twenty minutes that you spend getting the knowledge needed to write the article that takes the time out of the day. Be disciplined about your research time, and always save your old articles. They're a gold mine of older research material that you can re-use on articles on the same subject. When editing, be sure to check for details on source citation, and refer back to the sources cited and make sure they're used correctly; nothing hurts your clients more than having a correctable mistake slip by.
Where the internet has changed copy writing and copy editing is that it's made it possible for several companies to act as clearing houses for clients who need something written, or for writers to find work. Most of these clearinghouse sites are geared towards marketing copy writing; writing or editing on more technical detail mostly comes from getting noticed by someone who needs the work done.
