Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking it was time to get started working again.  Lots of potential upsides, it goes without saying, but since I don’t really want to put H into nursery full-time and I look like a bag of spanners on the best of days, a traditional job that needs me to go into an office somewhere is probably not going to be the best option.

On the other hand, I don’t really want to be doing Avon sales, or Innovations catalogue sales or similar because that still involves going out and the psoriasis is making me far too self-conscious for anything but handing over money at the average checkout.  And it’s been so long since I moved in some of my previous circles that I really don’t have current contacts.  All the recent stuff I’m allowed to talk about (no NDA, no Official Secrets) has been for S and his various ventures, so hardly an objective reference, even if the work I did was good.  Ah, what to do?

The only thing I’d been doing on even a semi-regular basis was writing articles on Helium.com.  It’s a great site and has had the virtue of giving me the courage to get off my backside and write again.  Some articles I’ve written because there was a gap in their database I could fill, others have been in their weekly writing competitions, where I’ve picked up the odd prize.  Pretty much all of them have earned me some click-through revenue in Helium’s revenue-sharing model, and it’s nice to be able to withdraw those funds to Paypal from time to time.

The kicker is that I only wrote a couple of the articles with SEO in mind, just to see if I could still do it.  Which is fine, since the two articles are ranked 1st and 2nd respectively for their keywords.  It’s no coincidence, therefore, that my article revenue on those pages is good.  So I set to thinking.  I can either optimise my other articles on Helium, submit the changes, and get only a share of the increased revenue, or I can rewrite them and post them on here.  Or I can rewrite them and post them to another site that gives me Adsense boxes on my articles with my own Publisher ID taking the revenue.

And then I had another thought, which is that all the Adsense and Helium revenues take a while to start flowing, and would require a major volume of articles to make a living from.  Was it time to stick my head above the parapet and see if someone would simply pay me to write things for them?  Like they used to in the good old days?

This has a lot of merits in theory: work as much as I want, when I want, with visibility over how much I’ll get paid and when.  But it also brought me back to my previous thoughts about the lack of a current network.  Ahem.  Well, thank God for the internet!  I’ve been so lacking in confidence it had never occurred to me that someone might be prepared to hire me without a personal recommendation for this kind of stuff, even though I objectively know that this happens every day to other people.  Gulp.

And so, with a little scouting about, I decided to experiment on just the one site, to see what kind of response I might get.  The site I chose was oDesk, largely because it had a few jobs listed I thought I might be able to do.

For those not familiar with oDesk, it’s a neat little site that puts providers and buyers in touch with each other and allows them to give mutual feedback to help future clients/providers make an educated decision about who they want to use.  Since each assignment also adds to your online CV, you gradually build up a body of work that also helps people see what you’ve been capable of before, and allows you, I suspect, to push your hourly rate up a bit.

The upside is that anyone can join in, and there are tests you can take to make up for a lack of oDesk experience.  The downside is that established buyers often won’t look at newbies for jobs, and the openness of the system - membership is free - means that there are many people offering their services for all kinds of jobs for which they aren’t qualified, so you have to try that much harder to get yourself noticed.  Also, competition from people in India and the Philippines lowers the pay rate and perceived value of some activities, so you don’t necessarily get as much as your experience might normally be worth.

However, the economy is in recession, the work is convenient, and you can pick and choose what you apply for, so the balance seems pretty good.

In the week since I joined oDesk, I’ve applied for some 20 jobs, and I am overwhelmed by the response.  Of the jobs I’ve applied for, 25% have taken me as far as shortlist stage: one buyer has said they want to use me in the future on a different project, 2 have given me jobs and 2 have taken me to shortlist and will be letting me know in the next couple of days whether I’ve got their gig.  And one other will be interviewing me at the end of February for an ongoing part-time job.

To say I’m gobsmacked would be something of an understatement.  I’ve ‘met’ some great people already, whether it’s Dip, who shares my love of research, Tom, who shares my sarcastic sense of humour or Emma, who not only has a similar sense of humour, but also some of the same professional experiences.  It’s been hugely encouraging, and I’m gradually gaining in confidence.

So hello world.  You’re no longer talking to a full-time mum, you’re talking to someone who makes their living as a writer again.  How good did it feel to write that?!!!