Does Payment Affect Your Effort?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately due to my freelance writing efforts. I don't know how many of my readers have looked into different forms of freelance writing, but there is a huge range in how much writers are offered for their writings.

On one hand, you have people looking for content for article marketing, websites and blogs. Through sites like elance, many people are looking to pay writers about $3/article. These are articles between 300-500 words.

A bit more standard of a price for web content articles seems to be $7-10 per article.

I've been paid $45 for some web content articles, but I think I may have been "lucky" to get that gig, as many people say that those jobs are few and far between.

Now, on the flipside, if you were writing for a traditional print magazine, you could get $1/word (give or take).

Reading various forums where the different types of writers gather, I've noticed that there is a huge difference in the amount of time put into these articles. For example, on sites where there are a lot of content writers, you'll see discussions about how to write your content faster...many people claim to be able to write 4 or more articles in an hour. On the other hand, on forums which feature more traditional writers, you'll see them talking about how it takes them a week to write an article, including research, interviews, writing, and editing.

And it seems natural right...I mean, if you're only getting a couple of dollars per article, then you really need to whip out articles quickly to be able to get a livable salary from your efforts. If you're going to make $1000 for the article, you can afford to take your time and put in a really good effort.

Nobody will admit to slacking off when they are not getting paid a lot though. Everyone always says that they turn out the same quality of article, no matter how much they are getting paid. I just don't believe that this is true.