Although Web Writing is often seen as having a low barrier to entry for skill acquisition, it heavily involves Client Service (CS). Success requires not only technical writing skills but also essential business acumen and continuous learning.
1. Low Pay Rate and Poor Time-to-Income Ratio (Burnout)
Many beginners are forced to start with extremely low-rate assignments, leading to a point where the time and effort invested are not financially worthwhile.
- Inability to Escape Low-Rate Projects:
- Due to a lack of track record, beginners often accept severely low-rate projects, such as ¥0.5 or less per character (about $0.003 USD per word).
- The time spent on writing and revisions often calculates to only a few dollars per hour, making economic continuation difficult.
- Time Spent on Research and Revisions:
- Research time required to write accurate information is unexpectedly long.
- Failure to fully grasp the client’s intentions or regulations (rules) leads to requests for repeated, major revisions, significantly increasing the total hours until final delivery.
2. Lack of Client Service (CS) Capability
Although writing is a solitary task, communication with the client is mandatory for it to function as a job.
- Failure to Practice Horenso (Report, Inform, Consult):
- Losing client trust through poor basic business communication, such as being late to report a deadline delay, or proceeding with work without clarifying questions or uncertainties.
- Insufficient Reading of Regulations (Briefs):
- Failing to fully understand the client’s desired tone and manner, target audience, or submission format, and instead writing in a self-directed style.
- This results in significant rework, leading the client to conclude, “This writer is too much trouble,” and prevents securing follow-up work.
3. Lack of Core Writing Skills and SEO Knowledge
Just being able to write in Japanese is not enough for an article to hold value on the web.
- Lack of Structural Power for “Communicative Writing”:
- Unfamiliarity with the specific online writing “patterns” (e.g., the PREP method) that present the conclusion sought by the reader first and then follow with a logical development.
- The result is hard-to-read text or a simple list of information, which fails to produce the results the client expects (reader action or SEO effect).
- Lack of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Knowledge:
- Insufficient knowledge on how to naturally incorporate keywords and structure headings to achieve high search rankings.
- Since the client’s need is an article that is “read and delivers results,” not merely a “composition,” an understanding of SEO is essential.
💡 Typical Failure Pattern
“Unable to tolerate the low pay rate, I overworked myself by juggling multiple projects, resulting in a deadline delay. I lost the client’s trust with a low-quality submission, and job requests stopped entirely.”
| Failure Factor | Specific Risk and Outcome |
| Low Pay Rate | Taking on too many projects to compensate for low rates resulted in an inability to maintain quality and committing a fatal client service error: deadline delay. |
| Lack of Client Work | Deadline delays and low-quality submissions are direct causes of lowered client evaluation, leading to the discontinuation of continuous work requests (the most damaging failure). |
| Skill Deficiency | Lacked the efficient writing skills and the ability to maintain high quality necessary to handle multiple projects simultaneously. |
Key to Success: To succeed in Web Writing, the first step is to consistently exceed client expectations even with low-rate projects to build a strong track record. Subsequently, writers must acquire high market-value skills like SEO and sales copywriting to justify and negotiate higher rates.
