Some interesting jobs can be found on Craigslist, but often not ones that pay well. There are so many lousy paying jobs for writers on Craigslist and elsewhere that I could provide daily updates on the outlandish ones.

I recently came across an ad for a website looking for comedy writers. I have a good sense of humor, so I wrote to the generic email to see what it was about and if they could use my services.

They could, but at $6.50 per post of about 200 words. I won’t say here what the website was, because I don’t want to embarrass the owner. It’s an interesting site that uses humor in short reviews of a related site that is much bigger.

I politely declined the job assignment, saying that $6.50 for one story doesn’t work for me as a freelance writer.

Here’s part of the email they sent me:

I have the same goals as any blogger:  Provide quality content, attract gobs of traffic and make enough money through ads and other stuff to keep the project alive until I can sell it for a gajillion dollars to some deep-pocketed corporate entity.  Modest ideals, to be sure, but mine own.

We pay beginning writers $6.50 an article.  On the plus side, our articles tend to be short, usually around 200 words, and there are few deadlines.  You can have a byline if you want one and a link to your own site.  There’s also the opportunity to build a following.  Usually writers invoice me via PayPal when their tab gets to $25 or so but you can be paid any time you want.

If that sounds okey-dokey, drop me a line and we’ll talk about a story assignment.

AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million, then decided to go with full-time writers and not freelancers such as myself for its website “content.”

I’m still around, writing and editing as a freelance journalist. I’m starting a website aimed at helping dads and families save money, and so far have a Facebook page called ValueDad.

I continue writing for Dealnews about the psychology of shopping and related topics, and I have a few other websites I’ll be writing for soon (regularly or not hasn’t been determined yet), so check back for more details. I’ll be writing about family finances for one site, hopefully starting this week, so if you have story pitches in that area, I’m all ears.

I hired a business coach today, who will help me as I start a website aimed at dads seeking personal finance information. And I’m also planning to reinvent myself as a provider of blogs/stories for corporate websites based on the personal finance work I’ve done at WalletPop and elsewhere.

To all the PR people and others pitching me story ideas, I’m still interested and for now will be focusing on shopping and family finances for the sites I continue to write for. I hope to expand into more areas, but plan on focusing on personal finance. I’m also continuing representing clients in public relations, helping them get their messages out.

For fun, here’s some of the letter I got this morning, alerting me to being laid off:

Hi there –

Thank you very much for your contributions to AOL. As we have discussed on calls and in emails, going forward our editorial direction is to build a great team of full-time editors, writers, and reporters.  To that end, we are reducing the scope of AOL’s freelancer program.

The adventure begins again.

Instead of me going door to door, applying for jobs online or seeking out businesses to hire me, I’m turning the tables and offering my services for the next two weeks so I can be an exclusive writer/editor for companies that need such work. I’m calling it “Rent a Journalist.”

As a freelance journalist since being laid off at a newspaper about three years ago, I’ve spent a lot of my time chasing down job leads, applying for jobs, and doing everything I can to get the next freelance assignment. I’ve had steady work for most of that time, writing personal finance stories for WalletPop. But that’s going to change soon.

The AOL site is being absorbed into another website as part of the Huffington Post acquisition by AOL. I work on a monthly contract and have been told to reapply for my job as a fulltime writer, which I’ve done, but I’m unsure if I’ll be hired fulltime. Since the company has offices in New York and Los Angeles, and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I don’t know if they’ll hire me fulltime to work from home, as many writers/editors at WalletPop do.

If we come to an agreement, great. If not, this is part of my backup plan, which I’m trying out for the next two weeks as I offer my writing and editing services, among other things such as social media liaison, to businesses.

Instead of wondering if I’ll be available to write for your website or publication in the future, you can lock me in with an offer now to work for you. I’ve covered personal finance for WalletPop for a little more than two years, and have some of the highest-trafficked posts on the website. I can do the same for you.

I’m open to long-term contracts or month-to-month; but what I’m mainly looking for is steady work and a commitment. It can be exclusive on a subject — family finances, for example — but that will take a longer commitment such as daily blog posts. Or it can be a weekly column on something like personal finance and the food industry, that will still be a long-term contract but is only for writing once a week.

The advantages to your company in signing me now? You get my time and work before anyone else does, guaranteeing you a steady stream of quality work that will be unique to your publication. As a journalist I’m trained in general assignment stories, and can provide original reporting and writing on any topics you need. Again, I’ve specialized in personal finance writing for the past few years, so I can write for your site on those issues, or expand to tech, families, food, retail, education, health, and many others. For example, I currently write for Dealnews.com about the psychology of shopping each week, so I wouldn’t be available to write about that topic for other sites.

I have other services I can provide, including helping with social media campaigns, writing publicity and press releases, covering corporate events, and photography.

Don’t let this opportunity pass. Rent a journalist — this journalist — before it’s too late.

I’d like it to also be a discussion area on these topics and how they affect dads. It seems there are millions of mommy bloggers out there, and now it’s time for this underemployed dad to extend his Internet reach beyond my personal website that I’ve had since I was laid off in June 2008. If you’ve followed me here, you know my tale, so I won’t repeat it now.

Unemployed Dads is looking for 25 Facebook “Likes” to get a decent url, so help out if you like it and let’s get going on how dads can save some cash while trying to find work and take care of the kids.

While we definitely move in different circles, but I thought of some similarities between us after the interview:

• We’re both about the same age.
• We were both laid off at about the same time. Carolla about a year ago from a high paying radio job that he’s turned into the top iTunes podcast, and me from a newspaper job two years ago that I’ve morphed into a freelance writer and editor.
• Stay-at-home dads. He does it with the help of a nanny, but still takes care of his young son and daughter. I’ve enjoyed the past two years watching my daughter, now 5, grow up.
• Working from home. He’s surrounded by expensive cars and owns two homes. I have a 1991 Acura and work in a home office.
• My house needs renovation.

I’m a big fan of Carolla’s, following his work much more in the past few years. One of my first part-time jobs after getting laid off involved driving around to pick up police logs, and I’d listen to his morning radio show while driving. It was a Sacramento station, so the reception wasn’t great, but I’d always hurry back to the car to hear more between stops. I then started listening to his podcast, but stopped after awhile because he seemed to continue ranting about the same topics again and again. He’s still entertaining, and a comic I’ll continue to follow.

It’s great that his career path has done so well, from construction worker to podcast king. He found a niche and is taking it as far as he can. Good advice for anyone changing careers.

Today’s story was on being overqualified for a job and how to deal with it.

I continue writing about career topics for WalletPop, such as a story this week on how more aging workers may be having a “Helen Thomas moment” as the baby boomers age and work past normal retirement age.

My blogging topics, if you’ve lost count, are: personal finance, career, technology, and real estate. I’m also trying to add solar power to the mix.

June 8, 2010, marks two years since I was laid off, and I’m still without a full-time job. It was an anniversary I hoped to avoid, but I keep plugging along with part-time work to help keep a roof over our heads.

Soon after being laid off, I started this blog as Tales of an Unemployed Dad to detail the job hunt while raising a child while my wife returned to work full-time. She still works full-time and we still have health benefits, and our daughter is now 5.

It has been a long two years, probably the most stressful of my life. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned during those two years:

1. After being a freelance journalist for the past two years and enjoying all of the freedom that comes with it, I still think I’d prefer working at a regular day job with set hours and steady income. I enjoy the work I do, but having my income being determined on whether I have a good day and find stories and have sources get back to me makes a nervous start, and end, to every day.
2. I’ve got a new appreciation for the underemployed. I didn’t even know what the term meant until 2008, but now feel like an expert on it. Underemployment describes people who seek full-time work, but can’t find it and must take many part-time jobs to make up the difference. They often work without the benefits, such as health insurance and vacation days, that full-time workers get.
3. Looking for work is a full-time job by itself. I’ve spent hours each day looking for jobs, talking with people, preparing for job interviews and doing other such tasks, all while working 20-30 hours a week and trying to keep a 5-year-old out of trouble.
4. I enjoy writing. This may be the best benefit of the layoff. I was an assistant metro editor at the Contra Costa Times, a daily newspaper in the Bay Area, and had also worked there as a copy editor for years. It had been years since I worked as a reporter, and while I continue doing some editing and working with reporters on story assignments on a freelance basis, I quickly found that it was great to be back writing again.
5. Every day is exciting, but still a struggle. I look forward to the work I do, but the tentativeness of it makes every day stressful. I realize that’s a part of life and that it occurs even with a full-time job, but as I said from the top here, I need some steadiness to keep me sane. I don’t expect any job, whether part-time freelance work or a career at one newspaper, to last a lifetime, but I’d like to find something that I know will be there for me to do a year from now. Maybe that’s a goal I’ll never achieve in this economy, but it’s something I keep looking for.

That’s enough for now. I could probably write for days about what I’ve learned these past two years, and I’ll continue to blog about it, but those are the highlights.

Comment and let me know what you’ve learned from being laid off for a long time. After all, almost half of the unemployed have been without a job for six months or longer, so the numbers of the long-term unemployed are only going to grow.

One of the things I’ve had to unlearn, at least partially, from journalism school is being a generalist.  In college I was taught that as a reporter, it’s best to know a little about a lot of things so that reporting on many issues would be easier. Even with specific beats — city government, prisons, transportation, etc. — everyone was always a general assignment reporter who could jump on any breaking story.

But having a specialty is now popular with the Internet. Everyone has a niche, or is trying to create one. On WalletPop, I write about personal finance, but in an interesting way that has mass appeal. At Housing Watch, I write about new homes and the housing market in general.

They’re niche markets, but my beats are so wide that there are sub-beats within them to cover. For example, for Housing Watch I’m trying to find stories relating to solar power or “green” power. It’s an interest of mine and one I think that I can add a lot to.

Today I had a story about smart meters in California, and a fun story to report on Earth Aid, a site where consumers can get money back in gift cards for using less power or water each month. It’s a niche area I’d like to grow and become more of an expert on, with a host of sources and expertise to write about the solar and green power industries. I’ve already written a few stories on solar power, and plan to do more.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small start, but one I’d like to have lead to a full-time job blogging about such topics for a solar website. Or better yet, to start my own website on solar power.

AaronCrowehttp://s3.amazonaws.com/fiverr.com/attachments/317355/AaronCrowe.mp3?1274479158

Copy and paste the above link into a browser window and listen. Or click the link above and then click on the MP3 file to listen.

I hired a radio announcer to give a 30-second read of my resume and talk about my continued search for work. Take a listen and let me know what you think.

It’s also part of my blogroll below.