No matter what career or method of making some extra cash you choose, one way another you'll have to do the whole "pay your dues" thing. In one way or another, this generally means working the cruddy jobs no one else really wants to do, or that no one who's already gone through that really has the time to do anymore.

Every once in a while someone will pitch the idea to you, with great enthusiasm, that while they don't pay you'll get plenty of "exposure" by creating something for them.

Let's forget that this is a term I usually think of in context of "while lost in the woods, she died of exposure." There are actually different valid answers to this pitch, depending on where you are in your career, what the particular job is, who they are, and what you want out of it.

Where are you in your career?

If you're just starting your career, then you're looking for work to show off in your portfolio (or set of clips, or whatever the term is for your particular trade). Typically this quest involves the usual problem of how do you get work to put in your portfolio if you don't have one? Do you belong to any groups, whether professional associations or just clubs? Do they have newsletters? Do they produce workshops? Web sites? You can create a lot of nice stuff for your portfolio for groups who would never have been able to pay--and in fact rely in their own members for content--by volunteering. And often what they want is pretty small. Not always, mind you. You always have to assess whether the money, fun, clip/portfolio value, or whatever is worth the size of the job. But often it's quite worth it, and it lets you give back to a group that has probably given lots to you. When I belonged to the Society for Technical Communication, I wrote little tech pieces for my chapter's newsletter for a while. 

If someone stands to make a lot of money off of work that they want from me for free, I'm more hesitant. Now, that said, I can't even make that assessment if I don't understand their business model. You'd be amazed how many content operations have very low profit margins. But still, always weigh how much work it will be against the perceived benefit. Some people will tell you to never do any work for free. I'm rarely that rigid. I will say to watch out for being taken advantage of. And as a colleague of mine says, "choose your charities." 

And no one needs to know what parts in your portfolio you did for how much money. They're just looking at the results.

What is the job?

On the topic of what the job is, some pieces will take you about five minutes to throw together and another two editing, and some will take you several weeks of research and tweaking and checking back with them and fussing. Again, how much time do you think it's going to take? Confirm with them that they want what you think they want. The more annoying the work sounds, the less you may want to do it for just the exposure unless where your work will appear is a spot that you just know is going to result in a lot of paying work coming your way. Some people like to try to figure out what they need to make per hour, and how many hours any project would take. Ask yourself if you need to make $50/hour and this project is going to take 10 hours, give or take, is it really worth close to $500 in potential work later?

The more likely that it's possible the exposure work will turn into paying work (especially from the same people), the more likely I am to consider it. Though again, it's easy to be led and misled down the garden path on that one. Some lessons we just have to learn from experience.

Who is the client?

Are you dealing with a tiny local outfit, like your local small-town paper? Or a mega-corporation that jets everyone to Cancun for the annual staff meeting? Again, what kind of actual budget anyone in particular has can be difficult to guess (how much the publisher spends on entertaining potential as clients often has no relationship to how much a lowly editor can spend on articles every month, or at least not one that anyone outside of their accounting department might understand), but I wrote an article to promote a local group in the local paper for free since they only pay their staff writers (as a donation to the local group, really, picking my charity, plus I got an actual newspaper clip out of it, which wasn't something I had).

The bigger the client and the bigger the company's budget, the more I have to really want my work to appear in whatever they're producing for me to do it just for the exposure. They also should show extra respect for the time I spend for them. When you're self-employed, time really does equal money. You can't be doing paying work while you're doing free work for someone else. Mind you, if you don't have any paying work, free work may not be so bad. But you could always create for the client who'd appreciate it the most. You! Start a blog or a journal or a Web cartoon, some things as examples of things you would make if someone would just pay you.

What do you want out of it?

Here's where terms like "self-aware" come into play. Are you trying to get into some publication or venue that is very highly viewed in your field? If so, then what you're after isn't really money. It's raising your profile among your peers and potential clients. Are you trying to attract local business? You probably have a limited number of publications you can even approach where people might see your work, and if none pays, none pays.

Sometimes you just want to wave something in front of your parents to show that yes, you do actually manage to DO something with this freelancing life of yours. In that case ... well, depending on how knowledgable they are, you might get away with just doing up something yourself. It's okay. I won't tell. But it's definitely more satisfying to hand them an autographed book, or send them a link to an article or review of your work. Trust me.