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Freelance writing can be a fun and rewarding pastime for amateur writers, or an equally full and profitable career for professional copywriters online. Whether you are a creative writer, copywriter, ghostwriter, blogger, or freelance journalist, freelance writing is a vocation that has as many outlets as it does services at its disposal. With the maturing of the Information Age and personal computers at the fingertips of every coffee-shop connoisseur, freelance writing has become an online phenomenon all its own. Online, there are countless agencies and service-oriented websites that are eager to offer you the opportunity to try amateur writing as well as set you up for an interview with top name hard-copy magazines or publishers. The question now becomes, “Which website is best for you?”
To answer your question, you will not only need to gauge your own personal skills and talents, but also your level of commitment. Freelance writing is a profession that has, unfortunately, developed the stigma of being a “get rich quick” scheme thanks to the sales pitches of unscrupulous blogging individuals. Like any form of freelance work, the amount of money you make freelance writing is directly related to the amount of work you put in to it. Hard working professionals, eager to produce and possessing an aggressive business model, will always be the freelancers who see the best results for their efforts. However, if you're only looking for a part-time activity that you plan to use as supplementary income, freelance writing, thanks to some key websites, can also be a great source of income as well as a venue for socializing with like-minded individuals. By better defining your goals as a freelance writer, you will be better equipped to choose the ideal pay-to-write or freelance service website for you.
Freelance writing websites vary greatly in their models and levels of obligation. Pay-to-write sites such as Helium, Associated Content, Newsvine and Suite 101, are great for those with part-time aspirations because they let you write whenever you want and about topics of your own choosing for advertising royalties. Freelance service websites such as Constant Content, Elance, Guru, ScriptLance, and Getafreelancer are websites that serve as agencies between freelance writers and their clientele. These websites vary greatly, but for the most part the writers build a repertoire within the website and develop a rapport with various clienteles to land more professional contracts with better pay. Freelance writers who prefer a more direct approach to either hard copy publications, such as magazines or newspapers, or a more direct correspondence with clientele themselves, will find individual submission though Duotrope's Digest, Journalismjobs, or Craigslist exactly what they're looking for.
Pay-to-Write Sites
Pay-to-write sites are websites that offer amateur writers an opportunity to publish their articles, short stories, poetry, and other creative works online without the hassle and hours of webpage design, ad contracting, and online administration associated with having your own blog or website. These pay-to-write sites characteristically pay their writers cuts of the royalties generated from ads placed on their publication's pages. While professional bloggers may outwardly scoff at the royalties generated by pay-to-write sites, these same bloggers have to work considerably more to generate the same income, and must invest a great deal of risk and effort to earn more. In many ways, pay-to-write websites are ideal for amateur writers simply because they can have more fun in the process and focus more on what they love: writing.
Associated Content
Associated Content is a pay-to-write site that will often be the first to come to mind when you ask a freelance writer about the pay-to-write genre. Praised for its systematic and transparent submission and payment system, Associated Content can be considered ideal for those amateur content writers who want to submit the odd piece of writing and expect a modest revenue to trickle in for as long as it is published online. As a pay-to-write site, Associated Content is easily the first choice for inexperienced writers who are either new to the online venue or starting out as an uninitiated freelance copywriter.
Associated Content offers upfront payments of up to $20 per article for full rights to your submissions and also offers royalties after they has been published. Take time to note that while Associated Content pays “up to” $20 per article, most payments will average around the $3 - $10 range (still, considerably more return compared to what most “$1.50-per-article” spam-artist will pay on a freelance service website). Associated Content's royalties consist of $1.50 per 1,000 views of a member's page and can increase incrementally to $2.00 after the millionth view or so. Also, besides the usual streams of income, Associated Content offers “Calls for Content” which are requests by either Associated Content editors or external publishers who want content for their websites. These calls for content give an Associated Content member an opportunity to collect additional royalties from their writing, as the article that they wrote is now published online simultaneously by two separate websites.
Importantly, the writer has full access to an overview of the success of their submissions, and the complete figures of their account are well within plain site. In many ways, working with Associated Content is a safe and educational introduction to the business of online copywriting, website content production, and writing electronic magazines. By gaining experience through simple trial-and-error, observing which subject matter and which writing styles work best under Associated Content's editorial scrutiny, a new writer can discover their strengths as a content writer and better plan their business strategies in the future. One such writer on Associated Content has successfully made well over one million page-views (over $1,000) simply by writing less than a hundred amateur articles about MySpace. There will be few, even professional, copywriters who will argue with that business model.
Unfortunately, Associated Content does not offer any substantial writer-client interaction and there is no real opportunity to sell your work as a whole for more than $20. Associated Content is primarily a royalty site. While less than $20 plus stipulated royalties may be fine for some writers, others may have greater aspirations for their writing. If a writer feels that the time and effort that they have put into their content is worth more than $20, and they have no interest in collecting royalties, other venues such as Constant Content or freelance service websites may be a better choice.
In conclusion, Associated Content ranks highly against its peers. Its ease and hassle-free system makes it a good choice for any first time content writer, and can be admired for its “introductory” characteristics as a pay-to-write site. While it may not offer any substantial writer-client interaction, Associated Content can not be faulted for its well organized business plan and specialization as a quality royalty site. Interestingly enough, and evidence to its popularity, there are few copywriters online who don't have a membership at Associated Content, and don't, from time to time, post the odd piece of writing to see how it does.
Helium
Helium is an interesting pay-to-write site that seems, to a professional freelance writer, to be some strange cross between a pay-per-click and a social networking site. Granted, Helium is a very user friendly website, actually having a submission interface significantly simpler than Associated Content's, but its model, and peer-review rating system, can be so basic and at the same time so time consuming that it can actually be frustrating to write for. In Helium's defense, however, its “Marketplace” and “Writing Contests” are attributes that one would be hard pressed to find on any other pay-to-write site, making Helium an interesting online venue that would be well worth regular browsing from time to time.
Helium members submit their work in much the same way as Associated Content, but rather with more stringent lines of topic choices. A writer's submissions either have to fall under a predetermined “Title” that already exists, or submit a request for a new Title that the member wished to write about. This Helium Title feature can be a turn off for many writers who prefer to have the freedom to choose their own topics, but, for the most part, almost every conceivable topic is already available. As an interesting hind-though, while Helium's Titles mean never suffering writer's block from choosing your next topic, they also seem to entice Helium members to submit writing competitively, even if only to outdo the leading article on a given topic.
As a mark against Helium's submission process, while praising Associated Content for its own hassle-free interface, Helium's is actually so simple that it makes it difficult to write proper content. While it can be argued that Helium is merely trying to keep their memberships accessible to all writers, the very basic necessities of online content writing (i.e. keywords, images, titles, subtitles, etc.) are so far removed from Helium that there is little for it to offer the writer for media or search engine optimization besides a single block of text and a meta-description. This complete lack of writer created content besides bland, box-letter text can make Helium publications somewhat unsightly and frustratingly unprofessional.
It should not go without noting, in Helium's defense and as a feature any professional blogger would admire, that Helium's biggest search engine optimization strength is how Helium Titles, large chains of interlinked, similarly related articles, seem to form “SEO clusters” of sorts that prove useful on search engines. There is very rarely a Helium Title that doesn't appear on the first few pages of Google.
An overbearing attribute of Helium, and its most prominent disadvantage, is how its members have to spend a significant amount of time “rating” the works of other Helium members. By rating the writing of other members to earn Helium “rating stars”, they then use these stars to increase the likelihood of their own work being rated and given a chance to ascent through the ranks to earn more revenue potential and Helium “writing stars”. These writing stars, once earned, give the Helium member upfront payments of $0.50 - $2.50 for articles that, without the writing stars will receive none. Only by spending a great deal of your free time rating, time you could be using to otherwise write content, do you stand a chance of earning any royalties or upfront payments for writing that, otherwise, would earn automatically on other pay-to-write sites.
This peer-review rating system is absolutely the greatest frustration a member will encounter on Helium. Every Helium member is utterly, and helplessly, at the figurative mercy of a rating system that has been criticized from several angles by Helium's own members. After having submitted an article, a Helium member's writing will be rated against those articles in the same Title by other Helium members who are only trying to earn their own rating stars, writing stars, etc. This can be problematic for a Helium member, unfortunately, because this sometimes less than critical rating system will directly determine how much royalties will be collected from a given article and how much upfront payment will be collected from other articles in the future. Literally, the whims of any given anonymous Helium member will have direct consequences on the money made by you as a writer. Needless to say, many Helium members often feel cheated after they invest a great deal of time and effort on a piece of writing that only happens to fall out of favor on the Helium rating system that then disappears out of sight and collects little to no royalties at all. As any professional copywriter or blogger can tell you, there are already enough variables acting on the success of a given piece of content, and there is no need to add any more to an already complex equation.
To complicate the disadvantages of Helium even further, is the horrible lack of control a writer suffers after submitting content to Helium's concept of “Non-exclusive Rights”. To explain the “Literary Rights System” as should be understood by all freelance writers: sale of “Full or Exclusive-Rights” means the writer surrenders all rights of the content to the buyer who then has sole ownership of the content thereafter, while “Non-Exclusive Rights” means selling only partial rights of a writer's content that they then still retain the right to publish and sell again, non-exclusively, to other buyers afterwards. All other pay-to-write sites (besides Suite 101 and Triond) recognize this basic premise of non-exclusive sale and grant their members, if only offering royalties and not having made any upfront payment for the content, a very basic necessity of posting any form non-exclusive content: the ability by the writer to edit and specifically remove the content if they so choose. While having only been granted non-exclusive rights to a writer's content, and only paying royalties without upfront payment, Helium will still essentially take full control of the writer's content and make it significantly difficult to edit through Helium's “Leapfrog” process, and absolutely impossible to remove. Importantly, writers will, for the most part, unwittingly submit content that they will probably wish they had the ability to take off Helium at some point or another.
The royalties system is an enigma to Helium members as well. In most pay-to-write sites, there is either a stipulated pay-per-click system (as in Associated Content) or at the very least a disclosed percentage from the affiliate advertising funds raised from displaying ads on the member's pages of published content. In the case of Helium, however, an unknown percentage of an unknown Adsense payment appearing in the member's account with little indication as to why, but apparently in a direct relationship to the criticized rating system mentioned before is how Helium members are supposed to calculate their profits. Helium's system can leave many writers scratching their heads in dissatisfaction or simply furious at the loss of control over their own writing after having submitted it. As a royalties site, thanks to an overly arduous rating system and a less than transparent payment system, Helium would rank lower than most pay-to-write sites online.
A wonderful attribute of Helium, however, that can help us to forgive Helium for its less than virtuous royalties system and give it an edge over much of its pay-to-write competition, is its “Writing Contests” and “Marketplace” sections. Helium's writing contests vary across long lines of subject matter: from informative articles, to creative works, to even opinions about current events. These contests consist of several topics and titles of content being, again, ranked and accumulating into points that are used to designate a winner of $60 to $150 after a week or so. Several contests are active at any given time and hundreds of Helium members participate for a little extra cash to show for their work on top of Helium's royalties. As a writing contest site, Helium is perhaps one of the best that can be found online; its challenging and engaging competition making winning such contests no simple matter. (As a reality check, Helium will still make more than the contest money back from the royalties they collect from the submissions made by participating members.)
In an even greater turn of events, Helium's Marketplace seems to be the best opportunity an amateur freelance writer can have to generate income without the serious commitment of contract work besides Constant Content. Helium's Marketplace posts descriptions of content that clients want written and Helium members submit their work to a pool of submissions that the client then picks what they want from. The lucky writer chosen will be paid by Helium the advertised sum that can vary from $10 to well over $250, and can be a nice purse for any freelance writer, both professional and amateur. A major fault with Helium's Marketplace business model, however, is that any content not chosen by the client is immediately published by Helium for royalties - essentially destroying any hopes of the freelance writer to try and sell the content for exclusive rights to any other clientele. Another serious issue with writing for Helium's Marketplace is the fact that it can be a bit of a gamble: committing the time and energy for a $250 article, only to not be chosen and then stuck with Helium's poorly organized royalties system as payment instead can be a serious blow for any writer. Helium's Marketplace is a great opportunity for amateur copywriters who are just starting out, but sometimes the risk is just too much to take.
In conclusion, Helium should be treated as a risky, but high paying, marketplace with writing contests that could be fun to partake in once in a while. As a royalties site, Helium should be, for the most part, avoided completely. The rating and payment system not only being overly burdensome and opaque, but too much of a risk for any writer with higher aspirations for their content. In Helium's defense, however, the writing contests and marketplace can be a lot of fun for amateur or hobbyist writers. Any part-time poets would be hard pressed not to find other writers and artists to interact with on a system such as Helium's.
Suite 101
Suite 101 is a pay-to-write site that shares a great deal with Associated Content save for Suite 101's payment model and characteristic exclusiveness. A great deal of virtue can be found in Suite 101's more stringent selection process and more academically involved content base, but, sadly, most of the articles posted on Suite 101's site are still far from the quality of popular hard-copy science magazines or academic periodicals. While Suite 101 boasts a higher than usual royalties payout for their members, the academically focused content tends to has a smaller than average consumer demographic base, and does rather poorly for traffic in the highly competitive online arena. To its members, however, Suite 101 seems to have a higher purpose than mere income: by serving as an online portfolio and experience base to have on a resume, journalism students and other pre-career writers tend to use Suite 101 as a launching board into their professions.
Suite 101 prides itself in being a pay-to-write site whose content is written and edited by professionals. The freelance writers that write for Suite 101 have to submit a resume and a portfolio of their work to be considered for what Suite 101 unofficially considers a part-time job. Prior experience and enrolment in post-secondary education help a great deal with being selected, so in many ways suite 101 is very much like a job. More specifically, Suite 101 would have more likeness to a campus newspaper from your local university, and serve much the same purpose for its members, than most pay-two-write websites online. Suite 101 members write for the site for a few years, and after either graduating from school or staring their career, use Suite 101 as a reference or a portfolio in a job application.
Upon acceptance to Suite 101, their writers are obligated to write at least ten articles every three months to retain their membership. The writing topics are selective and must follow Suite 101's general themes (”Business & Finance”, “Education & Career”, “Politics & Society”, etc.), but following the topic specifications aren't very difficult. They seem, for the most part, to follow the average university's curriculum, so members can often write securely within their own major or minor. (In all honesty, it's refreshing, after plowing through a pit of amateurly written articles about Miley Ray Cyrus, to read an article that actually references the DSM-IV-TR.)
Articles that are submitted to Suite 101 seem to be turned over to a rather unusual model of exclusive and non-exclusive rights. After submitting an article, Suite 101 members sign over exclusive electronic rights for one year after publication. This means that the writer cannot, by law, republish their article on another pay-to-write site or their own website for a minimum of 365 days. They can, however, publish their work in their university's newspaper, periodicals, and any other hard copy media just so long as none of them end up online where they would be in direct competition with Suite 101's own online publication. After the designated time has passed, Suite 101 then surrenders full rights back to the writer who can then exercise their rights over the content again, while Suite 101 publishes the content with only non-exclusive rights thereafter. Unfortunately, (much like Helium) Suite 101 exercises “Irrevocable” non-exclusive rights, meaning that the Suite 101 member is unable to remove the content from the Suite 101's site, even though they received no actual payment besides royalties. This fact makes for a major mark against Suite 101, making it difficult to praise for its features as a royalties site alone.
Suite 101's revenue system is based on a Google Adsense contract that seems to have produced interesting ad content and royalty figures. One of the first features a professional blogger will notice about Suite 101's page layout is the unusually sized Adsense ads put square in the middle of the introductory paragraph of every article. Suite 101 publishes an Adsense average of $4.20 per 1000 views, though, unfortunately, with the full parameters of that statistic undisclosed, it means that $4.20 could actually mean anything. (Unfortunately, not to fully discredit Suite 101's statement, but it would be very difficult to convince a professional content writer that, excluding extraordinary examples, academic articles would even be worth $4.20 per 1000 views. While the credibility of Suite 101's claim can not be disproved, it is very important for every freelance writer to be extremely critical of any figures that are promised without substantial proof to support them. Adsense revenue is very unpredictable, and the mere presence of an “average payment” should make a writer uneasy.) From the extraordinarily large Adsense ads, Suite 101 members get an undisclosed cut of the revenue. It's important to understand that whenever a professional writer sees “undisclosed percentage of ad revenue” in a pay-to-write site's terms and services agreement, they should be very careful about the business they conduct within such a system. While Suite 101 does have a considerably more transparent system than Helium, allowing its members to see the traffic and fiscal statistics of their published content, the simple fact that the equation used to determine how much of the Adsense revenue goes to the actual writer is a mystery, means that Suite 101 is a royalties site that should also be, for the most part, avoided.
Granted Suite 101's greatest virtue is probably actualized as an online portfolio and reference source, its characteristics as a royalties site still fall short of what a serious content writer would be looking fore in a pay-to-write site. In Suite 101's defense, however, a student being weaned and guided by the Suite 101 fold would probably serve as a positive experience for the initiate, even if it wasn't an entirely profitable experience. A possible employer would probably take “Suite 101 featured writer or editor” more seriously in a resume than most positions one could find on their university's newspaper.
Triond
Triond is a royalties site that ranks somewhere around par with Helium, save for the fact that Triond has no Helium “marketplace” equivalent or writing contests to speak of. Triond pays content writers 50% of the royalties earned through affiliate advertising campaigns with Yahoo: an eRPM that Triond is quoted as being $0.50 - $10.00, but it can be safely assumed that most of the statistics fall around the $0.50 range. To its credit, and much like Associated Content, Triond requires all submissions to be examined by a Triond editor in a process that can help keep the quality of the posted content somewhat controlled. Triond also seems to have a healthy social networking community within its site, so its amateur content writers are not far from peer scrutiny or support. Unfortunately, Triond is the only pay-to-write site that requires exclusive rights to all content published on its site. To a professional copywriter, who may not even be associated with pay-to-write sites, the idea of selling exclusive rights to their writing for royalties alone is abhorrent. Indeed, this feature is the greatest negative variable acting against Triond as a pay-to-write site. Associated Content will only purchase full rights after an upfront payment of up to $20; Helium offers a small form of upfront payment for only non-exclusive rights; and even Suite 101 only purchases full rights for royalties for a year that they then release back to the content writer afterwards. Despite the quality of the writing and the regular payments of well organized royalties, the mandatory full rights submission feature makes Triond a hard sell.
HubPages
HubPages is a pay-to-write site that takes the pay-to-write genre to the next level. By offering amateur writers the opportunity to have more control over their content (i.e. text, images, advertising, and even direct interaction with the affiliates themselves), HubPages gives their writers a more involved experience that only just falls short of the writer having a webpage of their own. A substantial source of online content with a strong base of social networking as well, HubPages seems to be an ideal royalties site for more experienced content producers. Importantly, Hubpages gives the writer the ability to select and delegate the affiliate advertisers displayed in their content; these affiliates including Google Adsense, Amazon, eBay, Kontera, and others. Also very important, while the pay-per-click advertising that is found through companies such as Adsense is split with 60% going to the content producer, the click-throughs and commission from affiliate sales such as Amazon and eBay go completely to the content producer. This means that traffic is already split in favor of the writer, but if a visitor actually buys something from Amazon or clicks on an Adsense ad, that commission is given completely to the writer as well. An edge that HubPages has over a royalties site such as Helium or Associated Content is the fact that the royalty process is as transparent as they come: HubPages members having actual accounts with affiliates such as Adsense and Amazon that they can personally monitor, and then even going so far as to get a Google Analytics account with HubPages, allowing them to view the full statistics of their posted content (a very important feature as any professional blogger or webpage administrator can attest to). Unfortunately, HubPages has a less than transparent rating system: a social networking / quality control vestigial structure, called a “hubscore”, that determines, in bold red numbers, a writer's content status within the webpage that can play a large role in traffic. Also a major failing to any ambitious copywriter is HubPages complete specialty as a royalties site, lacking any means of selling content or connecting with clientele outside of the generic social networking one could just as find on a site such as Facebook. Interestingly, another failing also happens to be it's greatest strength: the accounts necessary to manage the affiliate advertising in HubPages can be, though the best way to make money from a pay-to-write site, still a bit too advanced for beginner content producers and a turn-off for writers who just aren't web-savvy enough and would probably be more comfortable with the minimal requirements of Associated Content or Helium.
Squidoo
Squidoo, due to its more prominent mediums of popular content, could easily be excluded from a list of “pay-to-write” sites simply because, thanks to the freedom that Squidoo offers its members, the content found on its site predominantly contain very little writing at all. Enabling content producers to create pages in a fashion more in the likeness of consumer-created-content, Squidoo seems to find its greatest virtue as an involved introduction to the popular pastime and career of blogging. A content producer's page or “lens” will generally be a long, blog-like script of text, images, movies, links, and ever blog-important affiliate advertising. The royalties from this advertising is divided three ways: 50% going to the content producer; 45% going to Squidoo; and, much to their credit, 5% going to a charity of the content producer's choice. Don't let that 5% fool you, however, Squidoo exists solely to make money “blog-blitz” style through aggressive online sales strategies that would make even a late-night infomercial blush. In Squidoo's defense, however, from the many different professional-quality blogs that one can find on its site, an eager blog prodigy would find the freedom available through Squidoo far more useful than any pay-to-write or freelance service website online.
Freelance Service Websites
Freelance service websites are essentially online agents that connect freelancers such as webpage designers, translators, and other online professionals besides freelance writers to their clientele. A client who needs a certain contract filled will turn to these online job-postings and advertise the contract that freelancers can either apply to or essentially “bid” for. The freelance writer who gets the contract, though not legally obligated, will have to fulfill their promise of quality, quantity and deadline. A failure to do so will cause a failing in “ranking” or “status” that most freelance service websites have a system of in one form or another. After your ranking falters from a poor review, opportunities to find contracts on that website become significantly harder if not impossible, so, in many ways, freelance service websites are a great deal of commitment and should not be taken lightly. These sites connect clients and freelancers for either a service fee or a percentage of the monetary gain made by the freelancer. While many new freelance writers may find this charge distasteful, they should try and accept it as the cost of doing business, and is, quite frankly, how all agencies make money. Not all of these freelance service websites were created equal, however, and some are considerably better than others for many different reasons.
Constant Content
Constant Content is a freelance service website that should be mentioned first because, from a business model's point of view, Constant Content is very different from other freelance service websites. Though not a pay-per-click site itself, it serves as a kind of bridge between pay-to-write and freelance service websites. Unlike its freelance service counterparts, Constant Content has no “bidding” process, which predominantly is the cornerstone of most contract work you see both online and off. In much the same way as Helium's Marketplace, a Constant Content client will post the specifications of an article or creative work that they want written with the price that they are willing to pay for it that generally ranges from $30 to well over $250. The Constant Content members will then write to those specifications and submit them to a pool that, much like Helium, the client will then choose from. Unlike Helium, however, and a significant advantage over it, Constant Content does not publish the rejected works for revenue, but rather gives the writer the option of deleting it from Constant Content's database or re-posting it for other clients who may wish to buy it. Another significant advantage Constant Content has over its competition is the fact that it allows its members to post their own work, written to their strengths and interests, that they even then price themselves. Members can post their work as non-exclusive “usage only” content that they may wish to publish again, or “full rights” content that they sell exclusive rights to for more money. A single well written article posted as “usage only” can be sold multiple times, perhaps earning as much as if it was sold exclusively while still letting the writer retain the right to post it themselves on their own blog or website. Perhaps Constant Content's greatest advantage over the royalties pay-to-write sites is its almost one-on-one interaction between you as the freelance writer and the clientele; offering opportunities for building rapport professionally with clients who may remember your name and wish for you to write for them again in the future. These unofficial contracts can lead to a single freelance writer being handed opportunities to write content with payments well into the $500-$1000 range for about a weeks worth of work.It's important to note, however, that, like any market of wares, an article written and posted on Constant Content is not always guaranteed a sale, and if it is sold, it may be quite some before the right client comes along. Still, as a freelance service website, Constant Content is an excellent choice for both amateur and professional freelance writers simply because of the freedom of choice that the writer has as a content producer.
An Important Note on the Demons of Freelance Service Websites
Freelance service websites are excellent opportunities for freelance writers to do business online. The countless international clients and the sheer number of potential contracts makes freelance service websites perhaps the greatest step in freelance writing since the invention of the hardcopy magazine. Unfortunately, the information age that has given us this opportunity has also given too much opportunity to the immoral and the fraudulent out there. These are the “clients” who will take advantage of a new or under-qualified freelance writer who is still trying to figure out the ropes of freelance writing and trying to prove themselves in the business. These are the “rewriters”, “spam-writers”, “$1.50-per-article”, “opportunity for better pay in the future”, and downright scam artist clients.
Rewriters and spam-writers are unscrupulous individuals who pay pennies to have freelance writers rewrite what is probably a stolen article as many times as is humanly possible without being blacklisted by search engines or caught by Copyscape. Rewriters and spam-writers are absolutely everything that is wrong with the online content production industry. These are the people who upload websites with dry, recycled, rewritten or stolen content that somehow seem to out-compete credible websites on the same topic through sheer volume. These are why your email accounts are flooded with spam, written, I might add, by amateur freelance writers who are absolutely ashamed of what they have done. Importantly to you, these are also the clients who will try to get you to work in a con industry while being conned yourself. They count on a naive freelance writer who will do simple work for a short while. After the writer catches on and leaves after they find out they are being taken advantage of, their place is simply filled by the next uninitiated freelance writer that comes by. If, at any point in time, you read the word “rewrite” in a contract description on a freelance service website, safely assume that not only is this work that you should have nothing to do with, but also that the client is a employer you want to avoid.
“$1.50-per-article” clientele is actually a very generous term for clients who will try to offer you as little as twenty-five to fifty cents per article if they think they can get away with it. Much like rewriters, they will offer new freelance writers, who have no employment history to use as leverage in a contract agreement, a chance in an industry that can be hard to break into on freelance service websites. In many ways, the rating systems on these freelance service websites actually work against their reputation; uninitiated freelance writers often doing demeaning and underpaid work simply to get a reference or a few stars on their profile so legitimate clients will consider them for better paying contracts. Sadly, these freelance writers will either simply give up writing all together, thinking that the whole industry is just a scam, or actually do the work, rewarding and further perpetuating these shameless “$1.50-per-article” would-be clients.
(The writer of this article/ebook, Jordan Dickie, is still finishing the section on pay-to-write and reelance service websites. If you feel anything has been missed or have anything to comment on, please do. I'll be giving your recommendations my full attention and will be more than willing to make an addition. Thank you.)
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