1. Entrepreneur Magazine — Pays up to $1.00 per word.
2. FamilyFun Magazine — Pays up to $1.25 per word (1000 – 3000 word travel features).
3. The Progressive — Pay is up to $1300 for investigative reporting for this left-wing political monthly.
4. Sierra Magazine — Pays $.75 per word for features (up to 5000 words).
5. The Sun Magazine — Pays up to $2000 for essays and interviews, and up to $1500 for fiction.

If you haven’t checked out our writers’ market directory yet, please do. We list all levels of paying freelance writing markets there, with rates detailed in the summary in many cases. We only feature publications that list their writers’ guidelines publicly online so you can always access their most up-to-date information (no “so-and-so says” stuff is included here). And keep checking back. We’ll continue to add new paying writers’ markets periodically. In fact, I’ll make it a point to add a few more $1000+ markets in there later today. If you have a favorite market that you’d like us to list, you can leave a comment or email me a link to the publication’s writers’ guidelines.

EDIT: As promised, I added another five writers’ markets to our directory today — all with the potential for you to earn $1000+ per article.

Yesterday, Michelle Rafter Tweeted this little gem:

More on #Yahoo #AssociatedContent deal – AC writers attempting to unionize to have more say post acquisition. Details: http://bit.ly/dcV6Gw

You may have read about the acquisition on any number of blogs already, including Carol Tice’s. But back to the Tweet at hand–say what? Associated Content writers are trying to unionize? Yes. According to the pro-union article (which, ironically, is published on AC), AC writers feel as though they have rights that are being ignored. They also think that they should be at the table for negotiations about what they are going to get out of the deal.

Yes AC writers, you are correct—you do have rights. You have the right to stop writing for AC. You are not an AC employee. You willingly give them your content in exchange for a few pennies and, sorry to break it to you, that does not entitle you to negotiate with Yahoo or any other entity that AC partners with.

But you are also correct when you observe that your rights are being ignored, because they are. But not by AC—your rights are being ignored by YOU. As a self-employed individual, you work for you. YOU are your employer. YOU are the one who decides what “rights” you have and YOU are the one is ignoring your own rights.

This is why, for years now, so many of us have urged you to move away from sites like Demand Studios, AC, HubPages, Helium, etc. They are making an inversely proportionate amount of money from your articles—and you are letting them. By writing for them you encourage this behavior and YOU tell them that it is okay to treat you this way.

No, this isn’t about how the rich just keep getting richer and you are a victim—this is about how YOU as a BUSINESS OWNER are victimizing yourself and looking for a scapegoat. Well go grab a mirror folks, because your scapegoat is you.

And this doesn’t even touch on the completely delusional idea that AC writers even CAN unionize. The post states that they will start working on appointing officers for the union and consider there to be “serious” interest once they reach 5,000 members. 5,000—out of the 380,000 writers who already write for AC. What is that, like 1.5% of the writers? Um… yeah… that sounds like a plan. Give us more money or 1.5% of your writers will leave. Wow. If you got 100% of the writers to leave and made new writers (excited by what they think is a great opportunity to get a byline on Yahoo) to stop signing up you may have some negotiating power—but the thing is—you won’t get that many.

And why is it that you are mad right now? Why is it that for the last few years whenever anyone tried to tell you not to keep letting AC take your work for pennies when you could be making so much more you got angry and defensive and accusatory—but now, all of the sudden, you understand what you’ve done and you want to get what you FINALLY realize that you deserved all along? Well, sorry but this is not a post-nuptial agreement. You gave them the cow and they didn’t buy the milk.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to appreciate this apparently effective wake up call and change your business plan, change your marketing approach, decide what your rights are and commit to ensuring them, and don’t stay on the penny writing hamster wheel.

A few weeks ago Jenn did a post about being contacted by NPR to do a story. While the gig didn’t pan out, it is the perfect example of the possibilities opened up by striving to become a query-free writer. Now, unlike Jenn I am not completely query-free. My marketing plan outlines many different things that I must do in order to keep the money flowing into my relatively new freelance writing business. I still apply to gigs posted on Craigslist and Journalism Jobs, I still send cold emails, I still query publications (okay, just one… but I got accepted so as long as I never query another I can always say I have a 100% acceptance rate!), and I ask for referrals.

But there is a big spot in my marketing plan for raising my visibility so that I can transition into being an almost completely query-free writer. This year—the first anniversary of being a full time freelancer—I’ve stepped up my game and as a result have been contacted by quite a few awesome potential clients during the past few weeks including a financial planner who hosts a radio talk show, a popular online trading company, and a newsletter with an exclusive agreement with a large insurance company. Why? Because the query-free method works.

So what have I done to effectuate this change? Here are just a few of my secrets (oh, and between you and me—these are not secrets. This is old, rehashed information that you have probably read in a million different places written by a million different successful bloggers. If you haven’t done these things yet, then the joke’s on you, because they work)

1. Specialize. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I know you’ve heard it before—but that’s because it works. As a generalist writer, you will have more difficulty setting yourself apart from the flock and identifying your client. Yes, you can still choose to take on different projects—but I bet you dollars to donuts you won’t actually need to.
2. Raise your visibility. If people don’t know you exist, they are not going to find you. I know,crazy—right? But true. So create your portfolio, use some keywords, join forums and groups on LinkedIn where your target client is and interact. You can also do some article marketing for yourself for a change.
3. Twitter yourself wonderful. One of the things that I did that I think was important was that I removed all my writer friends from the Twitter account where potential clients were and created a new account just for writer friends (writer friends, add me @YoFinanceWriter). Now on the account where I network with potential clients, I can talk just about finance and insurance all day.
4. Get testimonials. I love LinkedIn, and it has been super helpful in bringing in some of the query-free income I get. For me, the best thing I’ve done is gotten industry-specific CLIENT recommendations on my LinkedIn profile. Not recommendations of other writers (although I do have a couple) or recommendations from people I’ve partnered with, but recommendations of editors and companies that have given me cheddar in exchange for written words. To me this is vital. No one cares about what your friends think about you or how much your life coach enjoys coaching you—they care that you did a good job for another person in their industry. So good, in fact, that the person was willing to go down in history writing something nice about you.

So there you have it—again. Sorry there isn’t anything new here, but these methods work. It may not happen overnight (although I can give you some examples in which it pretty much has) but it really doesn’t take long so try it—you might be surprised at what you get. And be sure to share your tips on becoming query-free below.

I’ve been wanting to add a market directory here on AFW for a while. Back when this was still SixFigureWriters.com, we put a lot of effort into bringing you paying writers’ markets. And later on I launched a separate site devoted to them at Writers-Guidelines.com. That second site was shut down a while back to prepare for its merge with All Freelance Writing. While it’s taken a little longer than planned to find a solution I was willing to work with, I think we’re finally all set!

This is a directory of paying writers’ markets. The pay level isn’t always included. If it is, I mention it in the summary so you don’t have to click the link just to find out what they pay. Directory listings are for any paying market, and they don’t have to meet the requirements we have for job listings here. That’s because a lot of great open markets don’t list their rates publicly or they negotiate with individual writers. While I’m willing to rule those out for immediate-need gigs advertised where there might not be much time to research that info privately or try to negotiate, that’s not the case for writers’ markets like these. I also want to leave the pay issue a bit more open here so we’re freer to branch this off into a publishing market section as well down the road, where pay rates aren’t always clear-cut (not mentioned, negotiated, royalty-based, etc.).

We’re kicking things off with 50 markets in the directory. I’ll be adding to the list regularly. There is currently no way for you to submit listings. If you’re an editor and you’d like your market included, you can email me at jenn@allfreelancewriting.com. The only requirements are that it must be a paying market (I don’t consider residual or performance-based pay to be a paying market because payment isn’t guaranteed), and you must have a link to public writers’ guidelines. To make sure AFW readers aren’t getting outdated info or inaccurate info simply emailed to us, all listings must be tied to published guidelines on the publication’s website.

Writers — go ahead and play with it. When you first visit the page, you’ll get the master list with all markets. You have the option to search them or browse by category. When you choose a category or submit a search term, the results will appear on the same page. To get back to the master list, just refresh the page.

I’ll likely add more categories as I add more markets. If a market fits into more than one category, I can only put it  into one without messing up the master list. So if something isn’t where you think it should be, see if another category would apply. For example, there’s one on family travel for families with young children. It could have gone in the home & family section or the travel section. I felt travel was more fitting than lumping it in with things like parenting magazines. The regional section is a big one for situations like this — a lot of different niches can be covered with a regional focus, so be sure to check that too.

Let me know if you have suggestions. I’m limited to what I can do with the plugin we’re using, but if I think a suggestion has merit and it can reasonably be done, I’m more than willing to make changes to improve the feature.

Enjoy! :)

I have a very short update this week.

Very short.

So short that I am going to fill much of it up with mysterious sentences

and white space.

But it’s not my fault this update is so short. It’s the fault of Guru.com.

Understanding Guru.com

Like the now ruinous Elance, Guru.com is a bidding site. It does not have secret spy gear to install in your computer so you can be treated like an employee but taxed and benefited like a contractor so I thought I’d give it a try for a review.

Like Elance, Guru.com gives you a certain number of bidding opportunities for free and more access to gigs with a paid membership. I wasn’t about to pay for a membership so I just tried to bid on some specialty work in the financial industry.

No one wanted me.

While I’d been able to get between .10 and .30 per word on Elance before they forgot what it meant to be an independent contractor, Guru.com hirers seemed to think that just .05 per word was pushing it. That means I’ve been bidding off and on for months and gotten no bites.

But Something Changed

I hadn’t actually planned to write an update on Guru.com this week because I really have nothing to report. But yesterday I got invited to bid on a project and thought, “Finally, my luck is changing!” And boy was it.

The Invitation

I was cordially invited to bid on an editing/rewriting project with a budget of less than $250. Okay, nothing special there–until you open the attached Word doc that you are supposed to rewrite/edit for less than $250…

wait for it…

…open the 54 PAGE/ 29,600 WORD DOCUMENT THAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO EDIT/REWRITE FOR LESS THAN $250.

So far, 14 bidders have felt that this is completely reasonable. WTF?

Come back next Friday ready for a spirited discussion because that’s when we’re going to talk about how low ballers, content mills and cheap writers are helping your freelance writing business–no, not by giving you crappy, monotonous work–by simply existing.

A couple of weeks ago I told you about an experiment I was trying with Associated Content’s residual earnings plan. I got the idea for the experiment when I read an article by Jennifer Claerr about how she made $573.26 in residual earnings over the course of one month on a Halloween article she wrote and published on Associated Content.

I used her article as a guide and followed her steps, which were:

1. Find highly searched keywords.

2. Make sure there aren’t a lot of competing articles with those keywords already on AC.

3. Write your articles with the keywords.

4. Earn money.

Her method is not a new idea–this is how people make money on niche websites all the time. I decided to do this with AC instead of on a niche domain because I was under the incorrect assumption that page rank mattered in search results and that AC would get me more hits because it already has a good page rank. Of course I now know that this is incorrect–but either way, I wrote the articles and published them on AC.

This Is Where I Sum It Up

When I wrote the articles, I wrote them extremely fast. Like, craptastically fast. They each took me about 10 or 15 minutes to write. One was about partying cheap on St. Patrick’s Day and one was about celebrating a cheap Easter. I am going to link to them here but please note–this is not quality work. This was all part of the experiment and in no way resembles anything I would give to my clients. I spend more time editing my grocery lists than I did these articles.

I didn’t keyword stuff them–each keyword phrase makes up about 1.5% of the article. But maybe this is where I went wrong. Maybe I should have crammed those keywords in like I cram cookie dough down my gullet during PMS because I made next to nothing on those two articles. On the St. Patrick’s Day article I earned the most, raking in an astounding $0.20 and on the Easter article I failed even more spectacularly earning only $0.05.

This Is Where I Theorize

As I looked at my dollar results, I started wondering why so many people mess with this crap. I mean, c’mon–how much time do I have to spend in the trenches before I realize that they are nothing but trenches? They are what they are–that’s it. I can’t make them into something else.

But then the wheels of my brain started turning and I started to think of a million different ways I could try this experiment to possibly get a different result. And then something scary happened–I started to get excited about the prospect. It’s as though Associated Content threw down a gauntlet and I, the mad freelancer, want to keep picking it up time and time again. I cannot accept failure, refuse to recognize defeat and want to try over and over to create that elusive $500 article that takes me 10 minutes to write.

And that’s how AC gets so much content, gets rich and keeps writers addicted.

The end.

After the experiment I laid off for a little while—you know how it is, it’s fun to flirt once in a while but you don’t want a lifetime commitment or anything. But then, I noticed my business was getting a little slow. I had been booked solid for a couple of months and as a result I hadn’t been marketing as much as I should have and I hadn’t been as active on LinkedIn or Twitter. By the time I finished up all of my existing obligations I was left without any projects other than my regulars and I wasn’t as visible to my target clients.

So I turned to Elance for support and although I still haven’t found a way to get up to my normal rates on Elance I have found that it’s a great way to make what I am comfortable calling decent money without a lot of marketing effort and since I’ve streamlined my client selection process so I don’t deal with as many nervous or controlling clients (check out the feedback the client has given to other providers before you bid), it’s been a real pleasure. It’s not a long-term plan for me, but it’s a great way to get gigs quickly and pay the bills. Since they’ve upgraded their system you can now save search criteria which really helps make searching for gigs faster. Also, since my client proposal is a few pages long and has a visual element, pitching is actually less time consuming through Elance than it is when clients contact me directly.  I also save time because I never need to talk to anyone on the phone and even email exchanges are short.

The important thing about this (and the reason why I’m talking to you about it today) is that I’m not just settling into the Elance groove for the rest of the foreseeable future. With the time I’m saving on marketing, I’ve gotten a little breathing room to work on my own projects: a white paper, a client guide, guest posting to raise my visibility, queries and some freebies for my target clients–all of which will help me get more of those direct client gigs that are within my normal rates and aren’t subject to a fee (Elance charges around 6-10% of the price of your gigs).

And that’s the key–whether you are working for low paying clients right now, Elance, a content mill or any other arrangement that isn’t making you feel completely happy–you’ve got to find the time to do what it takes to get you to your next level. If you don’t then you are probably going to be stuck at your current level for… well… a long time. Because that’s just how it is.

This week I played around with AOL’s new beta content mill SEED.While I would love to tell you that I felt my flowering buds of income potential spring forth into full bloom after planting the seeds of my content in the AOL plot, I need to instead tell you that this plot was a rocky, barren place where none of my seeds did grow.

If you have ever used the Helium marketplace, then you know what SEED is. If you have been smart enough to avoid Helium, then here’s the rough overview: SEED is a place where you write AOL editor requested content on spec, without any real direction and cross your fingers hoping you didn’t just waste your time.

Why Some Freelance Writers Might Like AOL SEED

Unlike other content mills, SEED doesn’t require any resume or samples to get started. You simply go and register for an account. Then, you start claiming and submitting assignments. That’s it–no approval, no test, no sweat.

The writing assignments are pretty fun. They range in topics from money management to lifestyle to pets to… well, you get the drift. Article length also varies; some calls for content are 100 word tips and others are 300-1,500 word articles.

I completed a total of three assignments, one on home decor, one on entertaining and one on travel. The assignments I completed averaged .10 per word–but I saw some calls for content that were as high as .46 per word. Of course, it is important to remember that they may choose to purchase your piece for full rights (and full pay) or for partial rights and pay based on page views.

Why This Freelance Writer Didn’t Like AOL SEED

The calls for content give you a topic to cover, but they don’t really tell you about the tone they need. With a real client, you can interview them, get samples of writing that they like, and test out a few different tones for the pieces they request. With SEED, you and goodness knows how many other writers all rush to find that magical, mystical voice that will satisfy the faceless editors. It’s like playing pin the tail on the donkey, but the donkey’s assular region is about 8 million feet wide and you are blindfolded facing the opposite direction.

Two of the three pieces I wrote were not accepted and the third is still under review (a 2-5 day process). The rejection letter SEED editors send is very nice and basically says they love what you are doing and want you to keep submitting, but gosh this one just wasn’t quite what they were looking for. Was it the mention of a velvet Elvis that turned them off of my article? The discussion of dusty linens and dirty pillows? I’ll never know.

The Upshot

I dunno. I can’t see spending time playing freelance writing roulette on SEED. Of course, after your articles are rejected you can take them off the SEED platform and post them to Constant Content or Associated Content so it isn’t like your time is completely unredeemable. Personally, I think you are better off spending your time building your name in your niche through good, old-fashioned marketing and networking.

This week, I tried Amazon Mechanical Turk. Mechanical who? Why, Mechanical Turk. Yeah, the name doesn’t make any sense to me either.

Amazon Mechanical Turk’s tagline is, “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” They act as a middle-man to website owners and workers. On Mechanical Turk you can find HITS (which are what the individual jobs are called) that entail doing transcription work, labeling photos, and writing blog posts and articles.

Now before, in the first paragraph, when I said I “tried” Amazon Mechanical Turk this week, I lied a little. I should have said I tried to try but then got physically ill and threw up a little in my mouth and decided that trying to try to do anything on Amazon Mechanical Turk is stupid.

Once Upon a Time….

I didn’t always feel that way. When I first started out I used Amazon Mechanical Turk. After earning a whopping $5.65 by labeling photos for someone I realized the site was not for me, but felt that it was a good option for people with a little extra time on their hands who needed some cash. Having gone through many embarrassingly poor patches during childhood, I know what it’s like when you need money now and Amazon Mechanical Turk is not the worst way to get it.

When I logged in to my old account yesterday I thought that I would take some writing HITS so that I could tell you how much I earned and give you tips and stuff. Turns out it was way easier and less time consuming than I thought it would be.

Freelance Writing Tips for Using Amazon Mechanical Turk

Don’t use Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Okay, A Little More Detail…

The first writing HIT I found was for a 400 word article for $1.55. Did you get that? $1.55. Not only was the pay bad, but the instructions for SEO and formatting were about 139 words long. I mean, it would take me 30 minutes just to go through this person’s never-ending checklist to make sure I had even written the article according to spec. This person is so delusional he’s probably holding coal up his ass crack to try and squeeze out diamonds.

So I moved on to a different HIT thinking that this was just a fluke. Found one to write three 200 word or more posts on Easter baskets for $3.00. Now, before you point out that this is actually more per word than the one above, consider this—the guidelines/instructions for doing this gig were 645 words long! 645! WTF?

The Upshot

Many inexperienced freelancers out there will take this information and say—“See, freelance writing rates are going down. Content mills like Demand Studios are really the best way to go. They even try to provide health benefits and grants for creative pursuits!” The sad part about these inexperienced freelancers is that they have the key to unscrambling the low paying rates right there in their statement and they don’t even realize it.

Content mills and low paying webmasters like those who post their gigs on Amazon Mechanical Turk are losing in the money-making game and they know it. So they either start paying less (in the case of Amazon Mechanical Turk webmasters) to try and eke out a little profit from their Adsense or affiliate sales or they try crazy gimmicks like offering non-insurance health insurance and token grants to fill their factory of writers (in the case of Demand Studios) so that they can get more and more and more content to try and maintain earnings or get a small increase. Freelancers who spend their time finding private clients understand that, if anything, rates are going up for web writers–not down. They also understand that the contraction of the print industry it not a harbinger of doom for all writers, it’s an indication of the popularity of online content–which means even more opportunity for high paying web content writing gigs.

If you are a good writer, don’t get sucked in to these sites. Set your own sites a little higher, market yourself, and define your career and your possibilities yourself—don’t let someone else do it for you.

Oh and, yes, Amazon Mechanical Turk is an offshoot of the real Amazon.com–but they are just a middle man. I wouldn’t blame them for the rates.

If you spend any amount of time online reading the many freelance writer’s blogs that dot the virtual landscape, then you have probably run across a post or two that sing the virtues of Associated Content’s residual earning program.

Now, I’ve spoken out about residual earnings and how they affect the time value of money before, as has Jenn. Essentially, earning residual income from other outlets (rather than your own blogs, e-books and other products) is pretty much never the best plan. If you happen to get a lot of traffic on your residual pieces, the online outlet may pay you a big enough chunk each month to keep you happy but you have to remember that:

a) They are sharing earnings with you, which means you could have more earnings on your own without sharing.

b) The company or website may not be there forever, and then your future residuals will be gone…gone I say!

c) Sometimes you have to work really hard to get traffic to a site that’s not only NOT yours but is also only paying you part of the ad revenue for the traffic you bring.

What I Did Last Month for Residual Earnings on Associated Content

Since I closed down my own freelance writing blog, I decided to throw my old, previously published posts up on Associated Content for residual earnings. It is important to note that I was paying freelance writers to write on my freelance writing blog and I was doing next to nothing to promote it—so I had lost money rather than made. This means that I am actually making more on Associated Content than I did on my blog…but that’s just because I handled my blog stupidly, not because Associated Content’s residual program rocks.

I posted the articles between 12/04 and 12/21. I set up an automatic feed from my Associated Content account so that it announced on Twitter and on Facebook when I had a new article posted and I did let the 30 or so members of the Freelance Writerville Ning community know that I was moving the articles there. That is all the promotion I have done.

The Results and How I Plan to Retire

By far, my most popular article was How to Increase Your Freelance Writing Rates for Existing Clients which was the last article I posted. It has gotten 110 views. Not too shabby for little to no promotion. That has earned me a whopping $0.17. That means I make roughly $0.0015 per visitor. Nice. I think I just found my new retirement plan.

The next most popular (posted on 12/06) is 5 Things to Do Before You Quit Your Job to Freelance Full Time. This high performer has gotten a total of 49 views and made me $0.07. Third most popular was the first one I posted (on 12/04) 6 Ways to Improve Your Freelance Writing Portfolio’s Conversion. There we have a total of 34 views and $0.05.

The rest have between 24 and 12 views each. In total, I have made $0.46 on the 9 articles I posted in December. Let’s say they had NOT been previously published on my blog and I had just sold them for non-exclusive rights (you can get significantly more for exclusive rights) to a blogger like Jenn at a rate of $25 per post. I would have $225 busy working for me–earning dividends or interest in my brokerage account, earning money and affording me a tax deduction in my SEP, reducing my interest and paying down principal of my home…really, there are so many better things I could have done with these articles.

If you want to spend the time to build up traffic to the articles you post on Associated Content (or Examiner and Suite 101 for that matter) then you will make more money but at $0.0015 per visitor, wouldn’t you be better off spending your time learning how to spin the cat hair on your sofa into yarn for clothing? I think you would.