When I was eight, I frequently wore a single, sequined glove and I took break dancing lessons. I was in love with Michael Jackson, wore my hair in a side pony tail and used to make my neighbor hold up a flashlight and point it at me while I danced in the street on my own, imaginary episode of American Bandstand.

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m getting old, that’s why. And old people like me enjoy telling the same boring stories about their youth over and over and… well, you get the drift. The thing is, if the following content mill blog post sounds the same as all the others, it is not because I’m getting old, it is because, so far, a content mill is a content mill is a content mill… sort of.

The Story

This week I worked with the relatively new content mill, Break Studios. I was actually excited to write for this mill because this is what they are looking for:

“Highly trafficked Break Studios is looking for freelance writers for our community of highly popular and humorous websites, including Break.com, MadeMan, Holy Taco, Cage Potato, Screen Junkies, and Chickipedia.”

So, alright, they need a little personality, eh? A little ho-ho-ho on their ha-ha-ha? Great, I’m in.

The Deal

Applying to Break Studios is easy. You send a resume and some samples, they approve you, and you fill your queue with 10 titles. They have How To articles, 10 Best articles, and Strategy articles. Some of the titles are misogynistic and others racy and some require an advanced familiarity with porn—but hey, at least they are trying a new content mill model.
You write your articles, editors review them, they get approved then you get paid. Right now there is no steady pay date, you simply get paid one random day each month.

The Pay

The pay is where it falls apart for every content mill, and Break Studios is no exception. In fact, the pay for this content mill is low enough that they might want to change their name to Break Neck Studios because writers will need to work at a break neck speed in order to make any serious dough—and with as slow as their editors are (we’re talking at least 5 days for article approval) your queue is unable to accept more titles for many a day after you finish writing the ones you’ve got.

Oh, right, the pay. $8. $8 for a 250-700 word article. It’s… well… yeah… it’s not very much.

What I Made

I wrote five 300-word articles in an hour. So I made $40 in an hour. Once again, I used my SlimTimer to time myself and that time does include the time it took me to select the titles.

Final Verdict

I don’t have to tell you that I am not a fan of content mill for full time freelancers. And while I’m sure many folks will say, “But $40 an hour is awesome” it really isn’t. $40 an hour is a tough full time income to live on once you factor in taxes, social security, retirement savings, business expenses (yes, even freelancers have those), sick and vacation time.

But you know what? If you needed a part time gig or a little extra shopping money, spending 2 hours writing with Break Studios is not such a terrible thing.

There is a very specific reason that I am saying this. Break Studios wants personality. They do not want you rehashing a Wiki article and then citing it in the references—they want you—your experience, your knowledge, your voice. The editors do not have a Napoleon complex, and they don’t have ridiculous editorial guidelines and thought police. And, most importantly, I actually had fun writing the articles I selected (and no, they were not about porn) which is a lot more than I can say for some of the other content mills.

*Important note: You must use some variation of your real name when writing for Break Studios. That means, if you choose to write about their racier topics, it could have a negative impact on those Google searches potential employers and editors do. Just sayin’.

UPDATE: Break Studios contacted me to let me know that they have always allowed authors to use pen names–so either I hallucinated that information or I misread it. Also, they now pay biweekly.

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.

I’m going to start this week with an apology. When I try out each of these markets for freelance writers it can take weeks to do all the things I need to do in order to get a realistic idea of what each gig is like, what it pays (relative to the time you put in), and how hard it is to get. I have to submit bids, work on my approach, write words for little to no cheddar, send emails, you know–do stuff. There’s a whole costume I have to put on that helps me get into character. I have to clean my monocle and magnifying glass, get out my favorite brandy snifter and start speaking with a British accent. Seriously, this is not easy, folks.

Unfortunately,  I was not able to approach Constant Content in as many angles as I would have liked because I was busy with my actual clients (yup, I gots thems). Hopefully, other people will pick up my slack and chime in with comments about their experience with Constant Content.

What is Constant Content

Constant Content is an article broker. You can write an article and upload it onto their website to sell to whoever wants to buy it. You can give the article three different prices, one for each of the licensing rights:

• Usage license: Multiple buyers can purchase and display the article with no content or byline changes.

• Unique license: Only one buyer can buy it, but he or she cannot make any content or byline changes.

• Full rights: One buyer owns the article and can change it however they see fit.

The more rights the client gets, the higher you price the article. You can also choose to let the clients make a cash offer for rights–so you might price a 500 word article at $100 for full rights and they could offer you only $65. Naturally, you can refuse an offer.

Constant Content also allows clients to request articles written on specific topics  from individual writers or they can put an article request out to the entire pool of writers. If you choose an article topic that has been offered to the pool then you write it, send it to the client, and they may or may not purchase it. The prices the clients offered for these things were both bad and not bad. You could expect anywhere from $10-$50 for about 500 words and up to $150 for some that were 1,000-3,000 words. It is really subjective though, the clients could choose to offer anything.

It’s also important to remember that Constant Content takes 35% of the sale price and they pay once each month.

One Freelance Writer’s Constant Content Story

For weeks now I’ve been going into the Constant Content system to get topics that were requested by clients but unfortunately, I just never got around to writing them.

So what did I do? I submitted two pre-written articles for sale. One of them didn’t sell after a couple of weeks so I took it down and sold it to an existing client. The other article received an offer about 24 hours after I posted it. The problem is that the offer was for 50% of what I was asking for it. So I refused the sale and edited the article to make it more offensive and less safe and then I submitted it to Outright* as a guest post.

And that was the end of that.

In all, I didn’t have a bad experience with Constant Content… I guess you could even say that I didn’t really have any experience with them. Based on my non-experience I think you can probably get .10 to .20 per word which is pretty great when you consider that you can just throw up whatever it is you decided to write, sans deadline. I think it’s just important to really figure out if that is the best use of your article. For me, I think the exposure and links on Outright will be more beneficial than the money would have been, and I probably wouldn’t have gone for the lower amount they offered anyway, unless my cats had been out driving and ruined the car and my car insurance premiums were going to go up.

If you decide to use Constant Content, be firm about what you want for an article and don’t settle for less. But then, isn’t that what we should all be doing at all times?

*Disclaimer — AFW contributor, Jennifer Escalona, works for Outright. While that fact is completely unrelated to this specific article, we’re all about full transparency and thought you might want to know.

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.

There are a lot of different sites that post adverts for freelance writers. Since October, I have used Craigslist, Journalism Jobs, Problogger.net and Media Bistro to find gigs and apply for them. I decided that I wanted to challenge the conventional wisdom that the best way to get gigs that you apply for is to apply for a lot of them. Let me explain.

The Freelance Writing Rumor

There was a time when I believed, like many others, that you needed to apply for 15 or more freelance writing gigs each day in order to get a reasonably good response rate. I went into this challenge believing the same thing and never have I been proven quite so wrong. The key to scoring a lot of gigs when applying for them is not about bulk it is about:

• Applying early
• Making a really strong case for yourself as the best candidate

What this Freelance Writer Did

Between October 7^th and December 16^th I applied for a total of 11 gigs. That is just over 1 gig per week. I applied for only financial writing gigs and I applied to many without knowing what the pay would be. I used my standard response which talks about my experience in the financial industry, industry licenses, writing experience within the industry and attached my resume and industry-related samples (unless the ad instructed that applicants do otherwise). I cannot stress enough just how focused my approach was.

I received a total of 5 responses from the 11 ads. That’s just short of 50%. Now, I know many readers query and network to get gigs—but a lot of you also apply for them when they are posted. When was the last time 45% of your responses to ads generated an email back?

The Results

Okay, so an email back is one thing—but how many of the gigs did I score? I scored 3 of them and accepted 2. The pay on one is extremely low but it actually does have fantastic exposure, so it is worth it. The pay for the second is $0.55-$1.33 a word. Ironically, that one was listed on Craigslist.

The Trick to Scoring Those Freelance Writing Gigs

Apply for those gigs you are irrefutably qualified for by experience, knowledge, and education. Attach only those clips that show your experience in the subject matter and attach a niche or industry-specific resume–just like you would when applying for a regular desk job. Even if you are a generalist, you should be able to craft a few industry-specific resumes that strengthen your appeal to someone posting a job within them.

Also, apply early. One of the posters of a gig I applied for told me they had already hired someone for the gig but would have hired me if I had responded first.

This week, I did some work with Demand Studios. I have a very long history with Demand Studios. As many readers know, they were one of the first mills I worked with. I have over 130 articles with them, most of them published between July 2008 and February 2009–before I realized how much more money I could make working with regular clients instead of content mills. I’m mentioning this because it is impossible for my past experience NOT to factor in to this review. I am not a fan of Demand Studios’ recruiting tactics, copyeditors, process, format and monetization structure. That being said, I don’t think they’re evil or “bad,” I’d just like to see them do things differently.

Demand Studios: The Door is Always Open

Demand Studios is a content mill that pays from $5 (for really short, 200ish word “fact sheets”) to $25 (for specialized health content articles of about 400-500 words). Most of the articles offered by Demand Studios are in the $15 range and the topics are varied. Know how to build a chicken coop? Then they might need an article from you. Know anything about business? Hop on board.

They have quite a few different style guides you need to familiarize yourself with for their various article types. As an example, you might write a list, an “About” article, a how to or a fact sheet. You will need to submit a resume and samples in order to be approved as a writer.

The Pros for Freelance Writers

Once you’re approved you have access to a system with over 150,000 titles available. At an average (I’m guessing) of $15 per article, that’s well over $2m  sitting there waiting for you. Just log in, claim the article titles you want to write and then make sweet love…no…that’s not right…oh yeah, make sweet typey-typey with your keyboard and create cheap masterpieces on the quick. This appeals to many people because:

1. Client work can be unpredictable. If you want extra spending money you can’t always call a client and ask for extra articles. You can pitch needed services to existing clients (like suggesting an e-book for a new product they have or some article marketing) but that doesn’t have a guaranteed success rate. Demand Studios titles are a guaranteed thing.

2. You can drop the ball. Since Demand Studios is its own entity, there are no individual clients waiting for you to turn in the work. You can claim up to 10 titles as a newbie and then, if you only feel like doing 5, you can cut out on the other 5 and run away to Cabo with no one disappointed or hurting—unlike Textbroker where you have a client who is expecting the article/web content and needs it in order to run their business.

3. No marketing. No networking. No querying.

The Cons for Freelance Writers

So hey, man, what’s the downside? Uh…an average of $15 per article friend, that’s the downside. Unless you are super fast, don’t really care about the process of creating an article (you know, the thinking and crafting part that you won’t have time with while working for Demand Studios) and get no rewrite requests, you’re not going to make much money. Say what? Rewrite requests? Um…yeah…rewrite requests.

Here’s the thing about Demand Studios that pisses me off the most. You are given a title. That’s it. You don’t get to interview your client, find out who the target is, or figure out what the point of your article is supposed to be. This week I chose all life insurance, annuity and IRA articles because those are easiest for me and I gave all pertinent information in the articles. But you see, my idea of what should be in the articles and the copyeditor’s were very, very different. I don’t remember it being so bad before but this week was terrible. 90% of my articles came back with rewrite requests and some of them were just stupid–like asking me to add some information that had nothing to do with the article topic or that wasn’t even true of the topic discussed. Some of the rewrites I understood, although the articles were perfectly fine without the info the copyeditors just wanted to go an extra mile. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were able to sort that out at the beginning, as you would doing due diligence with a normal client, but with DS it just means extra time spent redoing shit you’ve already done.

Show Me the Money

So what’s the bottom line? What did I make? I monitored my work this week with Demand Studios using the Slim Timer application (as I did with Textbroker last week) and timed everything: going through titles, picking assignments, writing the assignments, and doing the rewrite requests. I wrote a bunch of $7.50 articles that were about 200 words each and one little $3 “Answer” to a question (about 40 words) and made a whopping $63 in 2.5 hours which makes my hourly average $25.20. As I said, this includes time to find titles and edit for requested rewrites.

If you think in terms of a regular job, you might think that $25.20 an hour is pretty good—but as a self employed individual there are some other things to consider. If you work a regular job and make $25.20 an hour then you make over $52k per year. Your employer pays about 7.5% of your social security and supplies you with some combination of benefits that may or may not include: vacation time, sick time, group health benefits, and 401K matches.

In addition, making $52K a year with Demand Studios at $25ish an hour means about 8 hours of non-stop typing, 5 days a week, every single week of the year. How does that compare to an office job where you get variety and breaks?

Freelance Writing Insider’s Tip

I think that content mills like Demand Studios, despite their drawbacks, may have a place in the lives of some writers but I can’t imagine anyone actually liking them for full time work. You can make so much more with so fewer hours if you position yourself correctly as an expert in your specialty, start networking and marketing (yeah, it doesn’t take that much time and if you know what value you bring to the table it’s not obnoxious or unwelcome) and get yourself some real clients.

If you really want to try Demand Studios, have at it. Don’t forget to work on positioning yourself and building that platform (visit The Query-Free Freelancer for tips) while you use Demand for money. Stick with topics you know and write only one kind of article so that you don’t have to change voice and style to match varying style guidelines.

Oh, one last thing, they have no way at this time to disable accounts so make sure you use a pen name because you may be attached to that stuff forever.

The Background on Textbroker

When you write for the content mill known as Textbroker, you are ghostwriting for individual clients. You’ll need a resume and writing sample to get started. If you are approved they will ask you to write a 200-400 word sample text in order to rate your writing and assign you to one of their rating classes. The rating classes determine what gigs you can take–which determine what you get paid–so they are important. When clients upload assignments, they choose what “star” workers they want to for the project. So if a client just wants  cheap work he may upload his assignment as a 2-star assignment. If he wants better quality (and to pay more) he will upload it as a 5-star assignment.

As a writer you will be rated anywhere from 2-5 stars and will get paid from a paltry .007 per word to a better-than-other-mills .05 per word. You can take any gig assigned to your rating class or below. Each time you write something for a client it will be rated and, if you do well boys and girls, you can get a star rating increase.

My Freelance Writing Work

Um…well…today I logged in and there were no 5 star jobs available so I had to go with 4 star. 4 star only pays .015 per word so I was able to make $9.20 in 30 minutes. I used an online timer and included time spent looking for a title to write. I wrote a basic information article defining some stock market terminology and a little intro piece about loans. I did not choose any topic that required research and instead, I wrote what I know. I don’t think there is anything else I really need to say here.

The Pros for Freelance Writers

Snarky title aside, I actually like Textbroker. When I first started writing online I wrote for many of the content mills and Textbroker was always my favorite for four reasons:

1. Variety. You can write a 100 word article about a sea navigator one minute, and then a 400 word press release about the return of Jesus the next (yes, those are BOTH real requests from clients on Textbroker).

2. You are writing for people—like the kind used to make soilent green. Unlike Demand Studios, Textbroker isn’t a weird algorithm creating mill that wants to take over Google. You also don’t rely on the continuance of Google Adsense policies for work on Textbroker (I’d love to see what will happen to Demand Studios when Google changes their Adsense policy). Instead, you are writing product descriptions for online stores, telemarketing scripts for vitamin salespeople, press releases for religious zealots, legal articles for attorneys—the list goes on and on.

3. You can earn more on Textbroker than with any other content mill that I know of. Textbroker pays 5 star writers .05 per word. Those aren’t pennies—that’s a nickel. It’s nothing like what you can make on your own, but if you like content mill work, at least you won’t feel quite as much like someone is sticking a hose up your anus and convincing you it should make you happy.

4. You can set your own rate for direct work. If someone likes your writing style, they can contact you directly to work for them through Textbroker. For this privilege they must pay whatever rate you have assigned. That can be .03 per word, .05 per word, or .99 per word.

Other reasons you might enjoy Textbroker:

1. There are no submission guidelines to memorize.

2. They pay twice a month via Paypal as long as your balance is $10 or more.

The Cons for Freelance Writers

1. .007 per word? Really? (for 2 star assignments)

2. Textbroker doesn’t always have a steady flow of work. In fact, there have been times when they have absolutely no work.

3. .01 per word? Really? (for 3 star assignments)

4. Unless you are approved as a level 5 writer at the beginning, you’ll have to do some really, really cheap writing to get there.

5. .015 per word? Really? (for 4 star assignments)

Freelance Writing Insider’s Tip

Customers often rate your work. If you have a customer who rates your work highly, you can send them an onsite email and let them know that you enjoyed writing their article and, since you already understand the style they are looking for, it might be a great idea for them to send you direct orders in the future. This approach got me quite a bit of direct work when I first began my career. If you set your rate at .05 per word, you can make more than double what some other content mills pay.

I’m depressed. Yes, yes, I know this isn’t LiveJournal but still…depressed. Huh? What? Tear myself away from this jelly doughnut and tell you my problems? Huh? …whatever…sure…

The Background

This week, as I explored writing markets to report them to you here, I tried to break into the market at Digital Point Forums (DPF). When I was a new online freelance writer working for the content mills, people used to stop by my blog and suggest I try to pick up clients in the Buy/ Sell/ Trade forum on DPF. I did and got some gigs that ranged in price from .01 per word to about .03 per word.

Of course, the underground market on DPF (as I think Jenn refers to it) is much more lucrative than the Buy/ Sell/ Trade (BST) forum. In the underground market, webmasters send you unsolicited private messages and offer you fantastic gigs because they’ve been watching you and liked your style. I’ve scored many ongoing clients this way, and made some good deals. But many people don’t have the patience to wait around for those super secret private messages to start coming in and instead apply for jobs in BST.

Since my goal in this series is to help you find variety and fulfillment in your career and start increasing the amount you get paid for your writing NOW while continuing to put food on your family, I decided to go to BST just like I thought you might.

And now I’m sitting here covered in jelly like a toddler eating her first birthday cake.

The Work?

So why am I so traumatized? Because they didn’t like me…they really didn’t like me. No, wait—don’t be angry. I tried everything, I swear. I bid sorta low…then sorta high. Then, out of complete desperation, I started offering to flash people if they at least let me write for them for free.

Nothing. No takers. Not. A. One.

I played by all the rules. I bid on only those gigs I was impressively qualified for. I tried to craft my responses so they sounded open and eager without feeling desperate and victimy. I double checked my spelling and didn’t use any of those made up words that often fill my blog posts (‘cause I’m trying to get style points). I did everything that a million condescending blog posts written by my very own fingers have told you to do. And now, instead of working, I’m licking jelly from my knees.

The Verdict…I Guess

So what’s the moral of the story?

The moral, I guess, is that everyone goes through hard times when trying to get gigs. Luckily for me, this is just an experiment. My cats aren’t going to start gnawing on their own paws as they fade away from starvation. But in the anxiety of trying to have something to write about for this series, I started to get a little desperate in my bids. I know how that desperation feels when it’s money you need not a story for a blog post and it’s not pretty. It’s almost impossible to focus, write well, be a good spouse and parent, feel calm, and have a good life when you are facing that kind of desperation—and that is the one good thing about the content mills. They are there for you when you just can’t seem to find anything else.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue to look. If I were doing this to find work I needed, I would not lament my inability to get a job on DPF right now. I would not lament the fact that I had to suck up one more week with boring work or extremely low paying work. I would move on to another market. Period. Because, as Jenn mentions in this old-as-dirt post, there is not just one writing market that we are all corralled into–there are many.

New writers and inexperienced bloggers might try to convince you that all web content writers are sharing the same market–but they are really just showing their inexperience. Every topic, outlet, niche, sub-niche, type of website, type of client, type of content has it’s own little market in this big, fat world. Just as there are many different ways to monetize a website there are many different markets to approach–each with its own pay and protocol. The DPF market that advertises in the BST is not a barometer of all the markets out there–neither are the content mills, Elance, Craigslist…etc.

The Secret (no…not that Secret)

The secret is to find your market and write the hell out of it. Also, there is no Santa. Sorry folks but someone had to do it.

I started my online career with Helium, moved up to Associated Content, went on to Textbroker, then added Demand Studios and Bright Hub to the roster. I got gigs with webmasters advertising on Digital Point Forums, bid at GetaFreelancer, and had a blog on Today.com that, in retrospect, is so cutely naive I almost want to vomit. Of course, by the time I was done with that blog I had gone from making .01 per word to .10 per word, so it is an interesting progression to watch.

With the help of Joe Wallace of The Freelance-Zone and Jenn’s e-book I realized that all those great business skills I had in the corporate world could transfer over to the online writing world. In fact, every skill I used to run an insurance office I needed to run my freelance writing business. Finding leads, networking marketing–all the same things I’d been doing for years I now needed for my own business. I also realized that I had been a writer long before I discovered I was one. All the training manuals I’d written, PowerPoint presentations I had developed, sales brochures I created and business plans I wrote were, in fact, writing and proved that I had a talent–even if I had no college degree to back me up.

One year later and my career is in a completely different place. I’m working for myself on a full time basis and supporting my husband and kitties on my income alone. I don’t work crazy hours and often enjoy short, 20 hour work weeks. My business is still in its infancy and I sometimes have holes in my schedule that I need to fill, but I am enjoying a relatively low-stress career (low-stress until I spook myself and suffer those little crisis of confidences) with a handful of great paying clients and fun and challenging writing assignments. I get most of my work through networking but that’s not always an exact science and is something that writers trying to get out of the full time content mill and penny-per-word habit have to stick with and cultivate.

Of course, cultivation doesn’t make money now and that’s why I’m exploring many different markets that freelance writers new to online work are often exposed to. I won’t be relying on just my old experiences with these markets, I’ll be applying for and taking on these gigs right now and giving you a play-by-play. In this series I’ll share what it’s like to get gigs on webmaster forums, content mills, residual income sites, bidding sites and more. I’ll give you tips to increase your success and let you know how the work feels. And while these may not be my traditional methods for getting gigs, I will treat every one with respect and care while I am executing them–after all, a paying client is a paying client. It’s not up to me to place a sliding scale value on their money.

As a final note, it is important to remember that these posts are not meant to opine on whether or not you should or shouldn’t use any of these sources. I don’t know your business model so I don’t know if one penny a word is a step up or down for you. My hope is that, at some point in the series, you’ll find a resource that you can use as your stepping stone toward creating the freelance writing business you want, not the one some random blogger tells you to be happy with.