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.

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.