Do You Still Have Hope In The Content Section Here At DP?

As a new poster here this has been a great thread to stumble across. I came to DP mostly because another writer I know rec'd it as a place to advertise your services and pick up gigs ... but from my initial cruising through the job postings and seeing all the "CHEAP WRITER WANTED" topic titles I'm now thinking this is just going to be a place for chatting, maybe networking and getting some tips on building out my own sites. So no, I have little hope for the content section here at DP

 

I think the problem here is in the general direction the market is taking. On one had, you have a ton of Asian writers eager to get the job done. Low skills, low quality, low expectations. $1 per 100 words seems like an amazing deal to them, given that they can actually live through the day off that $1. With the growth of Internet penetration in countries like India, Pakistan and others, the problem only got bigger. Basically the same thing that happened to manufacturing, when a lot of it moved overseas, only in terms of content creation.

On the other hand, the recession that hit the world in 2008 made more companies turn to freelance. That's when people started losing jobs. I kid you not, I know at least a couple of American writers with superb skills, who are ready to write for $1 - $1.5 per 100 words.

Another huge factor - the clients. People now assume that content creation is something a 5 year-old could do. People don't know how hard it is to create a truly outstanding piece of content. It's hard to explain to them the value of great content. Partially because of the reasons, mentioned above.

Then there's Google - paying more and more attention to content. This spawned a ton of content creation companies, which now do all of the heavy lifting, taking over placed like DP.

 

That is a great analysis, Alex Toll. I agree with your points. The question now is how do content creators get around this so that we can still make money from our craft?

 

@alex, I do agree with your comments regarding outsourcing.

Then they should be writing for themselves. I kid you not, I know people that have written multiple books, and are actively selling them on amazon. They aren't 'real writers per-sae, they just picked up a pen and some paper and started. The sales might be slow, (around 1 book per week) but still works out much better then $1-$1.5 per 100 words and its with amazon, fully automated. All she has to do is spend her check when it arrives.

 

The problem, is your all STUPID -

HIRE WRITERS THAT KNOW THE SUBJECT AND SPEND THE GAWD DAM MONEY !

MY GRANDMA ALWAYS SAID: JOSEPH - IT TAKES MONEY TO MAKE MONEY !

IF YOU SPEND $1 on a article , it will make you $10

IF YOU SPEND $50 PER article , It will make you Thousands,

I have pROOF ALL DAY FOLKS

 

so where do writers get their money from?

 

People who pay , ....

Not sure what you are asking....

 

Then ask your grandma.

 

Are you implying that writers use software to write articles, for the most part?

 

I was mainly more annoyed that he is calling everyone stupid, when the majority of people in this thread are writers, or respect talented writers.
People always say it takes money to make money. But it takes hard work and determination to earn money, and then skill and experience to make that money work for you.

 

I misunderstood you, then. I thought you meant that a lot of "writers" used software like article spinning software, or did not actually write their own articles.

I use Microsoft Word, even though I hate it. The "Track Changes" feature (along with other features) is too valuable to my business, but the program itself is terrible on the PC. Very laggy and overall problem-creating in terms of speed and CPU efficiency.

His point was that too many people think they can spend next to nothing on a piece of content and think they can extort writers for pennies, in order to make hundreds and thousands.

He is right. The people that have that mentality will never make money in the long run. Anything substantial, anyway.

 

I use Libre Office. I used Open Office for a long time, but then switched to Libre Office and have been using that for a couple of years. Both are good alternatives to Microsoft Word.

 

I too use Openoffice. (Libreoffice is a slightly different fork of Openoffice but almost the same.) Openoffice development seems to have stopped of late. I recently switched from Open to Libre and have started liking Libre more. They are introducing additional features day after day which is making writing or using the word processor increasingly comfortable especially for writers. E.g. the word count in status bar; I missed this feature a lot before but now it's solved. It's the best FREE alternative to Word currently, although Abiword is also something I would recommend.
Anyway, MS Word sucks and very heavily eats my machine's resources. I find its grammar checker horrible sometimes. It can make a love letter sound like a business proposal after corrections! :O

 

What @sundaybrew means here, I think, is that you have to invest reasonable capital at first if you want your product to generate some handsome sales for you. In other words, you have to invest a good budget in creating your content if you want it to generate traffic, effectively market your brand out there by attracting a huge number of visitors to your website and convert prospective buyers to direct customers. There's no point in investing just some pennies on the dollar and expecting writers to deliver high-quality content that will work it's magic all the way and get you tons of sales. Sadly, most cheap buyers don't realize this and put the blame entirely upon writers for producing crappy or shoddy work. How in the whole world am I supposed to get motivated to deliver 'high-quality' when all I am getting out of it is merely $1/1.5 for 500 words? :O This rate doesn't even fetch a one time decent meal!

No doubt hard work, determination, skill and experience are the keys to make money and eventually more money but you also have to have some initial capital to invest if you want to enhance your profit-maximising potential. As a writer, just being able to write well is not enough by itself. You should also be able to promote your services efficiently and make your presence powerfully felt if you want to survive in the market and outperform your competitors. This promotion is one of the things that require initial investment or money needed to make money. Using cheap or free platforms for promotion doesn't take your business very far in my view.

@Jennifer Hutson said it right I believe.

 

I don't get it. If there are people who are willing to write for $5 or $10 an article, and there are people who are pleased with the work they produce, where's the problem? You sound like those who would insist that everyone flipping burgers at McDonalds should earn the same amount of money as the CEO. You don't write for blogs, you say. That's fine, but there are people with blogs who need people to write for them, and there are people who write who are charging rates that are affordable to blog owners. Again, what's the problem? If you can make more, fine; make more. No one is denying you that. However, if the problem is that these people are taking your jobs, then perhaps you need to consider that you're charging too much.

 

I just spent around thirty minutes skimming this thread, and would like to add my $0.02.
$0.02 was what I used to charge per word when I started out here at DP four years ago.
When I started out here at DP four years ago, there were definitely more buyers and fewer sellers!

Three simple sentences like the ones above were enough to prove to my (prospective) clients that I was capable of writing compelling content for their websites/blogs.

These days, the quality of my writing doesn't seem to be enough to convince (most) buyers (on this forum) to hire me. Instead, they expect me to stick to a rate of $0.02, but for 200 words instead of one!

So no, I don't have hope for the content creation section over here. As mentioned several times in this thread, serious writers definitely need to move on from DP. That said, I occasionally keep an eye on the CC forum for any interesting opportunities that might randomly appear. The "penny market" issue does trouble me, but I see it as a challenge to move on to a higher playing field! Since no amount of grumbling is going to make those low-paying jobs in the CC forum go away, the only sensible thing left to do is to find out where the high-paying jobs are. Easier said than done, but that is why it's a challenge.

 

@Content Maestro, sundaybrews comments came directly after I mentioned how non-writers that I know in real life, are able to put pen to paper, and get content published and earn recurring sales from amazon.

This is why it puzzles me when people tell me they are out of work but are expert writers. My opinion is work for yourself, write books, guides, it costs you nothing but a bit of time, and can earn you recurring income for life. You might earn $1000 per 100 words by the end of the first year.

Like sundaybrew said:

Why cant writers work for themselves and make thousands and not just that make recurring income? Even if it is working for yourself part time while writing content for others surely doing so at some stage will make you less reliant on buyers, and eventually earning enough to say "F*** em all"

 

Writers do work for themselves, at least the savvy ones do. But you still have to pay the immediate bills and keep body and soul together somehow, which means paid writing work for clients if this is what you do full-time for a living. And you can only do so much typing in a day before you get burnt out (or just run out of hours). Unless you have a big bankroll to sustain you while you work on your own projects, it's a balancing act between client work (cash in hand) and chipping away at your own projects.

I like the cut of your jib, sundaybrew, although $50 for a return of thousands might be a *slight* overpromise in most cases