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Content mills challenge

Discussion in 'Copywriting' started by syda, Jun 26, 2015.

  1. #1
    I'm a writer, or at least I started out that way. Recently I've been doing translation, marketing, website development, administrative work and what else. No writing really. So I've decided to take a break this weekend from all this and only focus on writing.

    I wanted to make it interesting, so I created a challenge for myself:
    Earn $100 this weekend with content mills.
    I thought about making it $200 ($100 per day), but since I have 3 kids, including a 1 year old, I might (and will) get distracted and busy with other stuff.

    I have a 3 star elite status iWriter account, which I am going to use. I just hope that there are enough articles available, especially since it's a weekend and all.

    So if you guys know of any other content mills, similar to iWriter, where I could sign up and find some articles to work on, let me know.

    You are also welcome to join me, let's see who makes more money over the weekend!

    It's roughly 9:00 in the morning here now and my challenge will finish Sunday night at 23:59. Of course, it may take a little longer to see the actual results as buyers have 3 days to approve iWriter articles.
     
    syda, Jun 26, 2015 IP
  2. syda

    syda Well-Known Member

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    #2
    It's tougher than I thought. I have written 3 articles, one of them is approved - $8 something.

    I'm a fast writer, but there simply isn't anything I could write. Sure, there are 4 pages of articles in iWriter, but half of them are either accepting "only English writers", which I'm not, or are from buyers with an approval rate less than 10%. I'm definitely not going to take these.

    Used my time to research other similar sites, but texbroker only accepts American writers and I didn't really find any others. I guess I will just keep checking and writing anything remotely writeable :) If that's even a word :)
     
    syda, Jun 27, 2015 IP
  3. Akram Khunaizi

    Akram Khunaizi Active Member

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    #3
    Sounds interesting
    I already visited iWriter.com and they are OK
    Count me in :cool:
     
    Akram Khunaizi, Jun 27, 2015 IP
  4. syda

    syda Well-Known Member

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    #4
    Cool! Update us how your challenge is going, I guess we will now compete for projects. :)
     
    syda, Jun 27, 2015 IP
  5. syda

    syda Well-Known Member

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    #5
    It has now been 9 hours and I have written 9 articles, still only 1 is approved but I'm sure most others (if not all), will also be approved in the days to come.

    There are more projects available now, but I have had to go grocery shopping, make lunch and dinner, play with the kids and do laundry, that's also why there are only 9 articles. Planning to make up for it in the evening when kids are sleeping and it's nice and quiet to work.
     
    syda, Jun 27, 2015 IP
  6. WLEadmin

    WLEadmin Active Member

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    #6
    @syda, that site in your sig has been suspended. :\
     
    WLEadmin, Jun 27, 2015 IP
  7. syda

    syda Well-Known Member

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    #7
    Thanks, I'm aware of that. It is being moved to a dedicated server, should be back up and running tomorrow.
     
    syda, Jun 27, 2015 IP
  8. syda

    syda Well-Known Member

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    #8
    So how did it go? I didn't accomplish what I had set out to do. I only wrote about $80 worth of articles over the weekend. I didn't succeed mostly because there weren't enough articles available to write and I didn't want to do those $2.43 for 500 word ones.

    Also, 3 articles got rejected, all of them by the same buyer. His reason for rejecting them was that I had rewritten them from some other already existing articles. I hadn't done that, these were simple home renovation ideas articles, which I didn't even have to research and just wrote what I knew. I will be checking later to see if he still somehow managed to take my articles and publish.

    What do I conclude? It's not really worth all the trouble :D I don't think I will be writing much for iWriter, maybe only when I see higher paid work for people who actually accept the articles written or give me a chance to edit them. But for those of you working at the $0.50 per 100 words rate, iWriter is a good option. At least you won't have to deal with finding clients, emailing back and froth, etc.
     
    syda, Jun 29, 2015 IP
  9. coreygeer

    coreygeer Notable Member

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    #9
    Yeah, don't take iWriter gigs unless it's by a writer with a decent approval rating.

    A lot of broken English clients on there are super nit-picky and reject content at the click of a button just because they can. I've submitted an article before and a few seconds later after hitting submit, I got a manual reject for "broken English".

    Obviously I emailed iWriter Support and they changed the rating for me but it's absolutely absurd. Cheap clients are the most difficult clients to please. You'll notice a lot of those people do have sub-par 50% approval ratings which scares a lot of people off.

    I can't imagine trying to crank out enough content to earn $100 a day on that site. I might give that a go one day or try my own challenge on there.

    As a general rule, you're going to get rejections on there. Clients are often unreasonable and have no idea what they want for the price they're offering. You'll also notice that the 2 and 3 star writers never send any tips for work completed. However if you look at the 4 star and 5 star section, approval ratings start to improve, they've sent tips to writers and the instructions become a bit shorter.

    You just can't please low budget clients. I used to be excited to check the content section here every day but anymore, what's the point? It's the same garbage every single day. Some new $1 per 100 word client wants a unicorn writer to produce stellar content that will dominate Google. Not only that but they usually demand "high quality" when the requester barely has a grasp on English.

    Come to think of it, all of my rejections that I got when starting out was in the 1 star section. Everyone starts there and you have to work your way up. I had rejections for the most ridiculous reasons and I'm pretty sure clients were just getting free work. This was before they made some changes to how the system worked and they no longer allow clients to do that.

    I would still rate iWriter over Textbroker though. The editors are the ones who determine your rating over at Textbroker and having one comma they don't like can put you at a level 3. Some mistakes they let slide and some mistakes they penalize the hell out of you. It just depends on how the editor's feeling that day from my experience. They expect you to write at a perfect Stanford level of quality at the $1.50 per 100 word rating and never make any mistakes.

    This can all be summed up to content mills in general are an utter waste of time. Cheap and picky low paying clients, bully editors, low payout structures and a lot of other competing writers who are ready to eat up those $1 per 100 word deals.

    EDIT: I literally went to iWriter after typing this to see how much work was available. There's currently only ONE page. Ouch.
     
    coreygeer, Jun 29, 2015 IP
    syda likes this.
  10. WLEadmin

    WLEadmin Active Member

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    #10
    A lot of people do very well at iWriter, but if you look at their TOS there's virtually no protection for the writer. There's literally one para and a sentence to cover submissions. That's always been my point of contention: although the site IS legit and pays, their terms basically promise nothing, with no recourse if there's a problem. People flock to it because it's such an easy setup, forgetting that the more work someone else does on your behalf, the less you earn in the end.

    Talk about hitting the nail on the head. You can even drop the bit about price: clients often have no idea what they want or even why they want it. :D

    In general, I prefer an editor-based assessment. Neutrality is better than a client-based assessment of quality, unless you're writing on demand (in which case the client is the person who supposedly knows what they need). But yes, editors are all different and can have off-days.

    It's also true that as prices rise, quality demands get tougher: you'd be shocked at the number of people who expect to get $15+ per 500 words, simply because they made the effort to submit regurgitated rubbish that says nothing and has no value. And then they whine when you reject it because it won't ever sell, because it's no use, because it's just verbal diarrhoea that no sensible client wants to pay money for.

    And that's the thing, in the end. Writers have been told for years (usually with the same ClickBank-based junk) that anything you write will sell, and you can make thousands a month. They forget that - just like ads - there is someone at the other end paying out hard-earned cash for the content. And that person doesn't want crap. But the client has been convinced - usually by shitty short-lived SEO-writing freelancers - that they can pay $1 and get UHQ content. They forget that you get what you pay for.

    So everyone ends up feeling let down: the writers get peeved because they can't just submit word-spew as the ads pretend, the clients get peeved because they can't get their UHQ content for 20c per ebook, and the site is stuck in the middle, getting peeved because everyone complains all the time (or they just don't care and ignore everyone). :D
     
    WLEadmin, Jun 29, 2015 IP
    syda likes this.
  11. coreygeer

    coreygeer Notable Member

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    #11
    It probably wouldn't surprise me too much. I've been on the hiring end and hiring is a nightmare. There are some good writers out there for a fairly decent price for some of these budget clients but the majority of them are a waste of time.

    They copy content straight from Wikipedia (some even left the sources in)
    They'll open up the first article they find on Google for the topic they're writing about and just re-write it
    They'll give you delivery dates they can't stick to
    They try to spin content

    A lot of people online use English agents or people that do interviews for them on places like oDesk. That's the worst problem I encountered when hiring people. On several different freelancing sites, there are people who use English agents to conduct interviews for them, so you think you're hiring someone who speaks and writes native English. Then, you get this absolute garbage that can't be read.

    In general, It's far easier to just acquire your own clients who don't visit these kinds of forums. The first time I ever tried selling myself to a company for writing that had a ton of work, I told them I start out at $20 an article. I thought that was a decent price at the time and he basically just stuttered and said "uhhh..."

    I thought my price was obviously way too high. He replied back with he wasn't interested because the price was far too low and he was concerned that the quality wouldn't be even native English at that rate.

    Different clients are used to paying out different things. Some $1 clients expect top level content and I've met a couple $15 per article clients who really could care less, as long as it gets done. One guy who contacts me every month or so will hop on Skype, send me some topics, tell me to write as much as I can on it and that's the only requirement.

    I feel grateful that I've found that client to because they're really hard to find. My best clients never asked for a "sample". They know those could be rubbish and they simply paid me for a short trial article to start things off.
     
    coreygeer, Jun 29, 2015 IP
  12. WLEadmin

    WLEadmin Active Member

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    #12
    I've actually had someone do this and, when rejected, say that he didn't realise research wasn't allowed. Someone needs a dictionary. :D
     
    WLEadmin, Jun 29, 2015 IP