In this thread is the worst copywriting job in the world

I looked around the Get A Freelancer website to see what kind of jobs are out there and I came across what has to be the worst copywriting job ever. Here is the link to the job post: http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Copywriting/content-pages-needed.html

The employer wants "300 articles of 500 words each are needed. Must be keyword rich, the keywords will be provided to you. Quality, original work is essential. All articles must pass copyscape." That's 150,000 words total.

The employer's expected price to pay for this job? Somewhere between $100 - $300 dollars.

If you charged one-tenth of one penny per word, your bid would come to $150.

What's even more astounding is that there are four bidders competiting for this slave job!

Has anyone else come across similar awful jobs before?

 

Yes, I have unfortunately. But at the end of the day, you get what you pay for.

 

on the other hand, i once posted a request for 50 articles of about 400-600 words. some bidders bid $350, which i thought was...maybe a little too cheap. when i contacted them to see if they can increase the bid (and so increasing quality), apparently what they bidded on was $350 for ONE article. so 50 article is $350 x 50 = $17 500

 

There's no way someone is going to do 300 articles for one dollar each. There's no way that could work.

 

Since there is high competition, the prices are lowered like anything. But in Elance you can get good price and quality.

 

True. With Elance it is always a good bid

 

If there is supposed to be bidding, of course the initial price is low.
What is be much more interesting to me is what highest price will be reached in the end.

 

LOL. In the early days of my site I used to write 600-700 word articles, and I now have over 1700 articles, but that took over 6 years, and I didn't even have a life, so I wrote about three-four articles a week! And this guy wants to pay someone $100-300 to do this? LMAO. What a moron.

 

That makes 'posting for pennies' look lucrative. Maybe he or she is related to the person who thought a penny a word was a lot because she thought typing and writing were the same thing.

 

Are you kidding? Bidding sites like that attract the lowest of the low... I saw one job advertised awhile back that was paying only 15 cents per ARTICLE.

I'm a firm believer that you get what you pay for. I would never churn out that many articles for so little.

 

That is true, you get what you pay for.

Unless you are insane, there is no way to write quality articles and get paid such ridiculous amount.

 

That price is ridiculous.

Every once in awhile I bid on writerlance.com, on the off chance that there'll be a wise buyer posting a project, but it's at a rate of $25/article of 500 words. I don't really expect to get the project. It's more of a statement to let the buyer know that not all writers quote crap prices. After viewing my samples, I get something along the lines of "Your writing is good, but I'm not willing to pay your price." Which is fine, because someone else will pay my price.

I've heard of writers making decent money on elance, but I refuse to pay to bid.

 

Excuse, who or what is Elance

 

If you are a freelancer head over here and you will understand
http://www.elance.com/

 

Elance or any other, I will not pay to bid either.

I don't know how people survive taking jobs for one-tenth of one penny per wordand still paying bids.

 

It was $.13 / article. Don't worry about sites like GAF. Once in a blue moon I pick up a press release there for my normal rates, so I keep their email alerts. Some of the writing gigs listed are pretty pathetic. They seem to attract the ones with every demand in the world (must be perfect english, must be written by an expert, must be completely unique, bid must include the full copyright, work must start within 12 hours, etc.). Of course they don't want to actually pay for anything though.

Even with my much higher rates, if a client said something like "you have to start in 12 hours," I'd tell them to get someone else. I don't fork over copyright unless they're willing to pay a minimum four figure buyout fee per piece (or unless they're a hell of a big client that I really really want on my client list). I set the time estimates in any proposal or quote, and if they want something immedately or off-hours they pay my off-hours consulting rate. If they don't like it, tough cookies. That's how it works in the "real world." If you want to make extreme demands, you pay a hefty price for them. Hence why I don't take general content writing gigs from GAF or webmasters at all usually (only PR writing and copywriting). So don't worry about that site or others like it. If people are stupid enough to bid for things like $1 per article, they'll never really make it as a writer anyway, and you don't want to lump yourself in with that group.

 

Should I start the whole debate about how cost of living in different countries can account for different bid prices and so on?

I'm not sure anyone can afford to work for $1 per article or less, even if it is their very first writing assignment ever and they are trying to build up reputation, etc...

I do hope the original poster pays for the work (assuming the work is decent)...people that set expectations like that can be sketchy.

Rebecca

 

Hi,
If you don't want pay for your bid, just peep in rentacoder.com or scriptlance.com. Both these sites are equally competitive. Here also one guy asks 500 word article for a dollar.

 

I've seen the articles that are churned out from some of those bids on getafreelancer. the guy who is writing it doesn't even speak proper english so the articles don't even sound fluent.

 

Bottom line: you get what you pay for.

If you want to hire someone for "one tenth of a cent per word", you're probably going to be hiring non-english speakers to do very, very bad work.

I've been making serious money from copywriting for years, and if someone approached me with that kind of offer I'd laugh at them!

Truth be told--my rates are about twice that of the other writers on this board. I don't know how or why you do it for so little!