Don't Sell Yourself Short It seems like a fantastic deal and it seems almost effortless, but when you step back and actually get more information about it, you're selling yourself short. For example, imagine you can bench press 250lb and your friend says "you could make money working in a warehouse." You think to yourself, hey he's right. That'd be the perfect job. Meanwhile your other friend can bench 280lb and goes on to be a bodybuilder and starts branding himself as a product and makes 100 times more than you. The same can be said of submitting your work to these places that pay you $1 or $3. Sure they're easy, and their website has flash and javascript with a nice icon bar for formatting, but you make no money, while they're selling to yahoo for a cool $3 million. If you were the "other friend", with a little bit of research on your own, you'd find out that the way all these huge newspapers make money is by buying articles from people just like you. They aren't on staff. They're not on a paycheck. They submit their articles to the editor and get a check in the mail and a thank you note. And trust me, the check isn't $1, nor $3 LOL So how can you make it rich selling your aticles to real people? Well first you have to be the "other friend" and do your own research. You need to compile a list of editor's email addresses or OR mailing addresses to introduce yourself. pet peeve: everyone is looking to be spoon-fed, and they want it NOW. Noone in business is going to spoon-feed you anything, without you putting down a million dollar retainer. Stop selling yourself short kid.
didn't take this scraper site long to find the post... stop selling yourself short why they are scraping and 'republishing' it without making it unique first I have no idea. suggestion for DP mod (if there are any left) - ban codono IP address to stop them scraping your content. unless I have hold of the wrong end of the stick, and the post has been copied TO d.p....
I don't know why i write original content for DP lol I shoulda just posted on my blog, but I don't have a "make money" type of blog. I don't think my women readers would care about me writing about blogging or writing specifically. They just wanna hear my gossip or politics. Guess I answered my own question. Can i ask that website to take that down?
Yes, they are infringing your copyright. Send their host a DMCA notice specifying the page, and they'll either have to take it down or be shut down (if they are hosted in the USA, of course.. You could also complain to Google - adsense being used to monetize copyright theft probably isn't what Google like to hear. Click on the Google text at the bottom of the adsense block, and look for the option to report a violation.
If only it were that easy. Here's the truth ... Everyone with a website is a publisher. That means demand for content is really high. That's why there are $3 article writers. (Well, that and the fact that $3 dollar articles are a simple exploit of the section of the search engine algos that score backlinks.) Twenty years ago, when there were far less publishers, there were far fewer writers being published. Most writer's rejection letter piles were bigger than their acceptance letter piles. Writing isn't easy. In fact, it's hard. I'd even go so far as to say that writing good content sometimes sucks. I think the basic principles of profit that guided newspapers and magazines are still in effect. 1. Buy entertaining, educational and engaging content 2. Find an audience (circulation) for that content 3. Sell ad space to businesses that think they can sell to that audience Those steps don't have to be done in that order, but they all need to be completed. (The order can vary depending on venture capital, your talents (or talent pool) and/or a existing demographic or audience.) When you hear someone say that it all starts with great content, you can eruditely reply "Ahem, not necessarily my friend. Not necessarily. The content, you see, is only a piece of the puzzle. Only a piece. What's what." However, though it doesn't have to start out great, to retain readers and advertisers content eventually has to be great ... and consistently so.
If bench pressing 250 lbs. is analogous to being a talented writer, that makes sense. There aren't a lot of folks around who can press 250 lbs.
@ Ace Lasher I don't know if you were agreeing with me or trying to refute me. i.e. putting effort to submit to a newspaper takes just as much energy as trying to submit to content middle men websites for that measly $3.
Effort is too subjective to base an argument on. And it's only one part of the writing equation. Good writing is a combination of effort, talent, skill, creativity and tenacity. Expanding on your analogy, imagine a skinny beginning weight lifter on the bench next to the guy who can bench 250 lbs. The skinny beginner can put as much effort as he wants into lifting as much as the other guy, but without proper training and dedication, his effort (which may be more than the other guy's) won't yield the same result. I believe: 1. Most $3 articles are published by websites that aren't widely read. 2. Most $3 articles are used to satisfy (i.e. exploit) sections of search engine algorithms 3. Most $3 articles are written by writers with only a rudimentary knowledge, if any, of the article's topic 4. Most $3 articles are repackaged duplicates of existing articles or rephrased Wikipedia entries 5. Most $3 articles wouldn't be published anywhere except $3 article publishing websites (like EzineArticles or Articlebase) When it comes to writers, there are diamonds in the rough. Maybe you know a lot of them. Maybe that's the reason for your motivational post. "Don't sell yourself short" is a positive message that we should all take to heart. If we cement it with "Don't ever give up" and "God don't make no junk" and "May the force be with you" there's no way we can fail. (I mean, of course we can fail. Failure is part of life. Just because some free article directory published our $3 article that doesn't mean we're ready for the New York Times or, god forbid, the Huffington Post. What I mean to convey is, you may fail but that's no reason to sell yourself short and give up because God don't make no junk. May the force be with you.) Thanks for the positive, inspirational and uplifting message Las Vegas DUI Lawyer. I'm just funnin' ya. I don't see the glass as half empty or half full ... I just wonder why the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
I must say sir, you're rather funny. Well we all look through rose colored glasses, n'est pas? I keep thinking everyone is like me. I keep thinking everyone is as ... I don't know, educated or enlightened as myself. And, you're right, not everyone can bench 250lbs, BUT everyone can eventually, with nothing more than training, which they can research themselves, bench 250lbs. Everyone, with training, which they can research themselves, run a marathon. One legged men, with dedication, can run marathons. At some point it simply comes down to willpower. My purpose wasn't to just motivated inept, bad English speaking, grammatical orcs, into posting to the Harvard Law Review. I intend to put these exploitative middle men out of business. Everyone complains about the poor, and accept as a "law" of nature that "we will always have the poor". But, it is my position, that people are poor, not due to any circumstance, in America at least, other than they just don't have any "powerful knowledge", i.e. knowledge is power. Imagine some kid thinks that all he is capable of, is submitting to these $1 or $3 commissioned article sites. He's killing himself, to get into the "big leagues" on those sites, and now he's beefed up his writing to make a cool $15, because now he's posting these $3 on his own blog with links included. At the end of the day, he's ruined his pr4 blog and he's out of all money, because he's ruined his once nice blog site. Had he simply known, he could have submitted articles about Egypt or Libya to Newsweek and been that much further ahead of the game. Not everyone that writes a $3 article, is a foreign, grammatical orc, with no copywriting concepts. Time and again these exploitative middle men completely turn the tables on their own clientele, a la scam, and everyone that was making $1,000 from the deal suddenly start making only $3 again. Why? Greed mostly, but the poor cannot get ahead. They cannot be allowed to get ahead. Sure these advertisers, that commission the articles to begin with are sheisters themselves and are relying on nigh child labor to market themselves instead of hiring a PR firm or marketing firm to do the job correctly. It's the same vein as those who came up with the bright idea of telemarketing to circumvent spending real money on a marketing firm. The employees always get the short end because the company goes out of business in about a week's time. but i digress...
none. It got picked up using a new IP banning app we are testing - that site is a scraping pest, and when I went to take a look at who was pestering our servers, that post was top of the page. The link below it leads back to this thread, ergo, it's a recidivist automated scraper site that specializes in stealing content from forums to try and make a couple of bucks from adsense. Pathetic.
Ok. It appears we're on the same side (for now). We can be friends then. Now I am off to get some lunch ... but I digest.
I think people that get paid $3 are worth exactly $3 and not more. I'm also sure that web masters that pay $3 the article, won't pay more even if there isn't a supply. It's simple: They are profitable at $3/article, some are profitable at $1 only and they'll bid at that price. They don't really care about the article itself, but just look for a unique content that can rank for some keywords in Google. And while some exceptions exist, I doubt that most people that work for $3 are worth $50 and I also doubt that people that pay $3 make $100 from the article, but are just too egoist to pay the writer. It's just a different market. It's crappy, yes. But it's making some people money.
well this article was for people ... like me basically. I did like 1 or 2 articles and got paid $5, and then thought ... why am i doing this. Then of course, in my own research, it was suggested that I submit to Newsweek, WSJ, the NY Post etc... So I ASSUMED ... [no jokes please] ... that there are others out there like myself. While I did not graduate with a journalism degree, I took about half credit for a degree anyway, I fell out of the loop on submitting my work for publication and all. The web presents a unique brand of pitfalls that people in my situation fall for. So this post is mainly to warn, cajole, elucidate and enlighten those that might have "forgotten" that there's a real market out there for them ... us ... people like myself, that pay real live money. No, I'm not talking about the people that do: "Chocolate just time for easter. Very good chocolate. You like chocolate. Kind sir buy chocolate easter now." - and i'm being nice. The english that is not english. *sigh* Which I refuse to hire and put on my own websites.