It's appalling to me to see writing service advertisements that have poor wording, little or no capitalization and punctuation, and a shabby command of the English language. What's even more shocking is that there are requests for rates and topics from these writers! It's like you see the leaky rook and crumbling foundation, yet you buy the house anyway. So, my question is, when it comes to content for your site, what's on your priority list? How important are coherency and readability in comparison to cost? If you have multiple sites do you find yourself with a different priotization of needs for some sites than for others?
I won't buy a service unless they have perfect writing skills. A couple of times I have asked for forum posters, and specified that they must use perfect English, and I get a bunch of crappy posts with no capitalization, so I end up cancelling the paid posts.
Latoya, a lot of the time the buyers honestly don't know what "perfect English" is, especially in webmaster forums where the buyers are sometimes non-native English speakers themselves. Some just trust that the writer knows what they're doing, and frankly some just don't care about writing quality. They simply want unique content, and they want it cheap, even if it's crap. Don't worry about those kinds of buyers though. They usually get what they pay for. Target your own ads to people who do care about quality. If that at some point means leaving webmaster forums behind, or at least branching out more elsewhere, then so be it.
Don't give up, or lower yourself to their rates and standards. There are those of us about (however few) who are willing to pay a decent rate for quality content. My agency spend over $1000 a month (through myself) on quality content by authors - we won't settle for bad grammar and spelling, and neither will our clients. Just keep promoting yourself as a quality writer at a reasonable rate, and you'll most likely land a few clients who are better paying and a more long term relationship than most of the junk content buyers on here And as jhmattern said - diversify. Write content for your own sites when you don't have client work - build up a portfolio of work and look into sites like constantcontent which allow you to set a decent rate for your content.