Thread: Online Writing Help

I’m writing to anyone that can help me out from their own experience with online writing, or anyone who has dealt with a difficult editor (or in my case a slew of them).



You see, I had my hours slashed at my office job a few months back. To make up the difference, I thought it would be a fantastic idea to turn to online writing for profit. This, of course, mostly comes in the form of content mills (Demand Media Studios, Associated Content and that ilk) and bidder sites. I haven’t found a single job worth perusing on bidder sites (all insultingly low pay), but started to make a couple hundred on the content mills. Things were getting accepted and money was flowing in.



I let that little bit of success go to my head and quit my office job to write full-time as a freelance writer. Not a week after I quit my job and after they already found my replacement, one site dried up on titles and I have not had anything to write for weeks. To make matters worse, I looked at the scoring system they have in place (which I had not realized had as much clout as it does, ie. do poorly enough and you get fired). I have a 2.6 on a five point scale! I had not considered this before, seeing as things were getting accepted, I was getting money and I graduated with a 3.9 from an English writing program for Christ’s sake!



The problem is with inconsistent editors. One bad score because that editor does not prefer third person (even though I was told by a senior editor to always use it) and your score sinks. I’ve had other editors change things to be wrong or incomplete and rate my articles low. Because there are no titles I cannot raise my score. Even if I tried, who’s to say that editor will prefer the style of the last editor? And the scores are indisputable.


On another site, I am having a similar problem. Their guidelines are so complex that whatever you type, some editor can pick a problem with it. For instance, were I to cite something about a career, and it could apply to any other career ever, they consider it “fluff.” I don’t see how that makes the information invalid.


Sorry for the length, but this had been eating me up. I can’t write because I just see those low scores and have the feeling that whatever I do is wrong. That is the true frustration about writing; there is no one constant. Everyone has their own view of what stellar writing is. Even in food service there is a constant. You either filled an order or you didn’t. Writing is so subjective. I also think sometimes editors take their role as gatekeeper too seriously and get on an ego trip. I got an article rated as a 1.5 for a couple of typos anyone could have made. I’m only human.


Any advise would be appreciated. I’m looking at taking any pedestrian job I can get and it scares me. I don’t want to end up flipping burgers with a bachelor’s degree. Not being able to pay bills is now a looming threat.

I am a consultant for a living. I write code, I recommend solutions to problems, and pretty much do what I can to make the person paying the bills happy. Long ago I had high ideas of how things should be, and eventually realized that while it is good to know how things 'should' be, you give the customer what they want. You will have to do the same form of thing if you want to succeed. If you are writing on a per piece basis, ask the person who is paying what they want. If they want first person...make it so. Does it matter what is best, or what the person paying wants? When writing fiction we are still ultimately serving an audience. The only difference is we pick the audience we are looking to have. You are finding audiences willing to pay, give them what they want to pay for.

Take a few lower paying ones if you need to, and find out what they want and give it. If someone gives you a low score, ask them (politely) why, and if it is something strange, ask if you fixed it would the rerate you (if that is possible).

You have moved it to a business, and if you want to make money, you have to bend to the customer. You can call them losers if you wish, to yourself, as you count the cash. Otherwise you should look for another normal job where you can get back to a normal paycheck. If you want to do service for a living, you have to bend to the customer.

Oh, I wish that I could Darkstorm. But that is the nature of these content mills- you do not know who your "customer" is. I get assigned nameless, faceless editors based on each individual article. And once they make their decree, I cannot change it and even contact them directly to ask how to make it better. That score is in stone. Perhaps it is time seek out private clients (though I have had little success at that. Networking is my Achilles' heal). Again, made the leap too fast...

Originally Posted by Astralwolf37

Any advise would be appreciated. I’m looking at taking any pedestrian job I can get and it scares me. I don’t want to end up flipping burgers with a bachelor’s degree. Not being able to pay bills is now a looming threat.

Astralwolf37 my advice to you is: Nothing is below you.

Do whatever you can to pay your bills and work hard to improve your craft.

They don't call us starving artists for nothing.

Good luck.

I've done a little work for a content mill (not something I like to have to do but I needed the few bucks I could make at the time) and you need to know exactly what each individual job entails. Never assume if you can help it, message the customer for answers if that is allowed in the system.

In my experience there is a lot of hard work in content writing (if you do it right) and not much money in the content mills. If your scores are going down consistently even though you're working for more than one mill, I'd say you need to be REALLY careful not to make simple mistakes like typos. That is an indicator that you need to bring your game up to a new level, not that you're being picked on.

If you think you can do freelance on your own, network like crazy and look for places where freelance jobs are posted. Where I live I can find such jobs on Craigslist. You'll have to be prepared to spend time with your clients to make sure what they want. You'll have to do all the things that the content mills were doing for you; meetings, approvals, billing, etc. Be ready to deal with the writing and the business side of it both.

And keep looking for a 'regular' job. There is no shame in flipping burgers to pay the rent, a lot of people with four-year degrees have to at one time or another.

Well, as bad as it sounds, those who are in charge make the rules. And those rules, sadly, change very often and often from person to person no matter how well defined. And it will be doubly bad when the person making the rules pays for content.

I stay away from content mills. I find them horrid places.

Rejection though is a way of life.

For example, I submit articles under my real name to some other sites like articles databases but only to build links back to my own sites where I make my money. One of those sites which loved my content got taken over years ago by someone who wanted to go in another direction with the site. They set up new rules for submissions which made it very hard for anything I wrote to get published there. But I still submitted and made them reject the articles. Every other week an editor would reject my article and the reason given would be some new reason that was nowhere to be found in the site user agreement. I would email the admin. He would email me back reaffirming what his editor had done claiming that my submission was not in line with the rules. He never cited the rule. Just said that the submission was in violation. I was not the only author who had this problem.

Over time the submission "rules" grew and grew to a massive list complete with sections like 23.1.3.2.1 (a) making it nearly impossible to understand what was and what was not acceptable. However basically it boiled down to, if you read through the entire thing, that any article containing an opinion the owner or one of his like thinking editors did not like would be rejected. That's fine. It is their site. But myself and many other authors simply stopped submitting. That site still exists today. But it is a bland article mill and shadow of its former self.

Every couple months they email me asking me when I will submit again. I tell them why I am not submitting, they promise me that things are no longer the way they were and I submit an article to test them. The article is then always promptly rejected just like before. I stop submitting again, then several months later they email me again begging for submissions.

You just have to deal with this sort of things and move on.