Saturday, February 19, 2011

Constant Content, Daily Article and Article Sale

I've looked around for other listing marketplaces for writers. The biggest and probably the best is Constant Content. I mentioned it below, but it's worth describing in greater depth.

The site clearly gets a lot of visitors, many of whom are keen to buy good content. You can also choose which kind of rights you are offering to the buyer. The site does take a substantial commission of 35% on each sale however. I've also read a few complaints about how picky they are about grammar and spelling from some disgruntled folk. But surely that's a good thing in the end. You just have to go through each article with a fine tooth comb before submitting it to make absolutely sure that it's perfect.

There seem to be only two other sites of this kind. One is called Daily Article. This looks pretty good. And from what I've read it takes a 20% cut. There does seem to be pretty good quality control, however I get the impression that it's not quite as stringent as Constant Content.

Unlike that site, however, you don't have any choice about what kind of rights you're selling. You basically just hand over the article completely to whoever buys it. And they can basically do whatever they want with it.

There's another site called Article Sale. This one takes no commission, and seems to get its entire income from serving ads. Like Article Sale, you sign over all your rights with each purchase. There doesn't seem to be any quality control, and after reading some of the negative reviews of various authors, it's clear that a few are just uploading duplicate content.

That said, people are clearly buying stuff from there. And it could be just the place to sell short blog post type articles for 4 or 5 bucks a pop. I'd imagine that you could end up with some regular customers pretty easily.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Constant Content and Textbroker are good sites for writers

I've been looking around for different ways to earn a few dollars from writing articles. There are a lot of freelance job boards out there, and people are crying out for content for websites and blogs. But they usually pay peanuts, and you have to fight (or at least bid) to get those peanuts!

Then, if you do score one of these gigs, you'll often be committed to weeks of work because the requests are usually for scores, if not hundreds of articles. If you live in Australia, as I do, writing jobs like these just aren't worth it.

I don't want to sound like a protectionist whinger, but this is an unfortunate result of the global economy, as well as the brilliance of all this cyber-technology. Nowadays, it can be economically viable for someone in Pakistan to crank out oodles of content for a client in the USA for next to nothing.

Not only will this be low quality because of the nature of the demand (lots of it in a short pace of time), but there's the language factor as well. People in countries like India, Pakistan and the Philippines aren't native English speakers, so their writing quality will generally be lower. Yet business owners will still buy content from people in these countries (usually indirectly) because their work will still improve site SEO enough for the deal to be profitable.

So, you've got to look for other sites that have slightly different models to these big freelancing sites. Then you have a chance of earning better money, and on your own terms.

One of these that gets lots of good reviews is Textbroker. The site is completely focused on writing. They assess your work, then give you a rating. They have heaps of small, simple gigs that pay a few dollars each. You can crank out a few of those at your own pace and accumulate a nice little sum after a while, or get more serious about it and end up with big ongoing jobs. The big downside is that you have to be in the USA to join.

Then there's Constant Content. What I like about this is that it's much more writer-focused. You write something, decide on a price, then leave it on the site for someone to buy it. I suspect that if your work is half decent, you should be able to sell a fair bit of it eventually. The downside is that you have to wait, of course.

Still, I like this model. You can earn more money, and basically write whatever you want.

Of course there are many other sites for freelance writers. I'll post about them in future, too.

UPDATE: Textbroker has launched another site in the United Kingdom. This one accepts writers from all over the world. So, those living in Australia can join and make money through them after all. 

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Use backlink checks to find more great blogs for commenting campaigns

I've been going on a bit of a blog commenting blitz lately. It's definitely worth doing from time to time. There are just so many blogs out there about blogging, marketing, etc. They're great because not only can you learn new stuff all the time, they're very conducive to participation. And because they're not super-specific in their focus, it's usually really easy to find something that you can contribute thoughtfully to.

Also, the bloggers themselves appreciate the feedback and often reply. They come back to my blogs and return the favour, too, which is appreciated.

The best thing about comment-rich blogs like these is that you'll find an endless stream of them simply by scrolling down though the comment threads, since many of those commenting are in the same niche.

And here's another good way to find them:

You'll keep seeing the same bloggers' names popping up in the comment threads. So you know that these people been particularly active with this method. So if you do a backlink check on one of their URLs (Yahoo is probably the easiest and quickest) you'll see scores, if not hundreds of the blogs they've commented on showing up in the results. While you'll see some of the blogs you already know about, you're sure to find some new ones pretty much every time.

You just repeat that process, and on and on you go ... You could do this for weeks and never run out of new blogs to learn from and contribute to.