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Minor list update

Just a very minor update. Took Review Stream off the list because of a number of reasons.They are poorly set up, their criteria for accepting reviews is non-existant, and there are quite a number of other complaints about them by writers. There are also a number of writers who have previously written for them claiming that their account was closed when they had almost reached the payout of $50, or claiming that they suddenly started getting paid at the bulk rate of $0.40 after they have requested payout. In light of all these, I'm taking Review Stream off.

The Philoscribe Blog

Just came across The Philoscribe Blog . It's a blog maintained by a small group of copywriters and editors, and there are a number of entries there that should prove to be quite insightful to new writers.

Request for websites

A week ago, I had a request from Aunindita in my comments section that I "list a few websites which accept international writers and pay good" I'm sorry to inform all of you that my knowledge of the freelance writing industry is limited and I really do not have a huge list of websites that pay well and do not mind their writers not being able to tell the difference between "good" and "well" I have to say that my one week search drew up a blank. I do have a number of sites already on my list where jobs that offer $10 for 500 words (or higher) are available, but if those sites aren't accepting him, I really don't have any other recommendations that I can make. I'm hereby requesting website recommendations from my readers which fit 3 criteria 1) They pay $10 for 500 words (or higher) 2) They are not already on my list 3) They are not restricted to members of certain countries On a separate note, Aunindita is from India, and I do know that qui

List update

Added two sites to the list, Bukisa under the "Passive Income" section, and Words of Worth under the "Sites which Pay Upfront Section" Personally, I don't like Bukisa , and I have indicated so in the site description on the list itself. They have been around since late 2008, which does mean that they are relatively new as a content site. I have to say that they are actually better than when they started out, when they didn't care what you published there as long as it was 250 words. They, however, still have a long way to go. Words of Worth is a UK site set up in 2007. You enter into a contract with them, where you promise to deliver 10 to 80 articles every month, depending on the contract, and they promise to pay you £250 monthly. Contracts typically last for 12 months, and they do require you to give a month's advance notice should you decide that you want to quit. You are not limited to one contract and can choose to apply for a second contract with

List update

Well, after planning to make changes to the list sometime in March , I somehow managed to procrastinate and put it off till now. Nothing new added or removed(for now). Just moved some sites from the "Sites Where Publishers Will Post Job Requests" section into a new "Blogs and Forums" section.

What to Do When your Article Gets Plagiarised

Just published an article on on Triond about the options available to writers who get their content plagiarised. Was inspired to write it after reading a topic started by Spike over at MyLot about a website that he discovered had been plagiarising his articles, and apparently articles by a few other writers as well. Here's the link to the article for those of you who are interested http://writinghood.com/online-writing/what-to-do-when-your-article-gets-plagiarised/

List update

Added descriptions and moved Feed The Village and Print N Post up to Sites which let you earn passive income Personally, I don't like Feed the Village. They're not the only site donating to charity, and if you take the 10% they donate and add that to the 10% they pay out to writers, that's only 20% they're paying out. In contrast sites like Squidoo and Triond pay out 50% of the revenue they earn to writers. And Squidoo even pays out an additional 5% of their total revenue to charity and doesn't attempt to make a marketing gimmick out of it. You could decide to give half of what you earn on Squidoo or Triond to charity and both you and the charity of your choice would still come out ahead earnings-wise compared to writing for Feed the Village. Print N Post, on the other hand, might be worth taking a look at. True, it's a site where you earn via having Google Adsense displayed on your articles (which means a high payout threshold of $100USD for those of you who

PWRLN and Bianca Raven

Those of you you have been following my blog will know that I recently discovered Bianca Raven's blog just two weeks ago . Since then, I have been checking back on her blog quite frequently. In her 20th March entry , Bianca Raven blogged about Googling herself to see how easy it would be for someone looking for Bianca Raven the freelance writer to find her using a search engine. Let's just say that she didn't like the results :P Since her stated goal in her blog entry is to be the only Bianca Raven to turn up for the first page of search results, I decided to give her a hand by starting the Let's Help Bianca Raven Achieve Her Goal Of Being The Only Bianca Raven To Show Up On The Search Engines by Using Every Chance To Refer To Bianca Raven By Her Full Name When We Can Project or PWRLN(Project With Ridiculously Long Name). It occurs to me that since Bianca Raven the freelance writer doesn't like revenue sharing sites, her blog + her blogger profile + profiles for one

List update

Added Bianca Raven's blog ( http://ravens-writing.blogspot.com/ ) and Athlyn Green's blog ( http://www.writeandearnaliving.com/ ) to the list under the "Sites Where Publishers Will Post Jobs Requests" section. Both are freelance writers with years of experience and they do post writing leads on their blogs. Athlyn Green's writing leads are quite frequent, and you can view them via a JobThread widget she displays on her blog. While Bianca Raven's writing leads are less frequent, she does focus on high paying gigs which she'll cover in detail in a blog entry. I'm planning to split the "Sites Where Publishers Will Post Job Requests" section, since it appears to have grown quite long, and quite a number of sites are not exactly sites "where publishers will post job requests". Probably into a blog/forum section for those sites where you can find writing leads and a true "Sites Where Publishers Will Post Job Requests" section fo

Qassia

Just recently, Qassia has started charging new users a one-time fee to sign up for an account with them. For those of you not familiar with Qassia, it's a site where you can post information and for each piece of information you post, you get a backlink to the site of your choice. You can also earn via Google Adsense on Qassia. Guess I'm lucky I signed up with Qassia before they implemented the change, though to be honest, I haven't gotten around to using it much. For those of you you are interested to read more about Qassia, read this review that I published here .

Murphy's Law

I was contacted by the owner of a copywriting and copyediting company today. Which would have been nice, since I'm a freelance writer. Well, it would have been nice if that phone call had just come 5 minutes earlier today. Or 5 minutes later today. However, I just so happened to be cutting through my local mall at that time, while en route to the train station. Which just so happened to be having a hip-hop dance competition today (the mall, not the train station) Guess where I was standing when I received the call :P Anyway, I did manage to catch her name, and after my attempt to maintain a conversation failed miserably, I established that I would call her later. So, I called her after 5 minutes and a couple of questions later, she asked about what type of assignments I took. I replied that I usually wrote SEO articles. She then asked me what was SEO. (I presume her company hasn't taken online assignments before, though she didn't directly state that, so I might have been

List update

Updated the descriptions for most of the sites under "Sites Where publishers will post job requests" Should have done that a long time ago, but I kept putting it off. Renamed "Sites which offer a one time payment for articles" section to "Sites which pay upfront for articles" Moved Bright Hub up to "Sites which pay upfront for articles"

Freelance Writing Income From Home

I just came across a woonderful, wonderful blog today. It's Freelance Writing Income From Home at http://ravens-writing.blogspot.com/ The blog's by an Australian freelance writer who's been in this business for 6 years and is earning a 6 figure yearly income. She does reviews on sites with writing opportunites that she has come across and blogs about her experiences in freelance writing, plus other related stuff. In other words, her blog is what my blog aspires to be when it grows up :P She does feel quite strongly that revenue sharing sites e.g Triond, Associated Content are to be avoided at all costs though. I don't quite agree with her on that, but then my only credentials when it comes to online freelance writing is that I have managed to survive solely on my earnings from writing online and have written for less than a year. That's about the only thing that I disagree with her about. Her blog has plenty of great advice and leads for those looking to make a livi

New Hub

I just started a new hub at Hubpages listing online publishing sites, their page ranks, and whether links were allowed and if those were nofollow links. What I was going after was a list which writers could just glance over and gauge which site was better for gaining exposure and creating backlinks. Of course, there are other factors that will affect traffic besides the main site's page rank, but I would say that Page Rank is a pretty good indication. Here's the site http://hubpages.com/hub/pageranks

List update

I added a total of... 1 site to the list. Whoa, I sure am effective. Bright Hub was added to the Other Sites section. Oh, and moved Rate It All and Shared Reviews up to Review Sites. After keeping an eye on Shared Reviews for these few months, I think it's safe to say that it has gotten over it's financial troubles.

Life Tips

Moved Life Tips down to the list of suspicious sites. On the one hand, they are selling e-books with 101 tips for $9.99, promising writers 20% of the commission, and on the other hand,they are telling writers that they can be paid $10 per tip. Anyone see anything wrong with that?

Bukisa

Just published an article about Bukisa at Triond. Bukisa is a new writing site which came out in late 2008. Currently the site itself has less than stellar English and apparently doesn't care about the quality of published content itself, so long as said content has a word count of at least 250 words and is in English. This has resulted in stuff like "(body of article)get paid to write get paid to write get paid to write...." and poems that keep repeating themselves. I'm guessing that the word count stipulation is for them to ensure that they get higher PPC (pay per click) ads based on keyword targeting, and not to ensure the quality of an article. That's just a guess though, and I'm not about to go around spreading this theory of mine. They already have enough going against them without me adding to it, lol. I also found the site itself too liberal with the use of words like "exciting", "revolutionary", "innovative" for my taste.

Shared Reviews will soon be back

Shared Reviews used to be one of the sites on my list but due to funding problems, they had to put revenue sharing on hold in September 08'. It seems that they have taken care of that though, and have scheduled Feb 11th 08' as the official launch date for their new revenue sharing program. If they don't run into any problems, we can expect to see this Paid To Review site making a comeback next month.

The New Helium

In the world of online freelance writing, there's sites like Demand Studios which offer a one time lump sum payment for each work you publish, and there's sites like Triond which let you earn passive income from your work. And then there's Helium, a site which's somewhere in the middle. It's undergone quite a few changes over the past few months. It used to be that an article you submitted for Helium was either an accepted Marketplace piece (earning a one time lump sum payment) or not (earning passive income), never both. Now, it's possible for those articles falling in the latter catergory to actually earn you upfront payments. Being the first to write to an empty title on Helium earns you $1.00. And depending on your writing stars, you'll earn anywhere from $0.50 to $2.50 for each article submitted. (Although certain categories, like creative writing, are excluded from upfront payment) But there's a catch. Now there's actually a need for you to rat

Finally Back

Well, after taking a (I would like to say well-deserved, but even I don't believe that) break from my blog, I'm finally back. Expect more posts from me in the next few days.