Iakul's Freelance Writing Musings

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...

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...

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....

Another Triond article published. This one's on how to tell if a writing site is a scam. The article link http://www.writinghood.com/Online-Writing/How-to-Tell-If-a-Writing-Site-is-Legitimate.256087

Added Get A Coder to the section "Sites where publishers will post job requests". Although most of the assignments there are programming based, there are still quite a number of writing assignments there. You can filter your search results to only show wrting assignments. Moved Xomba up to sites "Which let you earn pasive income". Basically, Xomba lets you place Google Adsense on your articles and splits the revenue 50/50 with you. It doesn't sound all that attractive, but Xomba does make up for it by holding frequent contests where winners stand to earn cash prizes. In addition, Xomba articles can also be used to generate backlinks to your other blog/site/other articles.

Shared Reviews will stop paying members revenue from the end of September onwards. They put up an announcement in the forums saying that they have been having funding problems and as of September 2008, they will be putting the revenue-sharing model on hold. They have promised that they will still any outstanding amount that are owed to writers. The link to their forum announcement http://forum.sharedreviews.com/forums/1/topics/1728 As Shared Reviews will be putting writers on hold indefinitely, I'll be taking Shared Reviews off my list for the time being.

Compumom from MyLot started a discussion about Oboulo.com, a paid to write site she discovered recently. I went to take a look and the site has a large number of grammar mistakes and weird sentence strutures. Which raises one red flag for me. The site claims it has been around for 3 years and for the top 10 most popular experts, the most popular expert has earned $255 and the "expert" in the number 10 spot has made a whooping $10. Yes $10. 2nd red flag. Their most popular article ---> Business case study: Panera Bread Summary of the article as copied and pasted from Oboulo "Panera Bread began back in 1981. It started out as a small sandwich shop. After going public the company grew in size with the addition of more stores. It is currently headquartered in Missouri. Revenue has seen a tremendous change for the better. This year alone revenue is expected to come out near one billion U.S. dollars. In order to achieve its great success the company had to implement many s...

Academia-research has the dubious honour of being the first one to be put on my "To be watched" list, meaning I have turned up enough cases and reports of misconduct on the site itself to be wary of it, but have not gathered enough conclusive evidence to put it on "sites to avoid" list. What I have found so far. - Lied about address being in the US, despite it being a Urkaine company - While Academia-research won't blatantly not pay a writer, it may delay and fudge to avoid payment. - Academia-research was by started by someone who split from Essaywriters.net, the notorious freelance writing scam also located in Urkaine. Which is part of what makes my search so hard, as there is apparently quite an intense rivalry between Essaywriters.net and Academia-research and Essaywriters.net is not above telling outright lies to smear the competition, so I have to sift through my intel and establish it's reliability. I do the same for other sites I look at, but there...

Checked some sites on my list of "Sites which I intend to take a closer look at". Except for Daytipper, all of them got moved up to their respective categories. A search on Daytipper revealed that it used to offer $3 per tip, which got cut down to $1, which got cut down to cash handouts to the top 3 writers of the month. On top of that lots of writers during the $3 per tip period didn't get paid for tips that were published, due to Daytippers "unique" way of defining "published". My search also revealed that an article by a Susan Corbett from Associated Content, saying that Daytipper was a scam, has been called a scam by Nathan Preheim, the founder of the site. Huh? That is also a new definition of the word scam for me. Stay away from the site. Did an article on Daytipper and a few other sites here. Top Sites You Should Not Write For

Been checking out these two sites. Squidoo I joined quite some time ago (along with the rest of the freelance writing sites I joined like Triond and Helium)but just left it sitting there cos' there was so much to figure out there and I had so many other sites to take a look at... Shvoong I just checked out and joined. Added my Squidoo referral link here. Will update on my experience with them after I have had more publishing experience with them. http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/iakul To do list: Check out Hubpages and Review Stream when I'm done with these two To do list after I'm done with the to do list: Check out Storymash, Informative Post, Newsvine, eHow, Academia Research, Ground Report...