Iakul's Freelance Writing Musings

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...

Scour is a paid to search site that offers to send users $25 Visa cards once they reach 6500 points. Over the past few weeks, I have seen quite a few MyLot users posting on it and whether it is a scam. Due to the numerous users who have said that it was a scam, I have never joined it. Recently took another look at it again and did some searching about Scour, and assuming that it is a legit site, here are the major problems that you are likely to encounter. 1) You won't get paid when you hit your points and request for payment. Yes, you won't. You'll have to send quite a few e-mails, post comments on their blog, and try a few means to contact them, before you get a chance to get paid. 2) It is possible that you'll get banned by an automated banning system when you reach payout, and then you'll have to send quite a few e-mails, post comments on their blog, and wait a few weeks to wait and see if the problem is resolved. All these problems, ASSUMING it is legit. Now op...