Iakul's Freelance Writing Musings

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?

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 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.

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...

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.

I did some changes to the list, so the categories actually showed up in the table of contents. Also moved up some sites to "Sites where publishers will post job requests". Some of those sites on my "to be checked" list have been sitting there for quite a long time. Some of those, like Blog Posts for Sale are sitting there since "paid to blog a advertisement" doesn't appeal to me and I have been putting looking at those sites off to look at new sites which I have more interest in. I really should stop putting them off. Think I may start a new category and find a day to review all those sites in one shot. Sites moved to "Sites where publishers will post job requests" Online Writing Jobs.net Accentuate Writers Forum Freelance Writing Craigs List

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

Addded Freelance Writing.com , Accentuate Writers Forum and Online Writing Jobs.net to the list, under "Sites which I intend to take a closer look at". Thanks to Triond writer Allison West for writing an article highlighting these sites. Here's her Triond profile and the link to her article.

Just "upgraded" my template. While the abilty to add widgets without doing much coding is nice, I do wish that it's possible for me to access and tweak the widget code on the edit widgets panel. Looks like I'll have to hunt down the specific widgets on my blog template and tweak it from there. I'll do it next time.

My humour article about cats made it to the Triond hot content! I find it ironic that it was written when I wanted to take a break from research-intensive articles, see this blog entry here. I'll still be concentrating on writing about writing sites though, as I think my research will help fellow writers. I'll probably do a humour piece every now and then. Here's the link to it. 10 Reasons Why Every Home Should Have a Cat

Added Dooyoo to the list under review sites. It's only available to a few European countries though.

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.

Just wrote another article for triond today. It's a humour piece on why every home should have a cat. Wanted to do something different after all those articles requiring research that I had been doing. It was a nice change to write something which didn't require research and only needed me to be creative. The link to my article is here. 10 Reasons Why Every Home Should Have a Cat

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...

Just did an article on Linkfilter.net A Look at Linkfilter.net I'll be following that up with an article on my experiences and interaction with the Linkfilter.net community. Link Filter kind of reminds me of those villages in those stories, where any outsider who steps in for the first time is automatically mistrusted and he or she has too work to prove that they are trustworthy and be accepted into the community.

Just had my article rejected by Constant Content. Reason given was "Please submit in one of our accepted file formats: rtf, txt, or doc. We do not accept odt files." I had to ask in the forums to find out, as they seemed to be having problems with e-mailing some writers. Kind of relieved to know that it wasn't for grammar or writing errors.

Well, Academia-research got moved from "suspected" to "to be avoided". Moved Ciao up from "sites I have been meaning to check" to "Review sites" and updated a few site descriptions for this week.

I just had another article published on Triond. It took me 4 attempts. The first time I submitted that article, I did a pretty silly thing. I submitted a blank file with the same name. There's a story behind it, while I was working on my article, my comp crashed. I hadn't saved it, and I have a habit of starting and saving an article with just the file name. Now I restarted my comp, opened my file to see if my word processor(Open Office.org) had managed to save during the crash. It was at that moment that my word processor informed me that it was retrieving the data. So, I waited and then the pop-up says that it has been retrieved. So, now I'm looking at an empty page with just the title, so I close it, with the intention of reopening it again. Open Office tells me that "changes have been made since I last saved it" and would I like to save or discard changes. I'm not sure whether by changes it means the empty file or the retrieved file, so I make a slight cha...

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...