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I was a freelance writer for many years. Some of the best places to find writing jobs:
1) Elance (http://www.elance.com) - An auction-style format where you bid on people's writing projects. Sometimes they choose the lowest bidders ($5-10 per 500 word article is the low-end), but often they pay well and choose the most qualified writers. There's a small monthly membership fee, but that actually protects you as a writer, because it means everybody isn't bidding on every single project and increasing competition. They have multiple protections in place to protect writers (like requiring buyers put the funds in an escrow account, so you won't get stiffed) and they're partnered with Ebay, so they have the largest number of projects at any one time.
2 - Guru (http://www.guru.com) is like Elance, but with less traffic. Not bad to keep an eye/ear open on the site, though.
3 - Demand Studios (http://www.demandstudios.com) pays $10 if you write an article on their list of topics, or $5 if you submit an article on a topic of your choice. They pay regularly (every Friday) via PayPal. Demand Studios provides content for eHow and other popular content sites.
4 - Today.com (http://www.today.com) pays bloggers around $1/day. Not much, but if you're blogging anyway...
5 - Associated Content (http://www.associatedcontent.com/) buys original content articles. Pay varies depending on the article, but I wouldn't expect more here than other sites.
6 - Write articles yourself for eHow. I have one article I wrote a year ago, and it continues to make more than $10 per month.
7 - Solicit work yourself. This is how you get the best paying jobs. Buy a copy of "Writer's Market" and send query letters. Most magazines and reputable websites pay upwards of $100 per 400 words, but they almost NEVER use writing job sites. You have to seek those opportunities out yourself.
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Why not try the trusty Mahalo Greenhouse.
http://greenhouse.mahalo.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33749589@N07/3221356427/
Right on the main page you will find a list of Topics available.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33749589@N07/3221357643/
There are lists and lists of different pages that Mahalo is willing to pay for you to build, once you learn the style guide they are very easy to complete and you can probably pump a few out each hour. If you become really good at it there is a good chance that you'll get hired on a full time remote worker....ahem..like myself.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33749589@N07/3221358773/
Good Luck
Source(s):
http://greenhouse.mahalo.com/
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eHow: http://www.ehow.com/
eHow doesn't pay any upfront money for articles - you just get a percentage of ad revenue. I only have 20 articles right now, so I've only made about $40 total so far. The more articles you have, the more you'll make. Also depends on the type of article - the more attention the article gets, the more you can make as well. They pay monthly through PayPal.
BrightHub: http://www2.brighthub.com/writers/writers.html
This is my favorite site. They pay $10 upfront for each article published, plus you get a percentage of ad revenue. They pay monthly through PayPal.
Associated Content: https://publish.associatedcontent.com/signup.shtml
AC does pay a small amount of money upfront for some articles, and also pays by page views. It starts out at $1.50 per 1000 views. The most they've paid me upfront for an article was about $4.00. This is the easiest place to start if you've never done any freelance writing.
Constant Content: http://www.constant-content.com/
On this site, you write any article you want, then upload it and specify your price. Then wait to see if anyone buys it. They pay via PayPal once you reach a minimum of $50.
I get a lot of my leads from the Work at Home Moms (WAHM) site on their "WAHM's Who Write" message board:
http://www.wahm.com/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=24
Also check out this site. This freelance writer has done some research and has put together a large listing of credible freelance writing sites. There's even a few on this list that I'm going to apply for:
http://freelancehomewriter.blogspot.com/search/label/Upfront%20Pay%20Sites
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I don't have a huge amount of personal experience to tell you about earnings etc, but my investigations have been a lot deeper than googling and seeing what sites come up, and I can probably save you some work doing your own research.
First question is are you specifically interested in freelance writing, or other possibilities for earning money from writing? There seem to be broadly three options around:
- Freelancing - i.e. You write material for someone else, they pay you, they own the material, end of story.
- Revenue sharing sites - i.e. You write something for a site that is making money from adsense or whatever, and you get either a percentage of that, or maybe a payment based on the number of pageviews your material gets.
- Create your own site or blog, and earn revenue from it, maybe through advertising, affiliate sales, or selling e-books etc.
In terms of money, freelancing means you are like any other contract worker getting paid as you deliver work, either based on time spent or fixed price. The main advantage is you'll see whatever cash you earn coming in reasonably quickly.
The revenue sharing sites don't seem to pay much money. You do hear of people earning hundreds of dollars a month from eHow, but I don't think there are many of them doing that, and those that are have a lot of articles up there. Mostly you would be doing very well if you made a dollar a month per article you posted to sites like that. In as much as these things have value, it may be more for link building to promote your own site than any actual revenue you're likely to see.
Creating your own site is in effect starting your own business. Like starting any business there is a potential to make a fair bit of money, and there is a potential to make zip, and run up more in costs than you make in revenue. However potentially this is by far the biggest return on your time in the long run, but it may take months or even years to build a significant income steam.
Now if you're interested - aren't we all! - in actually how much you could make with these options, the answer is probably "it depends on a lot of things". Chiefly, what would you be writing about, what is the demand for that kind of writing, how much competition is there for that kind of work, and what do you have to offer compared to that competition?
If you are freelancing, all that stuff probably has a far bigger impact on your earnings than what sites you use to find work btw. The range of rates on each of these sites can be pretty big, so it is more a question of whether the kind of work that comes up there is a good fit for what you want to do.
Take a couple of sites that have been mentioned, Constant Content and Elance. On Constant Content you see articles being sold for as little as $7, and as much as $300. Of which btw, the writer gets 65%. Someone who owns a dating website might pay $10 for articles about "How to get over your ex" or something like that. Whereas someone running a specialised techie website might commission a $300 article on "How to configure SQL Server" from a writer they know can do a good job of that.
On Elance there are people from India who've set their minimum hourly rate at $2/hr, and they are getting work, and positive feedback on their work. At the same time there are people from the US and Canada who've set a minimum rate of $90/hr, and they are also getting work and positive feedback. Also there are people getting no work despite bidding a $1/hr, and as far as I can tell, no-one that asks for $100/hr upwards gets any work at all.
If you are interested in Elance, you probably would also want to take a look at guru.com, odesk.com and maybe rentacoder.com and see how they fit what you see your target market being.
Since I've been looking into this quite a bit, I can't put everything I've discovered in this answer. I've written about some of what I've found on my blog:
http://www.philipyana.blogspot.com/
Possibly even more useful than my sparsely documented thoughts, the link list points you to sites that I've found worthwhile. There's no point in reproducing the whole list here, but there are sites there that have daily lists of freelance writing jobs, blogs by established freelancers that I like, sites like Constant Content that I thought were worth a try, and even nice tools for writers like the Visual Thesaurus.
Also I add and subtract from that list as I discover new good ones, or decide that some that I liked the look of aren't so hot after all.
So basically my link list is my personal current answer to your question: What are the best of the best sites for freelance writers?
Of course, YMMV. :)
Good luck, and keep me posted on how it goes.
Source(s):
Personal experience, and lots of reading and analysis, as partially documented here:
http://www.philipyana.blogspot.com/
Also other sites that are not mentioned in the blog, e.g. elance.com
Unfortunately for you I haven't documented the many sites that I looked at that were a complete waste of space, so you might have to discover that all over again! :)
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It's an extremely cut throat business and very secretive due to the huge amount of competition. I won't even allow my husband to tell family members who I write for. I know... it's bad :(
Steps in the right direction...
Buy a copy of the Writers Market http://www.writersmarket.com
US $29.99 look through the magazine section (easy, easy, easy money).
Sign up for the newsletters at http://www.fundsforwriters.com/
Hope sends out new job listings weekly.
** I turned off my minimum tip, so if you will send me your email address through Mahalo's ask a question privately feature, I will send you an invitation to become a writer through a company I know of.
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Source(s):
http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com
http://www.suite101.com
http://www.demandstudios.com
http://www.problogger.com
http://www.ehow.com
http://www.examiner.com
http://www.mahalo.com
http://www.craigslist.org/wri
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However, I have a couple of things to add that I sincerely hope will be helpful.
As mentioned freelance writing is very competitive. You really need to think out-of-the-box to make any real money in this arena. Combine out of the box efforts with the lists of sites that have already been presented and you could easily make money. How much you make depends on your style, interests and how much time you have available.
Here are a couple of out-of-the-box ideas to get you going:
1)
SEO is still big business. While most folks realize that SEO is a "game", most folks also realize that real content that is directly related to the marketing goals of a website will increase traffic and have a direct impact on income.
It would be feasible to sell packs of articles to companies currently engaged in SEO. Some industries are constantly engaged in search engine competition and targeting companies in these industries would be effective.
2)
Develop simple to read, online courses in topics your skilled in. People are currently seeking skills to maintain their current job or find new ones and if you can help them, they will buy.
If you're an expert in say, building greenhouses, compose a clear set of articles, complete with instructions, indepth research, and personal experiences. You may be able to sell a subscription to the tutorial, but you may also be able to break apart your series of articles and sell them to a variety of blogs at different times.
CONCLUSION
Coming up with this sort of out-of-the-box thinking in competitive markets results in success. Don't stop with these 2 ideas. Talk to your friends, your family, and deeply consider with creativity where you may be able to sell your articles that others haven't thought of yet.
I hope that this helps.
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I also write for bukisa, ehow and helium. These all pay a nice performance bonus for page views with a multitude of articles. Helium is now paying a small upfront payment.
Between these sites and a few print publications I query a month I am able to almost pay the bills. It does require tons of writing though.
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Answered Question
M$5
January 23, 2009 05:19 PM
Suggestions for online freelance writing jobs?
I'm looking for the best of the best when it comes to online sites that offer freelance writing jobs. I can go to google and search for the different sites, so I am not looking for what you can search and find, what I would like is information from people that have actually used the sites. How much money do you make per article? How much have you made total? What benefits have you found with the sites you use? Have you had any bad experiences with any sites?
Please be detailed when explain why the sites are worth checking into!
Please be detailed when explain why the sites are worth checking into!
Interesting Question?
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Best Answer Chosen by Asker
| January 23, 2009 09:37 PM |
1) Elance (http://www.elance.com) - An auction-style format where you bid on people's writing projects. Sometimes they choose the lowest bidders ($5-10 per 500 word article is the low-end), but often they pay well and choose the most qualified writers. There's a small monthly membership fee, but that actually protects you as a writer, because it means everybody isn't bidding on every single project and increasing competition. They have multiple protections in place to protect writers (like requiring buyers put the funds in an escrow account, so you won't get stiffed) and they're partnered with Ebay, so they have the largest number of projects at any one time.
2 - Guru (http://www.guru.com) is like Elance, but with less traffic. Not bad to keep an eye/ear open on the site, though.
3 - Demand Studios (http://www.demandstudios.com) pays $10 if you write an article on their list of topics, or $5 if you submit an article on a topic of your choice. They pay regularly (every Friday) via PayPal. Demand Studios provides content for eHow and other popular content sites.
4 - Today.com (http://www.today.com) pays bloggers around $1/day. Not much, but if you're blogging anyway...
5 - Associated Content (http://www.associatedcontent.com/) buys original content articles. Pay varies depending on the article, but I wouldn't expect more here than other sites.
6 - Write articles yourself for eHow. I have one article I wrote a year ago, and it continues to make more than $10 per month.
7 - Solicit work yourself. This is how you get the best paying jobs. Buy a copy of "Writer's Market" and send query letters. Most magazines and reputable websites pay upwards of $100 per 400 words, but they almost NEVER use writing job sites. You have to seek those opportunities out yourself.
| Asker's Rating: |
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Other Answers (9)
January 24, 2009 07:03 AM
EDIT: As of 2/26/09 we are no longer accepting submissions to the Mahalo Greenhouse. Why not try the trusty Mahalo Greenhouse.
http://greenhouse.mahalo.com/
Right on the main page you will find a list of Topics available.
There are lists and lists of different pages that Mahalo is willing to pay for you to build, once you learn the style guide they are very easy to complete and you can probably pump a few out each hour. If you become really good at it there is a good chance that you'll get hired on a full time remote worker....ahem..like myself.
Good Luck
Source(s):
http://greenhouse.mahalo.com/
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January 24, 2009 03:17 PM
I started doing freelance writing last November. So at this point I'm not making enough money to quit my day job, but the extra income does help. Here's who I currently do work for:eHow: http://www.ehow.com/
eHow doesn't pay any upfront money for articles - you just get a percentage of ad revenue. I only have 20 articles right now, so I've only made about $40 total so far. The more articles you have, the more you'll make. Also depends on the type of article - the more attention the article gets, the more you can make as well. They pay monthly through PayPal.
BrightHub: http://www2.brighthub.com/writers/writers.html
This is my favorite site. They pay $10 upfront for each article published, plus you get a percentage of ad revenue. They pay monthly through PayPal.
Associated Content: https://publish.associatedcontent.com/signup.shtml
AC does pay a small amount of money upfront for some articles, and also pays by page views. It starts out at $1.50 per 1000 views. The most they've paid me upfront for an article was about $4.00. This is the easiest place to start if you've never done any freelance writing.
Constant Content: http://www.constant-content.com/
On this site, you write any article you want, then upload it and specify your price. Then wait to see if anyone buys it. They pay via PayPal once you reach a minimum of $50.
I get a lot of my leads from the Work at Home Moms (WAHM) site on their "WAHM's Who Write" message board:
http://www.wahm.com/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=24
Also check out this site. This freelance writer has done some research and has put together a large listing of credible freelance writing sites. There's even a few on this list that I'm going to apply for:
http://freelancehomewriter.blogspot.com/search/label/Upfront%20Pay%20Sites
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January 24, 2009 05:18 PM
I've been looking into online freelance writing options for about a month.I don't have a huge amount of personal experience to tell you about earnings etc, but my investigations have been a lot deeper than googling and seeing what sites come up, and I can probably save you some work doing your own research.
First question is are you specifically interested in freelance writing, or other possibilities for earning money from writing? There seem to be broadly three options around:
- Freelancing - i.e. You write material for someone else, they pay you, they own the material, end of story.
- Revenue sharing sites - i.e. You write something for a site that is making money from adsense or whatever, and you get either a percentage of that, or maybe a payment based on the number of pageviews your material gets.
- Create your own site or blog, and earn revenue from it, maybe through advertising, affiliate sales, or selling e-books etc.
In terms of money, freelancing means you are like any other contract worker getting paid as you deliver work, either based on time spent or fixed price. The main advantage is you'll see whatever cash you earn coming in reasonably quickly.
The revenue sharing sites don't seem to pay much money. You do hear of people earning hundreds of dollars a month from eHow, but I don't think there are many of them doing that, and those that are have a lot of articles up there. Mostly you would be doing very well if you made a dollar a month per article you posted to sites like that. In as much as these things have value, it may be more for link building to promote your own site than any actual revenue you're likely to see.
Creating your own site is in effect starting your own business. Like starting any business there is a potential to make a fair bit of money, and there is a potential to make zip, and run up more in costs than you make in revenue. However potentially this is by far the biggest return on your time in the long run, but it may take months or even years to build a significant income steam.
Now if you're interested - aren't we all! - in actually how much you could make with these options, the answer is probably "it depends on a lot of things". Chiefly, what would you be writing about, what is the demand for that kind of writing, how much competition is there for that kind of work, and what do you have to offer compared to that competition?
If you are freelancing, all that stuff probably has a far bigger impact on your earnings than what sites you use to find work btw. The range of rates on each of these sites can be pretty big, so it is more a question of whether the kind of work that comes up there is a good fit for what you want to do.
Take a couple of sites that have been mentioned, Constant Content and Elance. On Constant Content you see articles being sold for as little as $7, and as much as $300. Of which btw, the writer gets 65%. Someone who owns a dating website might pay $10 for articles about "How to get over your ex" or something like that. Whereas someone running a specialised techie website might commission a $300 article on "How to configure SQL Server" from a writer they know can do a good job of that.
On Elance there are people from India who've set their minimum hourly rate at $2/hr, and they are getting work, and positive feedback on their work. At the same time there are people from the US and Canada who've set a minimum rate of $90/hr, and they are also getting work and positive feedback. Also there are people getting no work despite bidding a $1/hr, and as far as I can tell, no-one that asks for $100/hr upwards gets any work at all.
If you are interested in Elance, you probably would also want to take a look at guru.com, odesk.com and maybe rentacoder.com and see how they fit what you see your target market being.
Since I've been looking into this quite a bit, I can't put everything I've discovered in this answer. I've written about some of what I've found on my blog:
http://www.philipyana.blogspot.com/
Possibly even more useful than my sparsely documented thoughts, the link list points you to sites that I've found worthwhile. There's no point in reproducing the whole list here, but there are sites there that have daily lists of freelance writing jobs, blogs by established freelancers that I like, sites like Constant Content that I thought were worth a try, and even nice tools for writers like the Visual Thesaurus.
Also I add and subtract from that list as I discover new good ones, or decide that some that I liked the look of aren't so hot after all.
So basically my link list is my personal current answer to your question: What are the best of the best sites for freelance writers?
Of course, YMMV. :)
Good luck, and keep me posted on how it goes.
Source(s):
Personal experience, and lots of reading and analysis, as partially documented here:
http://www.philipyana.blogspot.com/
Also other sites that are not mentioned in the blog, e.g. elance.com
Unfortunately for you I haven't documented the many sites that I looked at that were a complete waste of space, so you might have to discover that all over again! :)
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January 24, 2009 06:32 PM
I am a freelance writer... and I will be very honest with you. It's an extremely cut throat business and very secretive due to the huge amount of competition. I won't even allow my husband to tell family members who I write for. I know... it's bad :(
Steps in the right direction...
Buy a copy of the Writers Market http://www.writersmarket.com
US $29.99 look through the magazine section (easy, easy, easy money).
Sign up for the newsletters at http://www.fundsforwriters.com/
Hope sends out new job listings weekly.
** I turned off my minimum tip, so if you will send me your email address through Mahalo's ask a question privately feature, I will send you an invitation to become a writer through a company I know of.
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March 15, 2009 12:53 AM
Hi Cyberangle,
Thanks for the info...I am trying to get into freelance online writing. Here's my email address: sgscholar2006@yahoo.com please send invitation to become a writer theough a company you know of.
Thanks,
SG
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Thanks for the info...I am trying to get into freelance online writing. Here's my email address: sgscholar2006@yahoo.com please send invitation to become a writer theough a company you know of.
Thanks,
SG
January 25, 2009 04:24 PM
I've been freelancing online since 1999, and have had a lot of trial and error experiences with a lot of sites. Here are the sites I'm working with now:
- Suite101.com: this site doesn't pay per article, but it offers a good revenue share. When I first started with them in 1999, the pay was much higher, I admit, but I love the site and have found great results. The larger content base you build, the more trickle income you'll earn.
- I blog for three different companies, some are higher paid than others. I found two of these companies on problogger.com.
- I write for Demand Studios for between $5.00 (for the titles I suggest) to $15.00 (for their titles) and have found this to be the steadiest and most consistent when it comes to reliable pay and work selections. I also earn revenue shares for all the work of mine that they post on ehow.com
- Examiner.com - I just started here, but I am happy with how it's looking so far. Again, the larger content base that is built, the better the montly income will be.
- Maholo greenhouse: there are high number of decent paying titles to choose from here.
- Ghostwriting: I found a number of ghostwriting article jobs on craigslist.org/wri (I search from state to state for leads)
My weekly income is about $750.00 to $1,000.00 when I can work 40 hours. Some weeks are better than others depending on how many positive responses I receive from leads I query on http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com I hope this information helps!
Source(s):
http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com
http://www.suite101.com
http://www.demandstudios.com
http://www.problogger.com
http://www.ehow.com
http://www.examiner.com
http://www.mahalo.com
http://www.craigslist.org/wri
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January 26, 2009 02:20 PM
Spoon, there are some great answers here. This likely won't qualify for the best answer against some of the links and insight posted here.However, I have a couple of things to add that I sincerely hope will be helpful.
As mentioned freelance writing is very competitive. You really need to think out-of-the-box to make any real money in this arena. Combine out of the box efforts with the lists of sites that have already been presented and you could easily make money. How much you make depends on your style, interests and how much time you have available.
Here are a couple of out-of-the-box ideas to get you going:
1)
SEO is still big business. While most folks realize that SEO is a "game", most folks also realize that real content that is directly related to the marketing goals of a website will increase traffic and have a direct impact on income.
It would be feasible to sell packs of articles to companies currently engaged in SEO. Some industries are constantly engaged in search engine competition and targeting companies in these industries would be effective.
2)
Develop simple to read, online courses in topics your skilled in. People are currently seeking skills to maintain their current job or find new ones and if you can help them, they will buy.
If you're an expert in say, building greenhouses, compose a clear set of articles, complete with instructions, indepth research, and personal experiences. You may be able to sell a subscription to the tutorial, but you may also be able to break apart your series of articles and sell them to a variety of blogs at different times.
CONCLUSION
Coming up with this sort of out-of-the-box thinking in competitive markets results in success. Don't stop with these 2 ideas. Talk to your friends, your family, and deeply consider with creativity where you may be able to sell your articles that others haven't thought of yet.
I hope that this helps.
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August 25, 2009 10:14 PM
I am a content writer at associated content and have over 1000 articles, I can easily make triplet digits in page view performance bonuses a month. They also do upfront payments but they are not as high now as they were a year ago. I also write for bukisa, ehow and helium. These all pay a nice performance bonus for page views with a multitude of articles. Helium is now paying a small upfront payment.
Between these sites and a few print publications I query a month I am able to almost pay the bills. It does require tons of writing though.
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