Would you like to make money writing articles for the web? Or are you in the market for articles written by others?
This has traditionally been a playground for scamsters. You can read my post about realwritingjobs.com—it’s one of the most popular ones I’ve written and I’m happy to say that the comments show that it has saved some people money and trouble.
There’s a new service called iWriter that is not a scam but has been making a bit of a splash—for better or for worse.
They say you can use their service to get articles written for you for between $2 and $5. They check them on copyscape (which is a handy site if you want to check whether something has been plagiarized) to make sure the content is original.
Not surprisingly, most of the writers who have signed up come from parts of the world where $5 goes farther than it does in the UK or US. Even so, they have to work pretty fast—in fact, if they agree to do an article they have to turn it in to the site within two hours or it’s given to somebody else.
Their top producer has written more than 500 articles already. I’m guessing most of these writers find the topic on Wikipedia and quickly reword that entry.
ARE THESE EVEN READABLE?
What kind of quality can you expect? From the reviews I’ve found, variable. You can reject an article within 48 hours if you’re not satisfied and I get the impression that happens quite a bit. However there are also buyers who found the quality fine.
I’m guessing that a lot of these articles are being used to add content to sites in order to rank higher on Google, rather than necessarily to impress the people who visit the site.
For example, a site selling fitness supplements might commission a hundred articles on various fitness topics and schedule them to be added to their blog one per day. Or a new site might put on a while bunch at the start so the site looks more well-established.
WHY THIS IS NOT YOUR COMPETITION
As somebody who features articles on his sites I wouldn’t be tempted. I’m presenting myself as a writer/ writing coach/ writing teacher, so I’m not interested in generic articles churned out in a hurry. If you want your articles to be a reflection of you and the quality you provide, I doubt that you’ll be temped, either.
As a writer I’m also not thrilled by iWriter and by their rates of pay. However, outsourcing is a fact of life now and even at these terrible rates writers in Third World countries probably will make more than the average wage there. It’s not a generous rate of pay but it’s not quite child labour in a sweatshop, either.
These folks are not competing with you and me. They’re competing with the “spin” software that takes one article and turns it into several semi-coherent variations, according the key words in it. (Here's a funny real example). Google is getting better at detecting these and not using them for ranking, so you’ll see more services like iWriter. But I think real writers don’t have to lose any sleep over this development.
Next post: how writing free articles can pay off
(For friendly guidance on writing, get my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other book sellers.)
