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Smiles and Bright Eyes

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 5:43 am
by Elizabeth Ann West
Okay, so here's how I got here. It started one day when I was researching to start my own consulting business as an at home administrative assistant. I was very successful at administrative assistant work as a temp, but the aspect I absolutely loved was taking a place that was inefficient and making it a well oiled paperwork handling machine! Only problem is my husband's career forces us to move alot, and typically the places I were sent had serious personnel handling issues, as evidenced by their need for a temp in the first place. I quickly learned places often need temps to take the place of someone who quit without notice because they really didn't care anymore.

Frustrated my search engine wasn't giving me the results I wanted, I rashly typed in "how to run an internet business." First result was a common sense article from AC.com, and then in the box of similar articles was one on how to make money in online writing. My husband is US Navy, and I have frequntly had my emails returned to me because they exceeded the 15 KB limit. That's a plain text email 15 KB limit, no html allowed. (If you've gotten this far in my introduction, I'm sure you have no problems believing I am verbose.) Light bulbs, bells, and whistles all went off in my head that maybe this could be an option for me to kill some time.

The article on freelance online writing listed this website, AC, and Helium. Honestly, the article was a bit on the simple side, but I figured if this could get published than I at least have a chance. It was intimidating, the thought of relinquishing my rights to my writing... at first. Then I realized anyone could copy and paste my blog or wikipedia contributions, and they didn't even have the decency to pay me peanuts first! But, in the article ConstantContent was described as the Holy Grail of writing sites and supposedly rejected "greaty writen articles." Since the skeptic inside thought this all to be a scam anyway, I started off with Helium and gingerly attempted AC.com.

On Helium I jumped into the deep end big time. I started with the contests, especially the Travel channel. I quickly became disenchanted by the chore of rating, and now have a new found appreciation for every English teacher I have ever had. Plus, being rated lower than an article with typos and misspellings in the lead is quite a shot to the ego. Or just proof most raters flip a coin. I quit the effort and started submitting "crap", and then thought well if I am not enjoying this what's the point? But I have $0.70 to help soothe my pain.

AC.com was a better hit, both articles I submitted, one exclusive and one non exclusive garnered up-front payments. I did that as a test, and my non-exclusive article beat the exclusive article's upfront payment by $0.50. It wasn't going to pay any bills, but it was comforting to know my musings had monetary value. It inspired me to give online writing more thought and careful attention.

But, it doesn't take a math whiz to figure out if your articles consistantly receive upfront payment then the work is probably not challenging enough. It didn't help that I noticed people who were very poorly ranked on Helium were regurgitating their articles word-for-word on AC.com. The coup de grace was when I ripped apart and retooled my #1 out of 14 ranked article, submitted to AC.com as nonexclusive (it was a very different article, but too many similar components for me to be comfortable calling it unpublished anywhere else), and less than 24 hours later I received a rejection notice from the editor. I was told the reasoning was the subject matter was too readily available and that they had published too many articles with same subject recently. So I did a content search on the subject, and what was the first result? The number 8 article from Helium, exactly as it is there, with a spelling mistake in the lead!

Since you are all here, and not there, it is probably safe to assume I am not sharing a unique story. Hopefully, my experience brought back memories and a smile or two at the epiphany. It has taken me about 2 days just to figure out the mechanics of this site. At first I was frustrated it's a little challenging to navigate, and I was going to complain it needs to be more user friendly. But don't change it! I have decided this is probably a great safety feature against the people who just sit at their computers, type anything off the top of their heads, and call it an "article."

I admit I am intimidated by the 3 article submission threshold. I found a requested topic I am passionate about, asked in Q&A if the opportunity is still available since it was posted over a month ago, and wrote my first article exclusively for Constant Content. It's 1400 words waiting in my "To Be Polished" folder where I will fine-tooth comb it tomorrow. If the opportunity isn't available, I'm confident my article could be picked up by another customer. Or, it's a great piece I could break down and handle sub-subject matter more in-depth. I'm excited and want to submit it right now, but that would grossly violate my time away from my work rule of at least 8 hours if there is no firm deadline. I've worked on a university newspaper where you don't have that luxury, but now that I am a little more mature, I relish the opportunity to edit my writing. Thank God I wrote under my maiden name there, because the articles are archived online! :)

Thanks for reading my introduction. I love writing for the purely intrinsic value of someone else cares. Online writing is the best, replies give the author instant gratification! The hardest aspect I find so far is I am still mastering the art of keyword writing. It goes against the very grain of what we are taught from elementary school to use variation and creativitity to keep the reader enthralled. Now, one must first use the same subject word or closely related words to first spark the interest of the search engine, and then use variation only around those words to keep the reader interested. It's a precarious balancing act and so far an intriguing game to play while writing.

Good luck to all and I hope this is a writing community I will be a good fit for.

Always Smiling,
Elizabeth

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 6:16 am
by Lauren
Welcome to you too, Elizabeth, and thanks for your reply to my post!

I came over here to read your post and reply in kind but didn't know what I was getting myself into. Writing online seems like a perfect fit for someone who clearly enjoys to write as much as you do. Hopefully we'll both do well here!

I haven't tried Helium, but I submitted one article to AC, and after being offered about $4 for an 800 word article, I thought I'd explore other opportunities. My article wasn't anything special, but I knew I could do better, both in writing and in pay. (At least, I hoped so!) I love that Constant Content has frequent requests, and I think the competition involved between authors responding to the requests ensures that the requestor gets something great.

If I understand the initial 3 article submission rule properly, it's just so that newbies don't find every article they've ever written in their My Documents folder and submit it directly to the site. I think if you're writing unique articles to put on Constant Content, you're probably fine, especially if you're writing in response to a customer's request.

I see you're in San Diego; I'd love to visit there some time. It's funny that you honeymooned in Paris, as my husband and I honeymooned in California! Unfortunately we didn't get as far south as San Diego.

Best of luck to you!
Lauren

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 6:53 am
by Elizabeth Ann West
Lauren-
I agree that the competition here seems healthy, but I also get a great sense of community here. I'm not entirely sure yet if peer editing is available here, but I get the feeling there are authors who are close friends and it probably goes on at least behind the scenes. I know I would be happy to trade edits on articles, or just feedback with someone especially on a topic I would have no interest or business writing on for lack of first hand knowledge. I don't fear article stealing as much because I always assume eveyone has the same high ethical standard I do, at least until they prove otherwise.

Thankfully the San Diego thing is a temporary home. I arrived in August from Virginia, my home, and when my husband arrived from deployment in September (it was a change of home port for the boat) he told me he has orders back to the East Coast and we move in December-January time frame. But I'm glad we're moving to Charleston, SC. We want to start a family and my parents live only 5.5 hours away in Virginia Beach.

I'll stop here so I don't write too much. I love meeting new people and have a tendency to overshare! I'm sure the threshold thing won't be a problem, but I want to explore the site a little bit more before I submit. I learn new things just by reading this forum everyday!

Always Smiling,
Elizabeth

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 12:39 pm
by TroyPankey
Love the introduction West. Need any help with kw-selection, kw density, lsi (latent semantic indexing), etc., give me a holler.

I see they've disabled the pm'n over here. I tried to get a hold of Celeste at one point. She seems to have the hook down pat. I'm over at AC-so if you want to pm me there relative to kw stuff, please do so.

I throw AC a bone every-once-in-awhile to keep the performance payment going. I have about 50-60 articles over there. I've amassed pvs in the hundreds of thousands range. I did that with only a handful of articles which I wrote with the sole purpose of pvs. All of the other articles were more or less pleasure without regard to placement, etc.

I, too, am just getting here. I have high hopes for this online endeavor. Let's roll!

Troy