Constant Content

Hi Writers,

Please check out the requests section. I haven't gotten any notifications at all, and by the lack of submissions, it seems that many of you haven't either.

We have requests for luxury columnists, marketing and finance articles, tech writers . . . please do not rely on the article price in the price column. This is the default pricing used when a customer fills out the request form and isn't always changed upon submission of a request.

Part of keeping customers is fulfilling their requests. When they get what they want, they come back for more, and maybe tell others about Constant Content, too. One tip that the established writers at CC give to new writers is, "Try to write for requests that others haven't." Here is your opportunity!

Thanks,
Ed

Yes, lots of interesting requests right now! John's requests look good though I won't be working on them as I'm swamped.

And for those who don't know Jason (tech columnists wanted): he can keep you busy. He's from a big software company. He buys lots of smaller articles and was the buyer behind many of those $8000 bundled sales that another author worked on.

My first email problem today. I didn't know my article had been accepted (thanks Ed for doing this so quickly) but just found it in the article list so I could offer it to a requester.

Now, my emails are not coming through and the site remains slow.

I'm a bit concerned as a big customer spent over a half hour last night trying to buy a bunch of my articles and was frustrated at having to wait for each page to load -- only to have the whole thing crash at the end. She never did get her files but said she'd try again in a few days.

Makes me wonder how many other customers are having trouble making purchases? In my case, this customer will be back however what about first-time visitors? Please fix the slowdown. I know you are working on it. I can live with slow pages but if our customers can't, then none of us will have any success.....

I could not reach the CC web site for 10-12 hours starting yesterday evening - it kept timing out, then twice it gave me a message I've never seen before.

I was starting to think some very sad thoughts. Knowwhatimean?

I'm afraid if I were a customer I'd think twice about using CC - it could signal reliability issues. Not that that would be fair at all to CC - it's a thoroughly reliable operation, but, you know, "perception is reality."

Possible to get an update on what's happening besides "we're working on it"? Is it going to be fixed and when? Please keep communicating, OK? Thanks.

The good news is that the customer was able to purchase the 13 articles today as was another customer! Yay! The site's a bit closer to normal too.

Celeste, Ed, is there any way to know whether requests are still current, or filled? It's a hard call knowing whether to put in the time. Also, if there's been Q&A from other authors, does this show up? Thanks.

Hi Tye,

Many of the requests are old and moldy, aren't they? Customers are the ones that are supposed to pull down the requests once filled however that doesn't always happen. If a request is over a month old, I'd say it's probably been filled unless it's an ongoing request or the customer has stated that they'll be purchasing dozens or hundreds of articles.

On the QandA link, you can only see your own correspondence with the customers - not other questions posed by other writers.

Also, what I do is I regularly check the "recently sold" content list at least once a day (usually more often - I'm obsessive that way) to get an idea of what's gone through the system.

If I know there's a request about organic goat food and I see that several articles about organic goat food have sold, then I will be less inclined to write an article on the topic. However, if I see that these articles are regularly selling, then I may try my hand at contributing a few of my own.

Having seen the previously sold topics also gives me ideas of what the customer has already purchased. For example, if he's purchasing organic goat food articles as well as organic foods for other farm animals, I might try writing about natural vitamins and mineral supplements for farm animals and other topics that might appeal yet haven't been covered so far.

Anyhow, there's a bit of strategy involved.

Also, if you see a request that has likely been filled but appears to be a common topic, you might weigh that in as well. For example, an old request on something specific like organic goat food isn't going to have widespread future appeal so I wouldn't bother. But, a request for articles about real estate topics or mortgage terms will likely sell to someone down the road - if not to the current requester who can probably use all kinds of general real estate or mortgage advice-related articles.

CC used to clean up old requests periodically. Hopefully they'll get the Spring Cleaning fever and delete some of the old ones.