Pitifully low offer

[Celeste Stewart]

It's usually easier and faster to just delete and resubmit.

[CharlotteAndrews]

The $3 bandit is back. Got 2 offers today. Anyone else?

[aprilk10]

I saw he placed a public request. I don't select "make an offer," so manage to avoid his nonsense! I did have a couple of orders marked that way awhile back though and got one of his pitiful requests. Changed them after that. The only real offer I ever got anyway wasn't even one that I had checked to make an offer. The client sent me a message. Other than that, the only offers I got were jokes,

[Lysis]

I'm guessing once you reject an offer the customer can't do it again? I got hit with about 5-10 $3 offers last time, but not this time. I stopped hitting "best offer," although, about a week ago I got a decent offer and accepted it.

I really like the site suggestion that lets you place the lowest offer you'd accept.

Anyway, though, lots of people accepted the $3 offer from what I saw in the sold list.

[Sharion]

I've been on a several month hiatus until a couple weeks ago and have submitted quite a few in the last two weeks. With several accepted and a few more in the kitty, I decided to scope out "the competition" so to speak and see what was going on with CC these days.

When I saw the pitiful sales amounts that people were accepting, I sank into a very sad place. It appeared that the site had been taken over by writers looking for pocket change to buy coffee rather than writers expecting to earn a living.

[VersantScribe]

I've never checked the Best Offer box. I doubt I will until an article is up for longer than 6 months or so (and even then maybe not.) Being still so new, I'd rather not have the elation followed by the heartbreak that's bound to come with thinking you've got a sell only to see it's for nothing. After I've got a few callouses I may feel differently, but we'll see. If a customer contacted me through CC about a specific article, I may consider opening it up to their offer price if it's worth it.

To me, if I wanted to possibly make pennies on something I spent so much time on I would post it elsewhere online. But I'm too attached to the possibility of actually being PAID a decent price for my efforts to do that. $25 a year from now is better than $3 over the course of a year. That's why I love CC. In my experience thus far, there just isn't the earning potential on the other article sites that I've had here. I see my writing here as a long-term investment. Investments don't pay off immediately, but they should still pay decently in the end. Otherwise, it's a bad investment of my talents and time, and nobody likes those.

Side note: I don't do tons of SEO and keyword research to build clicks on my articles. It's not my personal style. I've learned that I'm better at just putting my efforts into the writing itself and let come what may. If a keyword works its way into an article organically, I'm pretty proud of myself and I'll list the article as having such. But I learned really quickly that I get burned out writing specifically for keywords, thus writing articles for clicks isn't the best option for me.

[jak]

Hope you are listing lots of keywords and key phrases on the submission page. They don't have to appear in your article. As I understand it, they are just for the search function for customers, so you need to think what search terms might be relevant so they will arrive at your article, and include that word or phrase.

[VersantScribe]

That I do! I make a point to pull out what I can keywords I can afterwards so people can find the article. I know keywords are important, I just like to write more "organically" as they say.

[jak]

That's good. Thought I'd mention it, just in case. Some new authors don't automatically understand that.

[cjgarrett]

Just want to say I've gotten a few of those $3 offers - one for an article that's listed for much, much more than that.

Rejected out of hand... we gotta eat too, you know. $3 won't even buy me lunch.