Freelance Writing Sites for Beginners: Reviewed

Alright so this week I have been doing a lot of work on TextBroker, Yahoo Contributor Network and Break Studios. I also did a bunch of stuff for Independent Publishing, which is something new I found out about recently. The pay is good (about 350 words will bring me almost $7). However, I have some reservations that I will talk about in a minute. I threw together another Hub for Hubpages and it is doing crappy.


Winning my first "bid" on Elance was great and which may actually turn out to be a larger gig over a period of time-that would be pleasing.

Newcomers to the party include: Interact Media, Cloud, Independent Publishing.

Still Waiting on: Examiner, Bright Hub and About.com

Alright Let's take it from the top:

Textbroker: (Grade-A) Did around 10 articles this week for them and my current balance if I wanted to cash out now is (for the past 2 weeks)$64.36, with another $7 still waiting to be accepted by clients. Like I said in the last post. Not the best paying gigs but not the worst paying gigs. They are consistent and it's pretty easy stuff. The forums are friendly and TB is great to work for when it comes to assistance. I have twice emailed the help desk and both times received a response in under 1 hours. I wish my rating was higher, I started at a 3 and remain there. None of my other articles have received a rating and that might help. Level 3 is a penny a word, 4 is a .0125 or so.

Yahoo Contributor Network/Associated Content: (Grade-A) Big week here and I am pretty excited about it. My article on the "God Particle" got almost 20,000 views and is still grabbing some everyday. I was able to move up a couple CLOUT marks and make some money off-up front articles. So far the 2 week total is $38 in upfront articles with about another $25 due from page views. NOTE: I was paid $15 dollars for an article about how military families would react to Bin Laden's death! The most they have offered me thus far for anything! YAY!

Break Studios:(A-) This is probably the most fun site that I do work for. An article that I choose from their content pool is usually worth $8 and can be as little as 250 words all the way 700. So good money. But this is a "dude" web-site with dude stuff to talk about. I dig it, man. I haven't been paid by them yet and from all accounts they are good for it. I am going to count the $8 article I have in their review system right now in this tally. The only reason they get a "minus" is because some of the instructions for their articles can get a little whack... Update: I turned in an article 4 days ago and it has yet to be reviewed.

Independent Publishing: (Grade B-) Money Made: 13.93 Ok, this was a gamble because of the amount of time and energy that I put in here last week. I did 8 articles of 350 words, all worth $6.93 for a total of 55.44. Great right? Well, here is the bad stuff. While there user agreements say that a client only has 72hrs to approve or decline and article I found that not to be the case. After one of my articles went more than 3 days I queried there help desk and they informed me that "there is no maximum allowed time for a customer to accept or request a re-write, however most articles are accepted or declined within 5-7 days." So...B- but an A if I actually get paid and these clients start accepting. I did check the website today however and the two articles that were completed were paid out according to IP. No word from Paypal yet. Keeping my fingers crossed. I like this site. Easy articles, decent money.

HubPages:(Grade C-) Burp and fart. I think the Hubs are fun and if I wanted to put ALL of my efforts into this one site than I might actually be able to pull down some earnings from Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates. I just don't like it though. I could write 2, 500 word articles at Textbroker and make $10 in the same amount of time that it would take me to build a Hub. And then it might...well...fart. Too risky, but fun.

Elance: Grade: C) 0.00 Money Made, Elance probably deserves a higher grade than this but I have had limited success using it so far. I pay $10 a month to use it and it has been kind of hard to break in. With my ten bucks I get a certain amount of bid and once they are used I can't bid on additional work unless I purchase more "connects". Two bad things with this: Today, for instance, I renewed my monthly subscription and I have 25 fresh connects to use. But in the last month I have bind on over 35 projects and only received a "awarded to another" or "awarded" on 5 of them. This means that many clients award the jobs via private messaging and never update the status or they just disappear altogether. Either way it is possible to bid on something that is no longer "in play" and you wouldn't know which is a waste of your "connects" and money. I did get a job though and so far so good. Elance provides spots for good communication with the clients and has an escrow account set up so you can be sure the client has money.

Interact Media: (Grade: Inc) 0.00 Money Made New company that is still in beta phase. I haven't gotten work or assignments here yet and that is getting frustrating. Once you sign up you pick three expertise areas and when clients spot you they can choose your or the system automatically allows you to see it if the client just left it flapping for anyone. Most of the work I have seen so far has been in the "Home and Garden" and "Shopping" areas-two of which are not my specialties. And ready for this? You can't change your expertise area once you choose them. The company is good on pumping you up though and convincing you it will get better once they open the system up to additional clients. I hope so.

Cloud (from Facebook: (Grade: D) )0.00 Money Made. Wow, write for a Facebook company! Awesome, right? Not so much, not so far. You have to have a certain amount of credentials to work on certain projects. You gain credentials based off of tests and work that you do and it will either go up or down. Great for quality but... My credential started off at 30 after my acceptance test article. Does everybody's? I'd like to hear about that. Anyway there are articles on the assignment board that required 45 credential and the Writing Basic test. I took the test and passed and was awarded 3 whole credentials! So now my credential is as 33! I still can't write the article. Tests? Sometimes not available and I want to write articles not product descriptions. Frustrating thus far. The good thing that I heard about this site is that they pay EVERY DAY VIA PayPal. No minimum. YAY!

I have applications in with: Examiner.com, BrightHub.com and About.com...updates coming as soon as I get info.

All in all, I am still in the "beta" phase of this myself. I didn't go back and add up the numbers here but I think that it's like $130 or so. Note: If I wasn't experimenting with lots of places I could easily make more on sites like Textbroker, Break Studios, and Yahoo. Like I said in the last post, I will find 2-5 good sites that I like working on and will stick with them after I get my info from Examiner, About and Bright Hub.

I hope this helps anyone getting into freelancing with these sites. For another great place, check this out! The Freelance Home Writer