SEO Keyword Article Writing & Article Marketing @ Writingfourmylife.com

So it’s been over a year now since I began making my living exclusively from writing and I figured now would be as good a time as any to make some assessments. This is basically a summary of some of the most important facts I’ve learned the hard way.
I spent my first few months writing for Demand and a few other mills. Nothing new here, and it seems that a whole ton of would be freelancers start the same way. In that time, however, I did a great deal of research in order to better decide which route I wanted my freelancing to take. Writing for mills is not that route.

A couple things I determined

Writing for any of the content sites will make you very little money unless you invest massive amounts of time and energy in them. Even then, if you make enough to just get by, you will be investing so much time that the return will be incredibly lopsided against you. For the amount of time and effort needed, you would be much better served just developing your own site and product and promoting that instead for much larger returns. Yes, it’s THAT bad. Why work to drive thousands of visitors to your articles and get paid pennies, when that same traffic could make you hundreds per article on your own site?

None of these places are good for your portfolio. If you are hoping to grab some serious work, these places will have little beneficial effect on a potential client’s perception of you and can very possibly have a detrimental effect. Think of it as someone working for Burger King then applying for a job at the Four Seasons. Chances are, the management is not going to be impressed.

These places are good as a supplemental or extra source of income when you feel like producing content for them. I try not to tell folks not to write for them and I certainly do not attack anyone who does since I still do from time to time and understand all too well why folks do. Until you get some clients under your belt and some steady gigs, any money is welcome money. If you need to make an extra $300 one month, then Demand Studios can be useful. If you are going to rely on them for regular income, prepare to work 10 hours a day and make $400 a week if you’re lucky.

What I did though was shift my focus away from expecting ANY real returns or future from writing for mills and instead concentrated on constantly pitching potential clients, bidding on jobsites and only on postings that may have real potential (no posting on the $5.00 dollar an article jobs) and focusing on finding work through the traditional means. I set a real rate for myself and will not allow myself to be insulted by those who are only willing to pay $5.00 for 500 words. They are not serious; I am, so why work for them?

Within 4 months of changing focus and approaching freelancing this way, I landed some very good clients and have been swamped with work ever since that pays 3 times what I made at a regular job. Sure things were pretty lean and still are to a point, but had I kept plugging away at content mills, I’d be nowhere nearer my goal of a sustainable career and a better life.

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Writing for Content Mills might hurt you

Most of the mass produced content sites are viewed with a jaundiced eye. They are viewed as content mills where quality is sub-par and the writers willing to accept poor rates. This makes it possible that a potential client will see them listed on your portfolio and assume you are willing to produce, or only capable of, sub-standard work and since you are willing to write for those sites and accept $15 for an article, why should THEY pay you $100?

There’s no certainty to this happening, but I’ve seen it. I’ve learned, it is a matter of making those companies work for YOU, not the other way around and just plain outright using them like a tool while giving them as little benefit as possible in return. I write for them once in awhile and they get EXACTLY what they require and nothing more. If they want heavy research, creativity, and most importantly, heavy promotion to send traffic to a piece, then they should pay for it.

I think of it this way. If I write 500 words, work 5 hours to promote and send 5,000 hits to it, and they get even ten advertiser or affiliate sales totaling a few hundred bucks and pay me $5.00, who is really benefitting?
Recent Google algorithm changes were intended to target poor content and the content mills that were producing it to stop them from loading search results with spammy and poorly constructed content that had little value. Top among those hit by this change were Suite, E-Zine, AC and Examiner. This is something that should make anyone considering writing for a content farm stop and rethink their plans.

The bottom line on 6 months of Content Mills

How you market yourself and the value you place on your work is entirely up to you. If you find value in the long hours and weak returns that writing for these places holds, then it suits your individual needs and no one else needs to worry about it.

I believe, however, that those serious about freelancing are better served putting that kind of effort into locating work that pays real rates, building a portfolio of reputable work with no association to sites of questionable value and placing a higher value on themselves. Believe it or not, some of the best writers in the world found good work and built portfolios without writing for content mills.

As I have said earlier, I too wrote and still sometimes write for those sites. I will not, however, allow myself to fall into the trap of believing they hold any value beyond the poor compensation they offer. I only hope what I learn and share will encourage others to place a higher value on themselves and their work than those sites do.

I don’t know what your spiritual views may be. I can be pretty assured you have some though since just about everyone does. From the early Aztecs and their somewhat unfriendly tendency to pull the beating heart from faithful schleps whose only mistake was to stay in town on holy day, to the positively benign by comparison Shi’ite Islamic fundamentalists willingness to beat themselves into a bloody mess during the Tiq Zani ritual, there’s a plenty wide range of beliefs out there to choose from. Kinda makes our own fire and brimstone Christian services here in the south seem downright social now that I think about it. I’m somewhat exempt from any of it though by virtue of my own unwillingness to concede any kind of belief until I have some authentication, which pretty well puts me on the spiritual group W bench with father rapers for the equivalent of littering. I do, however, sometimes imagine what spiritual beliefs I would subscribe to though if I were to make a choice.

Perhaps the most attractive to me is reincarnation. For some reason, the idea that we are doomed to repeat past life mistakes over and over until we get the point and thus further perfect our soul for its eventual meeting with its creator holds a certain degree of appeal. Sure, if I were to REALLY find myself reincarnated  after my demise I would promptly kill myself since there is no way in hell I’m going through all of this again, yet there still remains a certain amount of attractiveness to the idea. With a little more thinking on the matter, I’m on a roll here with the thinking stuff, I imagine this appeal is due to the possibilities reincarnation  holds for practicing denial and shifting blame; two things I’ve already admitted to occasionally finding quite useful. Especially when combined with Rum. You don’t end up on the group W bench for nothing you know.

For instance…

You would think that a guy who enjoys words enough to work with them for a living would be pretty well organized. You’d imagine him sitting at a stately oak desk with a row of prestigious books neatly arranged on the corner. There’d be a well stocked pencil holder full of sharpened pencils and shiny pens that actually work placed strategically next to the work area. You’d probably picture neatly arranged files, tabbed and labeled for easy reference arrayed in alphabetical order in his file cabinet and within easy reach. He’d have an uncluttered desktop and a neat little wastebin off to the side with precisely three crumpled pieces of paper lying in the bottom because by golly, this guy is serious enough to keep mistakes to a minimum.

Well, in my past life I was obviously a dyslexic compulsive hoarder because the inability to achieve anything resembling neatness and organization is the biggest reason for my currently higgledy piggledy state of existence. Apparently there was something I forgot when I embarked on this writing career of mine, in particular, that I am a disorganized slob. As pretty as the above picture is, the reality is cold and stark, a veritable wasteland in fact where organization and neatness go to die. Prestigious books? Well, if you count dog eared copies of Bloom County and Dean Koontz novels as literary greats then I guess it’s possible. I have all the classics; Huckleberry Finn, Gulliver’s Travels, War and Peace, Of Mice and Men and more do in fact reside in the same household as me. However, my spouse has wisely arranged them on ledges around the house, unmolested and safely out of my reach. My pencil holder is well stocked indeed although out of the fifty assorted pens and pencils there are approximately two pens that work, one of which contains lime green ink and none of the pencils has a point. I don’t even know where the pencil sharpener is although I do remember seeing it once. A moot point at best since there isn’t a doctor alive who can match me for mangled handwriting.

 I’m a great one for taking notes and keeping hold of important information. At first glance this would seem a good and promising glimmer of hope. Problem is, the contents of my file cabinet look more like something you’d find in a third grade teacher’s confiscated items drawer than anything else. There aren’t any files in there but if the in-laws are going to visit and I need to find a Whoopee cushion, I know exactly where to look. My actual notes and papers are spread all over in heaps as if a confetti stuffed piñata exploded over my desk. There are bills and notices, hastily scrawled bits of inspiration on half shredded paper napkins that I’ve long forgotten the inspiration behind, passwords and logins that I have no idea what they unlock, client notes and instructions that I somehow manage to remember even though coffee stains make them look more like Rorschach cards than anything and a whole host of miscellaneous detritus and random objects. Wastebasket? Not a one in sight. Since I’m not sure what half this stuff is, I throw nothing out until I am absolutely and positively certain I won’t need it again, which is about twice a year. Of course, three days after throwing the stuff out is when I end up needing it.

Lest you think this is a simple matter of bucking up and taking charge of things, consider that this has been my case since I first managed to get hold of a marker and the family photo album at the age of three. School was a nightmare and while the rest of the class had to turn in their notebooks for grading every semester, my teachers took one look at my lumpy book-bag and the trail of loose papers following me from class to class and decided to just take my word for it as long as my test scores stayed high. I still have vague memories of my English teacher praising my above average CAT’s while holding my notebook between thumb and forefinger as if it were radioactive.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. There have been periods where I’ve managed to maintain the appearance of tidy efficiency for weeks at a time. I’ve learned though that these attempts are in fact serious mistakes. Apparently, whatever forces are at work during the actual reincarnation process remain active during your lifetime in order to insure that should you catch on to what’s up, you still get your lumps. In this case, these brief periods of neatness only serve to cause an eventual explosion of disorganizational chaos. Things will roll along swimmingly and I’ll present to the world the happy and self congratulatory face of one who has their inner slob demons licked, then one day I’ll open the door to my room and it will appear as if a pack of rabid squirrels were fighting over a ten pound acorn on my desk. Far worse than the gentle and slow buildup I’m accustomed to, this will be a torrent of disorganization bursting forth like water from a dam. Everything in its path is obliterated and only time can allow things to once again resume their normal state of serene disarray. In these cases I usually just drag out the hefty lawn bags, scoop everything in, and resign myself to more of the status quo.

I’m told there are those whose offices are clean and tidy examples of happy efficiency. It might be true because I’ve seen things resembling this in corporate buildings. I’m a bit suspicious though because the mere fact that they pay someone to come in and do the cleaning smacks of conspiracy. I mean really, who pays someone to clean up their office? Messy people, that’s who. And I resent the picture of efficient neatness they foist on the rest of the world as if they never left a piece of paper out of place or a pencil unsharpened.

At any rate, let’s get back to spirituality.

If one day we should meet in another life? Kill me.