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Showing posts from 2008

List update

I did some changes to the list, so the categories actually showed up in the table of contents. Also moved up some sites to "Sites where publishers will post job requests". Some of those sites on my "to be checked" list have been sitting there for quite a long time. Some of those, like Blog Posts for Sale are sitting there since "paid to blog a advertisement" doesn't appeal to me and I have been putting looking at those sites off to look at new sites which I have more interest in. I really should stop putting them off. Think I may start a new category and find a day to review all those sites in one shot. Sites moved to "Sites where publishers will post job requests" Online Writing Jobs.net Accentuate Writers Forum Freelance Writing Craigs List

Update : Added to list

Addded Freelance Writing.com , Accentuate Writers Forum and Online Writing Jobs.net to the list, under "Sites which I intend to take a closer look at". Thanks to Triond writer Allison West for writing an article highlighting these sites. Here's her Triond profile and the link to her article.

New layout for blog

Just "upgraded" my template. While the abilty to add widgets without doing much coding is nice, I do wish that it's possible for me to access and tweak the widget code on the edit widgets panel. Looks like I'll have to hunt down the specific widgets on my blog template and tweak it from there. I'll do it next time.

Made it to Triond Hot Content

My humour article about cats made it to the Triond hot content! I find it ironic that it was written when I wanted to take a break from research-intensive articles, see this blog entry here. I'll still be concentrating on writing about writing sites though, as I think my research will help fellow writers. I'll probably do a humour piece every now and then. Here's the link to it. 10 Reasons Why Every Home Should Have a Cat

List update

Added Get A Coder to the section "Sites where publishers will post job requests". Although most of the assignments there are programming based, there are still quite a number of writing assignments there. You can filter your search results to only show wrting assignments. Moved Xomba up to sites "Which let you earn pasive income". Basically, Xomba lets you place Google Adsense on your articles and splits the revenue 50/50 with you. It doesn't sound all that attractive, but Xomba does make up for it by holding frequent contests where winners stand to earn cash prizes. In addition, Xomba articles can also be used to generate backlinks to your other blog/site/other articles.

Shared Reviews running into funding problems

Shared Reviews will stop paying members revenue from the end of September onwards. They put up an announcement in the forums saying that they have been having funding problems and as of September 2008, they will be putting the revenue-sharing model on hold. They have promised that they will still any outstanding amount that are owed to writers. The link to their forum announcement http://forum.sharedreviews.com/forums/1/topics/1728 As Shared Reviews will be putting writers on hold indefinitely, I'll be taking Shared Reviews off my list for the time being.

Another Triond article

Just wrote another article for triond today. It's a humour piece on why every home should have a cat. Wanted to do something different after all those articles requiring research that I had been doing. It was a nice change to write something which didn't require research and only needed me to be creative. The link to my article is here. 10 Reasons Why Every Home Should Have a Cat

Oboulo.com

Compumom from MyLot started a discussion about Oboulo.com, a paid to write site she discovered recently. I went to take a look and the site has a large number of grammar mistakes and weird sentence strutures. Which raises one red flag for me. The site claims it has been around for 3 years and for the top 10 most popular experts, the most popular expert has earned $255 and the "expert" in the number 10 spot has made a whooping $10. Yes $10. 2nd red flag. Their most popular article ---> Business case study: Panera Bread Summary of the article as copied and pasted from Oboulo "Panera Bread began back in 1981. It started out as a small sandwich shop. After going public the company grew in size with the addition of more stores. It is currently headquartered in Missouri. Revenue has seen a tremendous change for the better. This year alone revenue is expected to come out near one billion U.S. dollars. In order to achieve its great success the company had to implement many s

Linkfilter.net article published

Just did an article on Linkfilter.net A Look at Linkfilter.net I'll be following that up with an article on my experiences and interaction with the Linkfilter.net community. Link Filter kind of reminds me of those villages in those stories, where any outsider who steps in for the first time is automatically mistrusted and he or she has too work to prove that they are trustworthy and be accepted into the community.

Constant Content rejection

Just had my article rejected by Constant Content. Reason given was "Please submit in one of our accepted file formats: rtf, txt, or doc. We do not accept odt files." I had to ask in the forums to find out, as they seemed to be having problems with e-mailing some writers. Kind of relieved to know that it wasn't for grammar or writing errors.

List update

Well, Academia-research got moved from "suspected" to "to be avoided". Moved Ciao up from "sites I have been meaning to check" to "Review sites" and updated a few site descriptions for this week.

Finally, another article published on Triond

I just had another article published on Triond. It took me 4 attempts. The first time I submitted that article, I did a pretty silly thing. I submitted a blank file with the same name. There's a story behind it, while I was working on my article, my comp crashed. I hadn't saved it, and I have a habit of starting and saving an article with just the file name. Now I restarted my comp, opened my file to see if my word processor(Open Office.org) had managed to save during the crash. It was at that moment that my word processor informed me that it was retrieving the data. So, I waited and then the pop-up says that it has been retrieved. So, now I'm looking at an empty page with just the title, so I close it, with the intention of reopening it again. Open Office tells me that "changes have been made since I last saved it" and would I like to save or discard changes. I'm not sure whether by changes it means the empty file or the retrieved file, so I make a slight cha

Academia-research on watch-list

Academia-research has the dubious honour of being the first one to be put on my "To be watched" list, meaning I have turned up enough cases and reports of misconduct on the site itself to be wary of it, but have not gathered enough conclusive evidence to put it on "sites to avoid" list. What I have found so far. - Lied about address being in the US, despite it being a Urkaine company - While Academia-research won't blatantly not pay a writer, it may delay and fudge to avoid payment. - Academia-research was by started by someone who split from Essaywriters.net, the notorious freelance writing scam also located in Urkaine. Which is part of what makes my search so hard, as there is apparently quite an intense rivalry between Essaywriters.net and Academia-research and Essaywriters.net is not above telling outright lies to smear the competition, so I have to sift through my intel and establish it's reliability. I do the same for other sites I look at, but there&#

Daytipper, scam? Not worth the effort?

Checked some sites on my list of "Sites which I intend to take a closer look at". Except for Daytipper, all of them got moved up to their respective categories. A search on Daytipper revealed that it used to offer $3 per tip, which got cut down to $1, which got cut down to cash handouts to the top 3 writers of the month. On top of that lots of writers during the $3 per tip period didn't get paid for tips that were published, due to Daytippers "unique" way of defining "published". My search also revealed that an article by a Susan Corbett from Associated Content, saying that Daytipper was a scam, has been called a scam by Nathan Preheim, the founder of the site. Huh? That is also a new definition of the word scam for me. Stay away from the site. Did an article on Daytipper and a few other sites here. Top Sites You Should Not Write For

New Squidoo Lenses (For List)

My Squidoo lenses is up. I finally arranged Iakul's List (calling it List of Freelance Writing Jobs is such a mouthful), and categorised them, instead of the haphazard way I just placed the sites all over the list before. The list is now available at http://www.squidoo.com/writingfulltime I'll still be keeping the list on my blog for now. There's still a lot I plan to work on for the list and until then I'll be keeping it here also.

Another list update

Added Feed the Village, Epinions, Review Party and Letter Rep to the list. Descriptions are up for all of them except Feed the Village. Still not sure about it yet. Epinions and Review Party are both review sites, although Review Party sets itself apart from other review sites in that it doesn't pay a lump sum, but offers you the opportunity to earn through ads displayed on your reviews. Letter Rep is a niche market website, specialising only in letter assignments.

List of list updates

Added Qassia, Tutorial Tub, How to Do things.com, Xomba, Rankrz and Rate It All. Haven't done any site descriptions for them yet, although Qassia and Xomba look promising to me. Both are sites that generate income through Google Adsense. Qassia appears to be a cross between a promotion tool and an article publishing site. Xomba appears to have quite positive feedback from what I gathered after searching the web about it.

Shvoong and Squidoo

Been checking out these two sites. Squidoo I joined quite some time ago (along with the rest of the freelance writing sites I joined like Triond and Helium)but just left it sitting there cos' there was so much to figure out there and I had so many other sites to take a look at... Shvoong I just checked out and joined. Added my Squidoo referral link here. Will update on my experience with them after I have had more publishing experience with them. http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/iakul To do list: Check out Hubpages and Review Stream when I'm done with these two To do list after I'm done with the to do list: Check out Storymash, Informative Post, Newsvine, eHow, Academia Research, Ground Report...

List of Freelance Writing Sites

A list I complied of freelance writing sites. I haven't checked all of them out yet. Have yet to decide whether I'm going to add sites like Get A Freelancer to the list or start a seperate list for them. Will be updating this and moving this all the way to the front whenever I find more sites Sites which offer a one time payment for articles Constant Content A site where writers can showcase their articles with a preset price tag and have interested publishers buy them. Has strict standards for submitations (free of grammar mistakes etc) so check to make sure that you are submitting a flawless article. Demand Studios Offers upfront payments for articles. No passive income though and you lose your rights to your articles once they are published. Only available to US residents. Textbroker Only available to US residents. Pays on a "price per word" basis, with higher rated writers being able to command a higher price. Sites which let you earn passive income Triond A site

Scour, a Scam?

Scour is a paid to search site that offers to send users $25 Visa cards once they reach 6500 points. Over the past few weeks, I have seen quite a few MyLot users posting on it and whether it is a scam. Due to the numerous users who have said that it was a scam, I have never joined it. Recently took another look at it again and did some searching about Scour, and assuming that it is a legit site, here are the major problems that you are likely to encounter. 1) You won't get paid when you hit your points and request for payment. Yes, you won't. You'll have to send quite a few e-mails, post comments on their blog, and try a few means to contact them, before you get a chance to get paid. 2) It is possible that you'll get banned by an automated banning system when you reach payout, and then you'll have to send quite a few e-mails, post comments on their blog, and wait a few weeks to wait and see if the problem is resolved. All these problems, ASSUMING it is legit. Now op

Links to my articles

Nothing new. Just adding article links here from before this blog was born. http://www.socyberty.com/Philosophy/Why-Altruism-is-Not-a-Myth.164399 http://www.writinghood.com/Writing-Business/Why-Ebooks-are-Unique.197013 http://www.writinghood.com/Online-Writing/Helium-Triond-and-Associated-Content-Which-One.166031 http://www.bookstove.com/Autobiography/Ugly-by-Constance-Briscoe.199375 The rest are on my Helium and Associated Content profile pages, so I'll be lazy and not add them :P

My Homepages Friends

Discovered my Homepages friends, which is a Paid to search site. Tried searching for anything negative associated with them and didn't turn up anything. I'll join it and see how it goes, especially since I'm doing quite a lot of searches per day now. Added my referral link here. http://www.myhpf.co.uk/apply001.asp?Friend=174057