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Beginners Work At Home As a Writer Guide

Some of you stumbled across this blog and realize it's a big mess. I have 1/2 finished ideas (some of which are fully completed by the way) and goals scattered around what should be more of a blog aimed at helping people start from A to B without any bullcrap along the way. My goal for the end of September is to make this much easier to navigate which means I'll be scrapping at least 50% of it entirely.

For my first time visitors, here's a cheat sheet of how and where to start.

1. Make an account over at Associated Content. This is where you put stuff that doesn't sell elsewhere, gets rejected or has nowhere else to be. It's also a money making site if you take the time to be a "featured contributor" in one category or another. AC takes most anything so if you have a rambling opinion on something, this is a good place to put that as well.


2. Apply at Demand Studios NOW. RIGHT NOW. This is going to be THE money maker for most of you. You'll have to type up a resume (just use MS Word or OpenOffice) and you will need an example article or two. I'll show you the exact format they like:

Heading
4-5 Subheadings
Some references.

Here's a great example that will NOT get you rejected (they love places/events/how-tos)

Heading: Hiking Trails Near Missoula
Subheadings: Overview, Casual Trails, Intermediate Trails, Advanced Trails, Geography, Considerations

This is the DS typical "about" article format which should be about 500-700 words long total. Overview between 50-75 words, each section about 100 words and there should be some legit examples such as "Hiking the M" in there.

References. Just slap down a website that isn't full of ads and pertains to what you just wrote about. I use park service sites of for the state/Nation I'm writing about. It's easy. For this example I'd use this site here: Really Long Link


Submit that as an example and add another if they want 2 (I haven't applied in a while)

IF YOU GET REJECTED: Try again with a different e-mail haha.

Start with these two sites.

I've spoken to a number of people I run into around Missoula where I live and try to get them to do this and most are very interested but I never hear from them again. If you have any questions, send me a private message on here. I can help look over your resume, look over your example articles and help you going with DS. Once you're comfortable there, I can push you in other directions where the money is.

I'm just here to help. The job situation is total crap in Missoula and working at home is a good option for a secondary income (or full time if you can swing it).

Let's take a look at if you did 1 "about" article for DS M-F. That's $15X20 or $300 a month. I don't know about you but winter is coming and my power bill is expensive. That's one less thing to worry about and I'd still have an extra $150 in my pocket for other stuff.

Subscribers to this blog. Don't be scared when you see most of it vanish. It will be replaced in actual categories that make sense and are up to date. This blog is a little on the old side and I'll go through everything and put it where it belongs.

When you visit and it's all missing, check back in a day or so!
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Have You Tried Forums??

August 18th 2010 16:23



It's kind of funny that probably 85% of the writers I know will work exclusively doing one type of work for one type of site until that site goes under or they simply get sick of working there. Associated Content is the easiest example. People will write there for a while, be happy, then all of a sudden be plagued by something about that site that leads them to abandon it. It could be something like not getting their $10 page view bonus on time or fighting in the general forums over there.
Your text goes here
Now that I think about that, it's not funny at all. It's sad.

Anyway, I'm here to share with you some of my favorite forums where you can find a few different resources. There's writing job forums that offer leads in print and online and there's forums to improve your skills. Both of these are very important as long as you use them fruitfully. It's tempting to become part of the "community" but over time it can become counterproductive as you can actually get hurt and even become depressed over your interactions on those boards.

My advice is to offer tips, advice and critiques if you feel like it but stay out of personal drama (every forum has it).

Here's my list of places to look for viable work:

Accentuate Forum

Digital Point
(content creation area)


Warrior Forums

Writers Weekly

WAHM

Absolute Write

Another one you should check out if Facebook4Freelancers I think it's called? You must be logged in to find it and I'm too lazy to do that right now.

Will these forums provide you with a never ending supply of work? I don't know. I've found many private clients from forums and worked with them for 1-3 years so there's a good chance you'll find someone or some company and hit pay dirt.

If you're following my city article strategy, the PVs are going terribly and I still have 12 articles waiting to be reviewed. It's been more than 2 weeks and I'm getting frustrated so I'm taking a break until school starts for the kids on the 30th. Until then, I'm whipping out web templates and filling them with nonsense that I'll eventually get domains for but that's another story
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Continuing From Last Post

August 2nd 2010 15:43
It's been a couple weeks and I'm updating.

I now have 12 articles sitting in the AC queue with just 2 published. The review times are abysmal but I blame summer for that. Lots of new would be work at homers jump on during summer and give it a shot. Good for them!

I'm patient so hopefully they will review all 12 this week. If not, hopefully next week and I'll have even more ready.

My lowest so far was $5.15 as exclusive as I use a different tone on AC than on CC or other sites. This week I have to try to put more of them on CC as I got behind on that.

Overall, a paltry $11 so far from AC. Let's see how it goes this month!
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We have Liftoff!!

July 7th 2010 17:02


After some waiting, my first Cheap Hotels in X article has sold twice today. I got an offer of $5.15 on AC and a rewritten one on CC has sold for usage rights only at $15. I have plenty more done just waiting to be approved on both sites.

Those of you following this, it looks like a good system if you choose something that's not prolific on those sites and has decent key wording.
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I have a challenge for all you writers who are subscribed to this blog as well as anyone who happens to stumble across it. I have a one article head start as of this post but as you know, I'm fairly lazy and with summer in full swing, odds are I'll spend a few hours a day at the water slides and with all the kids.

This is what I'm doing.

I've chosen a keyword phrase of "cheap motels in X, California". If you put in "cheap motels california" you'll get 7000000 pages or so with Google or Yahoo! but flipping to page 2, you'll immediately see hotel chains. Those sites are too specific and I know when I search for motels I tend to skip sites for a particular franchise like Best Western because those aren't the cheapest.

I'm doing LA first, then San Diego, then maybe San Francisco. This is hundreds of articles I'll be doing plus rewrites. Let's take a look at the strategy here.

Step 1: Submit the article to Associated Content as exclusive.
Step 2: Rewrite that same article 3-5 times. Addresses take up a lot of words so really, there isn't that much to fix up. A paragraph per motel plus intro and closing.
Step 3: Submit rewritten articles to Constant Content and possibly sites like Helium, DailyArticle, Examiner, or whatever you use and prefer. CC is a must though.
Step 4: Move on to next area and repeat.

Here is my first one: Top 5 Cheap Motels in Long Beach California which has about 250k pages of competition. You can do whatever you want and please don't steal what I'm doing and beat me at my own game, that's just not cool. You could do something by region, by demographic, by culture, or whatever you want. "best X for geocaching" is a great niche that should generate massive traffic if you know what you're talking about.

I'm going to keep at this until the end of July and post my results back here. This will be a combo of AC up fronts plus views, anything sold on other sites, packages sold on forums, etc.

Anybody with me?
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Overcoming Boredom

May 17th 2010 16:39
Well, I tried to have this posted the day after my last one but instead I did some experiments to see what actually helped stave off boredom. To my dismay, I didn't find anything worthwhile. Once you become too bored to continue with your work, there's only one real solution and it's an easy one.

Take a break


[ Click here to read more ]
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When Boredom Attacks!

May 10th 2010 16:15


I know my readers range in age from 18-65 but if you work at home, boredom is going to be something you have to deal with very frequently. It's difficult to approach something like article writing as a normal job because we have a TV across the room, might still be in our pajamas, and there is a kitchen very close that's just begging to be used


[ Click here to read more ]
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Wow Orble is working Great!!

May 2nd 2010 20:48
I won't lie, the old Orble was extremely slow and frustrating and sometimes something as simple as adding an image seemed to take a couple minutes which is years in Internet time.

I have some new posts coming very soon! I'm trying out some different sites and ideas so when I post about them, you're getting a REAL review and not some rehash of other sites


[ Click here to read more ]
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Handling Rejection Productively

March 8th 2010 20:08


(I realize it's an offensive picture. I'm an offensive kind of guy


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Self-Motivation 101

March 7th 2010 19:22
Lazy bum


Self Motivation 101

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I've been working full-time as a freelance writer/web guy now since 06. (I did work weekends in a deli for a while for free food/store discounts


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Become a KGB Agent

January 7th 2010 23:41


Some of you may have worked for ChaCha once upon a time or maybe got rejected when applying. KGB works pretty much the same way


[ Click here to read more ]
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About 1/2 the people I know who work at home simply aren't making a living with it or are skating that fine line between paying bills and sacrificing their cable or other wanted amenities. I'll be honest here, there's no reason for that. Let me tell you the top 5 reasons you aren't making enough money working at home


[ Click here to read more ]
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Sponsored Reviews!

December 25th 2009 19:01
<a Really Long Link Really Long Link border="0px" alt="Blog Advertising - Advertise on blogs with SponsoredReviews.com"></a>

While doing some research this morning I came across a site called Sponsored Reviews. This site pays bloggers (like a lot of people reading this blog) for reviewing all kinds of products that you can select from an advertiser list


[ Click here to read more ]
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