Income from online writing sites?

kate_a_p

Hiya,

Up until a couple of years ago I was working as a freelance journalist, but due to being diagnosed with Crohn's, working full time has become a little tricky. I've been looking at working from home using sites like Copify, PPH and Elance.. so far they seem to pay peanuts, working out at roughly £2 ph, sometimes less than a 1p a word! Are these sites just a massive con, or has anyone had any luck making any kind of living at online writing? HELP!

SailorSam

I've not done any writing for them but have looked into the idea, and it seems you're in competition with writers who live in the Third World.

w00519772

I looked into freekancing once. I bid for a job at £20 per hour. The buyer said that someone outbid me in India. They wanted less than one pound per hour.

Robinette

Have you looked at companies such as Scripted and Demand Media? Although they are content mills, you can make semi-decent money from them. They are both based in the US; sadly, there do not appear to be any UK content mills that pay enough to make it worth writing for them.

kate_a_p

Thanks, will give them a go. Seems ludicrous that anyone would work for that kind of money. They also don't take editing or researching into account at all. Am pretty new to all of this, so thanks chaps!

cte1111

I've done some work for Textbroker. There's a thread about them in the Up Your Income board. The open orders, which anyone can pick up, are largely short articles with SEO type work but there are some more interesting articles that pop up too. The best money is from Team Orders and Direct orders. Direct orders come from clients who have liked your work previously and tend to be bigger and more worth doing.

https://www.textbroker.co.uk/authors

JJOK93

Will give them a ago never heard of this before.

cazmanian_minx

PeoplePerHour is pretty good - mostly UK jobs and workers and a system for reporting anyone posting a job with an unrealistically low budget.

tyroneshoelaces

I started off using texbroker two years ago but I found the site awful and then came across pph and I havent looked back.

I started it off as a bit of a hobby as such and I just put some useful skills on there as hourlies. Things such as creating powerpoints, pdf'ing word documents and writing.

I made a bit of money on the powerpoints and pdf'ing buy the writing has really taken off but it was slow and hard work in the beginning.

I work full time in IT and what was once a hobby and a fun way of earning extra money has now turned into a serious sideline for me.

I earn around 600-700 per month which on top of my normal wage is a good bit of pocket money and I have to honestly say that in two years, only once have I had to go looking for work. People come to me and I now have three separate clients who I write for every week. One gives me 60 articles per month which is for a website in Canade whilst the other gives me ten and the other is in random chunks of anything between 5-15 per month.

All my other earnings on the site come from my hourlie. I sometimes can't keep up with the demand but I have a plan for that!

In the main once you get established it is easy to earn money but it takes a lot of time and effort to get to that point. I am now ranked 424th on the site out of 600,000 PPH'ers and I am extremely proud of that.

If you are interested, I would say PPH is very good although I have no experience of any other website but I would like to say good luck!

emceeassassin

I have done PPH and the commission is quite a lot really. If you get a good client that can provide you with lots of work then the money that you earn will soon mount up. There is a threshold that you hit and pay less commission but its been a while since i did it !!

SailorSam

I've recently had to sign-on, and i was speaking to the girl in the JobCentre that i'd like to try and go self-employed working from home doing some writing. She's tried to put me off saying it can be harder than you think, better to try and find a 'proper' job and write part-time. We were talking about some of PPH type websites, but i'd heard often you were up against others bidding £1 per hour. She logged onto PPH just for an example and some of the jobs there specified English Native Speakers only.