Post a Comment On: The Writer's Journey

Content writing is a temptation that is hard to fight sometimes. It's pretty simple to do once you get the hang of it, but the pay is pretty average. If I want a kick-ass pond in the backyard and some days off every month, content writing needs to go. Unfortunately, I do have some contracts and I do get bogged down in writing content for content sites out of simple laziness. Normally, this means a boring week that pays ok and little more. This week sucked. It sucked the big one.

When it all began, I was pretty happy with doing some marketing this week, throwing together a PR document and doing some content writing when time allowed because it's easy and people pay me. Here's how I started the week:

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Then, one of the content sites that I occasionally writer for decided to lay off more than 4,000 writers and may not pay me a thing for the work that I've done for them. That was less fun.

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I got bored one night and thought I'd write a few articles for a cheapie content site that is always a quick buck. A short article about affiliate marketing was sent back as "good, but not funny." It was an article about affiliate marketing. Seriously. It was supposed to be funny? Why??

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Then, another content company sent an article back because they "forgot to add" that their new articles are to be written in a specific style that they never put into their style guide. I have to redo it after emailing some obscure person to get the new style guide that is so important that they never gave it to us.

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THEN, another content company gave me new, more complicated guidelines that tripled the amount of time that their articles take without raising my rates by a penny. This was already my lowest-paying client, and now their articles pay about a fifth of my normal billing rate. No apologies from them and no acknowledgment of the extended time and expense.

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Some weeks are good, some weeks make you want to swing a big fat tuna at the idiots who waste your time with incompetence. I can run a content company far better than most of these people because I have this crazy thing called common sense. I think I'm almost done with writing anything at all for content mills. They've been getting far to much from me for far too long.