You have a talent for writing; your teachers and friends have always told you as much, you were great at the college publication, and you’ve written your friends’ resumes with great results. You’ve even put some effort into making a living out writing freelance for the local paper and your company’s newsletter. Making some steady cash out of your writing skills, though, has proven elusive. You’ve never managed to put a proper strategy together. What should you do?
Making steady cash writing content isn’t really hard
Whether you want to write for a major magazine or make some quick spending cash, there are plenty of well-established ways to do it online. Content mills can be just the ticket for fast money. It’s easy to sign up, write a couple of simple articles each day, and see some cash. If you want, you can get in full-time, and actually make a surprising amount of money — as much as two or three thousand a month.
Iwriter, one of the Internet’s most popular content websites, makes for an excellent example of this type of quick turnaround content writing destination. What you will find below is the story of how my efforts on this website went. You’ll see that it doesn’t take much effort. Before long, you might even like iWriter enough to want to do it all the time. An assured source of income can be addictive.
Getting on iWriter
I ignored iWriter for the longest time. I did get on the website several times intending to sign up, only to turn away disappointed — the first thing that I saw on the website was a blurb for customers coming in: Get content written for as low as $1.25 an article. If these articles were selling for $1.25, what could I possibly make as writer — $1?
Then, one day, I decided to just take the plunge — to sign up, and see what really happened. Signing up was easy enough; they didn’t even set me a grammar test at this point. Even better, unlike most content websites, they accepted writers from anywhere in the world.
They tend to be as inclusive for a very good reason — iWriter is a multi-language website; they offer services in Portuguese, German, French, and practically every other European language. IWriter has plenty of non-native writers; everyone gets on, whether they know the language that they plan to write in or not. The editors make sure that only writers with reasonable skill get to stay, no matter where they are from.
Once I signed on, there was a lot of material to read that showed me how much money I could make if I stuck to iWriter. If I could quickly throw together an article in a half hour, they told me, I could make $20 an hour. If I was willing to work 10 hours a day, this could translate to $200 a day, or $52,000 a year — not bad for a site that sets no eligibility criteria. If you can write basic, grammatical sentences and get a point across with reasonable clarity, you’re in (there is a simple grammar test when you attempt to write your first article).
How do you get to $10 an article?
The $10-an-article level takes some time to get to. When you first sign up, you are placed on the lowest level — the Standard tier that pays you $1.01 for every 150 words written. You only get past this tier once you have 30 articles to your name.
The problem isn’t the low pay; it is that the articles they have can be a little hard to write; they tend to be about odd topics such as fixing garage doors, reviews of obscure software and so on.
When you accept an article, you have two or three hours to finish it, and you cannot accept any more in the meantime. It can take at least 20 minutes to find some information on the Internet to actually write about. Since clients ordering articles tend to leave writers very little information, the process is somewhat hard, as well.
The rejections
Once you’re done with an article, you usually need to wait a day to see if it is accepted. Clients are free to reject articles; it is something they often do. Article requests always come with statistics to do with the rejection rate of the clients making them; fussy clients who reject 75% of the articles they have written for them are common. When you do have an article rejected, there is often very little reason given, and there is nothing you can do about it. You can’t even offer to correct any mistakes, and resubmit. You simply need to move to another article and try your luck with it.
This opaque process makes iWriter harder to work with than other sites. The good thing with iWriter, though, is that its editors seem easy-going. Unless there’s something alarmingly bad about your language skills, they’ll usually wave you through.
There’s plenty of work, though
It took me a half-dozen rejections at first to get to the point where I could make accurate guesses about what each request really asked for. Iwriter, though, is a hugely popular destination for webmasters looking for articles. Amazon’s Alexa website ranking service places this site at 9037 th place worldwide –it is one of the most popular websites in existence. This means that you’re never short of work — articles arrive seemingly every five minutes (they have a particularly large batch each Monday). You have enough wiggle room for trial and error.
Iwriter now has a new way to help writers quickly get to the Premium, Elite or Elite Plus writer levels — you get to sign up to their $147 fast-track program, where you get to enter the top league with no more than three approvals.
As convenient as this might seem, though, it’s a better idea instead to simply take the stairs. You’ll gain the experience that you need to work to this website’s requirements. Thirty articles isn’t that much.
The better you write, the better the reviews you will get from your clients, and the quicker you will move up in your world, to the point where you are eligible for the Elite Plus articles paying $14.99 for 1,000 words.
Making lots of money on iWriter
iWriter pays out your earnings once you reach $20 in article sales. It won’t be long before you learn how to make enough to get paid on a regular basis. Finding your way to the top of iWriter can take a little practice, though. Here are tips:
- Look for very small articles. At every iWriter level, the longer articles feature a lower rate of pay. For instance, at the Standard level, 150 words pays $1.01. With 300 words, though, you don’t get paid $2.02; you only get $1.62. This is a falling scale goes all the way to the top. It’s profitable to find short particles, then.
- While going up to the Elite or Elite Plus levels, may seem like an attractive thing, you need to remember that at those price levels, those clients tend to have greater expectations. It’s not just about words — they want valuable points made, as well. It really is conceivable that you would need 3 hours to write such an article. It may be an idea to stick to the lower ranks, even once you do qualify for the higher ones.
Destinations such as iWriter tend to be an excellent source of income for anyone hoping to get into freelance writing. Whether you plan to stay with content mills for an extended period of time, or simply wish to have a source of income to turn to when you really need some money, these websites make a lot of sense.
