My Content Confession — Don’t Judge Me

OK. Here we go. I’m going to admit it, in writing, for all the world to see. Here we go.  Okay. (*breathes deep and wipes palms on lap.*)

I-was-a-content-writer-for-two-years. Whew. There. I said it. Seriously, don’t judge me. Just listen to my story. Be warned, though. This is a little longer than usual. Also, I’m going to add random pictures that have nothing to do with content writing, but will serve to break up the monotony of text.

At a bed-and-breakfast we stayed at in Prescott last summer. 100 years old. Haunted. ooooh.

One day a couple years ago, I was feeling sad and frustrated. After 16 years of medical transcription, I was tired of it and my fingers hurt, but I couldn’t see a way out — not without having to get a not-at-home job. My older son was leaving for college, but my younger son was still in middle school. I wanted to be home. Besides who would hire a (working) mom who had been out of the “real” work force for such a long time? I had gone back to school for a year, had joined an online writing workshop, was reading writing books like crazy, but I just could not figure out how to get a freelance writing career off the ground (still working on it, too).

Plus, it was August in Phoenix, and I felt like I hadn’t been outside for three months. Can you say hot and stir-crazy?

As I walked by the living room desk, I saw my Writer’s Digest (ah yes, the one decision from whence all follow). Actually, it was the back cover of the magazine. Who pays attention to those? I don’t. Usually. But, right there, staring me in the face, was a Demand Studios advertisement: “HIRING FREELANCE WRITERS — Take control of your career with Demand Studios” (I will call them DMS from here on — the name was changed to Demand Media Studios at some point).

Now, I did not have a clue what DMS was. The advertisement spoke nary a word about content (those sly dogs), but even if it had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I had no clue what content writing was either. All I saw were the words “hiring freelance writers” and “work as much as you want from wherever you want and get paid weekly.” Oh my gosh, I thought. I could do this. I was excited.

I went online and checked them out. Ohhh. Internet articles. I had always wondered who the people were who wrote those. I could write that stuff easy. So, I applied. I got my resume together, my writing samples, my cover letter and uploaded everything to DMS. It didn’t take long before I got my answer: I was in! Yay!

Oh. My. God. Fifteen dollars for a 400- to 500-word article? Really? But, I wanted to write. I chose a title from a huge bank of thousands of titles. Just as some teachers teach to the test, so DMS writers write to the title. So, I wrote an article on ADHD — I know that subject well. I sent it to an anonymous copyeditor (CE), whose responsibility was to send it back for rewrite or approve it. Writers for DMS get one chance only (one ping only, please). If the article is not satisfactory after the rewrite — rejection. I am happy to say that in two years I never had a single article rejected.

The 3 a.m. art project from hell. Check it out here: http://jeannettemonahan.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/oh-to-be-needed/

But then, I didn’t write that many. My first article took me eight hours. Eight hours! I wanted it to be perfect. But, geez. That was working my butt off for $1.87 an hour. Ugh. I chalked it up to the learning curve (the one with no shortcuts). After about a month of writing a couple articles a week — when I wasn’t transcribing — I talked to my husband about quitting transcription. I would never get anywhere, I said, if I couldn’t write full-time. I was so sure I would be able to whip out 3 or 4 articles an hour — everyone else did. I knew that from the forums. That would be $45 to $60 an hour. I could work less and earn more than I did transcribing. And the truth was I liked writing the articles and had come to hate transcribing.

I was so, so wrong. How did I ever think I could write a quality, researched article in 15 minutes or half-an-hour, or even two hours? I felt lucky if I could get three articles done in eight hours or 10 hours. But, I kept trying. After about six months, I got an email stating that DMS had approved me to write for another of its websites — this one paid $25 an article, and I would get to use my medical knowledge, such as it was. Great! Maybe my experience transcribing would make it easier to write the articles — more articles, higher pay. Okay. This might work out.

Wrong. Again. I just wasn’t fast enough. And I couldn’t bring myself to skimp on the research and the references. I think, though, that a lot of DMS writers did. Some regularly wrote 12 or 15 articles a day. Some made their whole living from writing DMS articles. I’m not saying they all skimped, but I’m sure some must have.

Ah. The elephant in the room. Well, the bathroom. How cute is that?

After about a year of trying as hard as I could to increase my output, I came to the realization that it just wouldn’t happen. I could not write like that and I would not. I kept writing my two or three well-researched articles a day, taking at least three hours per article. I was approved to write for several other websites. I had high scores on my grammar and content, and never had a rejection. In the meantime, I wracked my brain for a solution to my dilemma. I needed to earn money. I needed to write. I did not want to transcribe medical dictation again. Worse, I was spending all my time writing these articles for piddly-*&#$ pay — I did not have time to try and develop other avenues of freelancing. Wow. Trapped again.

To make a long story short, this past fall, two years after I started with DMS, the company took a dive. They say they didn’t, but they did. All the content companies (farms) did. I had also written content for Bright Hub, which paid even worse than DMS and required longer articles. Bright Hub also took a dive, but I had already stopped writing for them. Google, by changing their algorithms (or whatever) had taken a stand against content farms and won. The number of titles available at DMS continued to decline, until by September 2010, there were none at all. Well, there were some, but the writers who were still hanging around pounced on them like vultures. Who can blame them? For writers who could whip out those articles, it was a good gig. I wasn’t one though, and it did not pay for me to sit in front of the computer hitting the refresh button all day to see if more titles had dropped.

So, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. Don’t judge me. I’m innocent.

And (sigh), I am now an unemployed freelance writer. But, hey, unemployment has given me opportunities I wouldn’t have had if I were still writing for DMS. Suffice it to say, that I believe being forced to stop writing for DMS has been a blessing in disguise. I will write more about that later. But next time, I will write about what I learned while I waswriting for DMS. Yes, believe it or not, those two years writing for a content farm were not a complete waste of my time.

Wastin' time at White Sands. Yep - those are treetops.

---