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The hardest part about moving up from 3 to 4 is that there are so few available assignments at 3, and that you only get rated once a month or so. Comma issues are by far the biggest thing I've seen them harp on, and yeah, AP style all the way. As for research, they don't really expect you to be professional unique tips. If you see an assignment that's "5 tips to maintain your water heater" just Google "tips to maintain a water heater" and crib a few tips from each. Obviously don't copy and paste, but writing the tips in your own words is simple enough. Of course, it helps in 4-star assignments to be able to be a little picky about topics. I avoid choosing assignments I don't already at least know the basics for research. Research is definitely a big part of content writing though, unless you're dedicating yourself to a professional niche you already have firsthand experience in and can offer authoritative tips from your own knowledge. It's just that at Textbroker's 3-star pay rate it's not worth it to spend much time per article.
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Mar 20, 2014 01:24
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I've been trying https://www.blogmutt.com/pages/writer recently. It's a bit like textbroker in that you can choose from a set of topics/keywords to write your article. The organization is worse, but there are a lot more writing jobs available. You get paid 8 bucks per article if it's accepted, and you only get paid when the article actually goes up on the client's blog. This can take anywhere from 24 hours to several weeks, depending on how full their queue is. You can see what articles they have queued up at the bottom of their client page however, so it shouldn't be a surprise on how long until you get paid. The article's length is typically about 450 words, so you're getting paid nearly 2 cents a word, better than anything you can get, even at 4 stars, for textbroker. The client is the editor, so no comma nazis over there. However that also means that there is no consistent stylebook, and each client has their own quirks. Some of them look to decline to accept otherwise fine articles for no good reason. However you can see the justification for the denial in all of their recent submissions, so you should be able to suss out if a client is really fussy before you invest a ton of time into them. If the client does decline your article you are free to resubmit it to another client to try to get paid. So far I've done two articles. The first one was posted by the client today and I can invoice blogmutt for it. I'll get paid next Monday if I do that. There's no minimum payout I believe. Invoicing works pretty much the same as requesting a payout in textbroker. Just hit the button and they'll take care of the rest. I'm waiting to see how the payout works, if it works well I'll go and invest a bunch more time and effort into it. To make about 100 dollars a day you'd need to do between 12-13 articles. The two articles I did took me about 30 minutes a piece, but they also didn't require much research. Some of the other clients I've seen have wanted articles on things ranging from surveillance equipment to horse enclosures. I'd say making 2 grand a month is doable over there if you don't get stuck spending tons of time trying to find good clients or researching for articles. I'm not really sure how feasible it is to make a living over there, but it seems like a decent alternative to textbroker. They accepted me much faster than some of the other content farms as well. Nitrousoxide fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 21:24
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When you're writing an article, are you "checking out" an article to write, or simply submitting on spec and competing with all the other writers for a given assignment?
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Mar 20, 2014 23:20
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kazmeyer posted:When you're writing an article, are you "checking out" an article to write, or simply submitting on spec and competing with all the other writers for a given assignment? The latter. However the client will usually have 20 to 30 sets of keywords to choose from. It also shows how many people have submitted with that set of keywords in the past so you can see if one set is over supplied. You can also see who has submitted. In fact, you can see every post that has ever been posted to that client's blog from blogmutt, so you can make sure to not duplicate the topic of a previous post. From what I've seen there isn't really a problem with multiple people writing posts on the same subject and submitting at the same time. One thing I like about the way they do it is I can pick 12 topics out in the evening. Then the next day take that list and my laptop and go to someplace without any internet and write them all without distractions. With textbroker I need to access the internet in between each article to submit and its easy to get distracted if I have easy access to the internet. Nitrousoxide fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 23:43
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Ugh. Not a fan of the competition model, especially when the payout's so low. For any given set of keywords, are they usually looking for one article, or would they say, for example, "I need articles about solar energy" and take several? (I've applied to check them out, they just haven't verified me yet.)
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Mar 21, 2014 01:46
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kazmeyer posted:Ugh. Not a fan of the competition model, especially when the payout's so low. For any given set of keywords, are they usually looking for one article, or would they say, for example, "I need articles about solar energy" and take several? I really wouldn't call it a competition model. The client can accept as many articles as they want on a subject. They just go out on their blog in the order they were submitted. The winner is the one who posts the on topic article first since no one is going to write another article on those keywords since EVERYONE can see that one was already submitted to them. You can typically write a bunch of articles about the subject for them, but keep in mind that most people only need 2-4 articles a week, so if you write 10 articles for them all at once you're going to be waiting a while to get paid on most of them. The articles you write, assuming they don't get denied or sent back for revision, will go into the client's queue and go out in the order they received them from people. The client can reorder their articles if they get one they really like to go earlier, but I don't really know how often they do that. Here's a typical client page.  You have to click one of the green pluses next to the keywords to post about that subject. You can click the blue magnifying glass to do a google news search and hopefully get a blog idea. Some clients are as vague as this with their keywords, while others are very specific on how they want you to write on that subject. If you've done textbroker before the variance is pretty similar there. ---- At the top you'll see three columns. The "Draft" one refers to how many people are typing an article for that set of keywords. This really is useless since everyone writes in Microsoft Word or Open Office than copy and pastes in. But ideally, it would let you know if someone was already working on a topic. The next column refers to how many posts with those keywords are in the hopper to go out on their blog. This includes both articles that the client sent back to the author for editing and ones that are actually scheduled to go out. If the topic has more than zero I wouldn't suggest writing an article on that topic unless the client has already has at least one article on all the other topics. the last column refers to how many posts are have already gone out with those keywords. The client will periodically drop some and put up new ones. If a client already has a post on that subject don't write another one on it unless you have read through the article and think you can have a new and interesting spin on the subject. ---- The stuff in the middle left is set by the client to give the authors an idea on what audience they are looking to attract. The links on the middle right point to articles that other people have written for the client that have either been rejected or accepted. You can click on them to see the actual text of the article and read the comments the client had on it. I find this to be the most useful part of the entire page. ---- The bottom left gives you links the client and their blog to get an idea of what they've posted in the past. Just glace over those to get an idea of what their business is if you aren't sure. You can also see the tone they are looking for in their articles at their blog. The bottom right is obvously a small blurb on the company Nitrousoxide fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 03:53
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I'd think it'd be easier to throw stuff up on Constant Content, at least the reward is more if someone bites.
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Mar 21, 2014 04:03
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It seems to me that Blogmutt has the potential to be more reliable sales, if you can zero in on what clients like, but at a lower rate than CC. CC meanwhile is the larger rate, but highly variable sales.
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Mar 21, 2014 04:43
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Has anyone had any luck getting onto the blog mutt site lately? I've been trying to give it a shot, but keep getting a redirect error while trying to log on. Curious if it is just me, or if it is happening to other people as well.
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Mar 30, 2014 18:10
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I only registered last week and I haven't done anything on the site, nor have I checked it regularly, but I just logged on now with no issues.
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Mar 30, 2014 18:20
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Hey all, I'm new to this (besides mTurk, which actually isn't terrible if you stick to the "$0.50 for two minutes of your time" stuff, unfortunately those hits run dry pretty quickly.) I'm looking to make some side money and figured I'd give the writing thing a shot. Anyways, I just got accepted into Zerys and I'm not seeing a single job available. I've heard from a couple sources that it sometimes takes a few days for stuff to actually show up on your dashboard; does that sound about accurate? I've read through the thread and it seems like Textbroker sounds kind of iffy. Is that even worth going for or should I not bother?
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Mar 31, 2014 21:27
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For Zerys, it all depends on the categories you have selected. Make sure you've chosen ones that have regular work, like autos and home & garden, as opposed to poo poo like anime that never has any work. That said, I only see six assignments right now (as opposed to over 100 last week) in business and finance, cities and locales, and style and fashion. I will likely perk back up soon, it's been fairly regular the last month or two. For Textbroker, if you can get in at 4-star you have a pretty decent chance of success. If you get in at 3 star, you're going to have a hard time. Even then it's not the best rates around, but it's more steady work than most of the other sites.
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Mar 31, 2014 21:46
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Thanks for the tips. I'll give Textbroker a whirl and mess around with my Zerys categories.
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Mar 31, 2014 23:53
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Kazmeyer, I'm curious about how assignments are distributed from these transcription houses. From reading your posts, it sounds like they just dump work in your lap when they have it, as opposed to the bidding or claiming models used by many of the freelance writing outlets. Are there places that let you choose your own jobs from pools, or companies that will allow you to say, "I only want to do one or two projects per week?"
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Apr 4, 2014 01:40
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Centripetal Horse posted:Kazmeyer, I'm curious about how assignments are distributed from these transcription houses. From reading your posts, it sounds like they just dump work in your lap when they have it, as opposed to the bidding or claiming models used by many of the freelance writing outlets. Are there places that let you choose your own jobs from pools, or companies that will allow you to say, "I only want to do one or two projects per week?" Where I work, the way you described it is mostly the case. Transcribers send in a schedule of their availability per day each week. You have to have at least 120 minutes available a week, but you can change up how much you want every week when you send in your weekly schedule. One of our transcribers has 120 minutes available per day. The norm is usually 30-90 per day. Projects are assigned based on transcribers' interests and availability, though their availability usually trumps all. So if there's a 45-minute project with a lot of southern accents and then there's a 90-minute action movie, I'll assign them based on who has the matching amount of minutes in their schedule for the next day. Only if multiple people have 90-minute availability will I try to assign it to someone who prefers action movies. It's a bit like playing Tetris with people's schedules.
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Apr 4, 2014 04:32
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Centripetal Horse posted:Kazmeyer, I'm curious about how assignments are distributed from these transcription houses. From reading your posts, it sounds like they just dump work in your lap when they have it, as opposed to the bidding or claiming models used by many of the freelance writing outlets. Are there places that let you choose your own jobs from pools, or companies that will allow you to say, "I only want to do one or two projects per week?" DT dumps them on you as they show up, depending on how much time you signed up for. Lately they've been really slow to hand out assignments.
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Apr 4, 2014 04:46
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:Where I work, the way you described it is mostly the case. Transcribers send in a schedule of their availability per day each week. You have to have at least 120 minutes available a week, but you can change up how much you want every week when you send in your weekly schedule. One of our transcribers has 120 minutes available per day. The norm is usually 30-90 per day. An Old Boot posted:DT dumps them on you as they show up, depending on how much time you signed up for. I'm thinking of maybe dipping a toe into the transcribing waters, but I'd like to go in easy, maybe knock out one or two per week until I decide that I want to invest more time. I'm concerned that these online options I see won't be willing to accommodate that.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:01
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They do say they expect you to try and keep so much availability per week, but at Focus Forward they haven't given me any poo poo yet about just bailing out and not putting any availability at all for a few weeks. (I got a new full-time job, but now that I'm settled in I want to still sign up for minimal amounts of stuff to stay on their books just in case) In fact, if you're totally new to transcribing, I'd definitely recommend going easy at first so you don't get too burnt out or swamped right off the bat. I had a couple close shaves early on where I didn't appreciate how long things were going to take. Or where I hadn't figured out a good routine yet to finish up earlier in the day, so I'd be stuck working late at night when I did have peace and quiet, but being tired can really gently caress with your accuracy.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:19
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To be perfectly honest the only companies I've worked for doing transcription that have really pressed the minimum times have been companies that were also putting themselves into positons where they were overwhelmed, and barely able to fulfill their commitments. Kaz's recommendation about having multiple clients so you're kind of at the peak of what you can handle is the best way for you as a contractor to be doing business, but your client companies should NEVER be working at full capacity because poo poo rolls down hill...onto us. As for DT, I dunno, this is everything for the last few weeks has been rush more than anything...that and fuckers who love to chew gum! Oh, translators! Try at a company called Wolfestone, they work out of Wales in the UK. I know someone who's physically there in the office working, so I know they properly pay, many options, and they need good people. There is a test, and I don't understand the credentials necessary, but worth a poke.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:41
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Slightly Used Cake posted:As for DT, I dunno, this is everything for the last few weeks has been rush more than anything...that and fuckers who love to chew gum! They must hate me lately, I've gotten all of one job per week.
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Apr 4, 2014 08:50
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Most entry-level places work with some kind of a schedule, you mark yourself down for X amount of minutes per day/week and they send you assignments commensurate to your schedule (whenever possible). I seem to remember it being difficult to get work on DT on any given day unless you put yourself down for at least an hour, but if you were willing to do an hour a couple days a week you should be able to start slow and work your way up. The more high-end transcription outfits tend to work a bit differently since they realize most of their transcribers juggle multiple gigs. The two I work for shoot me emails when jobs come in, and the better of the two gives me the details right off the bat. "I've got a super-rush job from XXX, interview with YYY about ZZZ, can you take it?" Once I find out the details of the tape, I look at my schedule, decide whether or not I can fit it in (and whether or not the rate or subject matter warrants moving stuff around if necessary or pulling a late night; I'll put in some extra effort if the pay is ludicrous enough or the job seems particularly interesting) and accept or decline. The scheduling system is actually the main reason I left DT; I like working for them and I didn't mind the lower rates all that much, but I kept finding myself in a position where I'd committed to a job for them at the beginning of the week and had to turn down something much more lucrative to honor that commitment.
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Apr 4, 2014 15:50
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So I submitted my first five articles to Textbroker and got the popup saying that my account is on hold until they rate them. How long does that usually take? The full two weeks like they said?  In other news I'm still having horrid luck with Zerys. I've managed to get one article in and the guy hasn't approved it although it's been three days. This means I'm still seeing zero jobs (in contrast to my fiance who is seeing dozens of them.) I guess this whole content mill thing takes a little while to break into. EDIT: Just applied for Constant Content so now I'm waiting for them to get back to me too. This waiting game sucks. Pikestaff fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 18:35
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Pikestaff posted:So I submitted my first five articles to Textbroker and got the popup saying that my account is on hold until they rate them. How long does that usually take? The full two weeks like they said? What level are you on Zerys? That makes a huge difference. If you're not level 4 you likely won't see much. And Zerys articles can take weeks to be approved, that's just how they work.
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Apr 5, 2014 13:41
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The waiting game is difficult, but once you've started it gets much easier. If online writing is going to be your Thing, you should take time now to set up an oDesk account and take their tests as well. When you're starting out with Zerys the important thing is to over-do every assignment until you're comfortably sitting in the four or five star range and there's no chance of two or three bad reviews dragging you down. AFAICT there's no system to keep a company the system barely knows from doing as much as a hit on you as a reputable client. You'll figure out over time which clients are more trouble than they're worth. (Like the HVAC people. Other posters have commented on them before but I'll restate it: don't take the HVAC articles.)
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Apr 7, 2014 21:19
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Pikestaff's started to get more on Zerys the last couple of days, she tells me, that first guy rated her and she's above a 4-star average now. I, meanwhile have seen sweet FA on Zerys recently; what might be some good expertise categories to try in order to see more work? Textbroker has yet to reply to me, and I can't work for most of the rest (especially WA) because I'm not in the US.
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Apr 9, 2014 02:05
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Man filling out these knowledge categories on Zerys one by one is a pain in the rear end. This is giving me the option of putting in a referral code, would that help anyone out if I did it? 100 HOGS AGREE fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Apr 10, 2014 |
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Apr 10, 2014 18:04
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I finally got into Writer Access at 4 stars with Industry Elite for the government and legal categories. Needless to say, the nearly 4 cents a word I can earn over is a drastic improvement over what I was able to get at textbroker with my 3 star rating over there and their comma nazis. I did one 900 word article and made about 34 dollars. It took about the same amount of work as a similarly sized Textbroker article and paid over 3 times better. I figure I can make between 20 and 25 dollars an hour over at Writer Access if I focus and have enough work available.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:03
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When you can get work, Writer Access is fantastic. My problem is anything worth grabbing is generally grabbed before I can read it. Unlike with Textbroker, there's no grace period of "another user is viewing this" or anything. You can read one, decide you want it, click to claim it and get a message saying someone else grabbed it while you were reading. A lot of people just go in and grab poo poo and sort it out later, tossing back anything they don't want. That, and gently caress casting calls.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:07
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I guess if anybody was curious about what is going on at Writers Domain.... they started with 5000 article March 1st, and now are up to 15,000. So PLENTY of work. They posted these charts to their Facebook page  Only 49% of articles are going through with no revisions...  On the flip side, 45% of writers have not received a single review for the articles they wrote in March. They posted an ad that they are hiring reviewers, the reviews are getting less detailed, and some High Priority articles are getting reviewed within 24 hours. I am now getting generic review responses from them instead of the 500 word critics of a 400 word SEO article. On their Facebook page people have asked about expanding the article limit to 100 articles instead of 80, and they said they have plenty of writers to handle their current workload. The article count keeps growing every day, and there are a lot of writers not writing in fear of losing their account (mainly because they haven't receive their first critique
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Apr 10, 2014 19:36
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Nitrousoxide posted:I finally got into Writer Access at 4 stars with Industry Elite for the government and legal categories. WA is pretty good if you manage to get in with four stars. If you get in with 3 it's a hilarious joke. I finally gave up on trying to move up there, although I do keep getting added to love lists for no reason and offered jobs at like 1.2 cents a word. Does Writers Domain still take forever to get into? I think I stalled out somewhere around the "write a sample about a dentist in Fort Worth" stage.
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Apr 10, 2014 21:35
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kazmeyer posted:Does Writers Domain still take forever to get into? I think I stalled out somewhere around the "write a sample about a dentist in Fort Worth" stage. My application from November hasn't been addressed yet, so... yes? Either they dropped/lost applications in their reorganization, they haven't hired many writers, or they rejected me without telling me.
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Apr 10, 2014 23:26
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Besides the serial comma, are there other pitfalls new applicants should watch out for? Also, I tend to use a lot of commas, and I don't want to get dinged for abusing my punctuation privileges. For example, the commas in the following sentence. I was brushing up on my grammar objects, and I found this site, which I am really loving: http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/. I thought I'd share it in case anyone else needs a gerund refresher.
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Apr 11, 2014 04:57
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Get rid of that comma before "which." It's not an independent clause because of it and would never survive on its own.
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Apr 11, 2014 08:18
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I don't think most transcription clients really understand what  'pure verbatim' means when it comes to transcribing, a-a-and, uh, you know, it-it-it-it's someone who-who-who, uh, talks fast a-a-an-and stutters like mad EDIT: especially if their only, primary interest is in getting a specific type of information. Good lord, at least doing relay allowed me to skip punctuation. In this job, you're expected to use it, which makes the stuttering even more horrifying. It honestly makes me wish we could send direct messages to the clients for DT jobs, just asking 'dude are you sure you really want this?' Old Boot fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 04:22
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Feel free to ask whoever assigned you the file. Sometimes they'll tell you to ease up on the verbatim in a case like that. Someone with a pronounced stutter and verbatim transcribing I'd either demand more money or send the file back. You have to be able to assess the work you're doing and if what you're being paid isn't commensurate to the time it's taking, you need to make the call. Like, I'm about to inform one of my clients the tape I'm working on is the last I'm doing on this project unless she can get the customer to cough up more money. It's a very high end production and something I'm ridiculously interested in, but the combination of strong accents plus the crew not being very good public speakers is turning this into a nightmare. Interviews with the actors are amazing, interviews with the key loving grips are like pulling teeth.
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Apr 12, 2014 04:50
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kazmeyer posted:Feel free to ask whoever assigned you the file. Sometimes they'll tell you to ease up on the verbatim in a case like that. Someone with a pronounced stutter and verbatim transcribing I'd either demand more money or send the file back. You have to be able to assess the work you're doing and if what you're being paid isn't commensurate to the time it's taking, you need to make the call. If there was more work right now, I would've sent it back. As is, I'm not in a position to argue. Last time I said 'uh, this tape has a lot of stuttering and lovely sentence structure' (for a client where it was obviously just an audio-only interview for a thesis) I was just told to deal with it, and, err, last I checked, they didn't bother to tell the client until after the transcripts had been delivered. A month later, I got the same client, and they decided to go with clean verbatim. In other words, lately, it only happens after the fact. Add in lovely audio, and DT putting out an ultimatum on 'anything that isn't sterling silver we're going to fire you/not pay you for, even if we have staffed QA people,' and it's basically its own nightmare. Old Boot fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 05:06
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Oh, what's that, transcriber? You get a difficult project with 24-hour turnaround and the next morning your kid suddenly has to go to the ER for a broken bone?  Yeah, see if I ever send anything your way again. Still got it turned around on time  Some transcribers really come in clutch for me (and then get a pretty constant flow of work from me) and others are just so fickle.
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Apr 12, 2014 10:21
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I've turned down difficult projects before, I hope transcription companies don't take that attitude with me. Additionally, lot of transcribers are work at home moms, and kids don't wait for a convenient time to get sick/hurt.
ohnobugs fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 10:33
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If you're one of those clients who is actually willing to pay commensurate rates for difficult work, I'll walk through fire for you. If you're one of those clients who offers a 10% per-minute premium for six-speaker audio recorded at the bottom of a well during a thunderstorm, I'm going to tell you I'm booked even if I've got nothing better to do than play Minecraft. 
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Apr 12, 2014 16:47
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Yeah, I definitely wouldn't be taking such an attitude with someone who didn't already have reliability problems. Her grammar quality isn't usually up to snuff either. It always seems like the unreliable types offer the most available minutes per day while my highest quality transcribers are usually only available for 30-45 every day or every couple days. I imagine it might be because they're in high demand from so many other clients, but c'mon, what's more fun than transcribing trashy reality television shows?!
Jedi Knight Luigi fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 17:04
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