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Affiliate marketing generally starts with "pick a niche you know enough about and/or can pretend to care about" and then finding products to sell through it. Amazon's affiliate program is the go-to for a lot of places, but it's a harder sell and less lucrative these days than it used to be. But, for example, if you search something like "the best web host for wordpress" you'll find a ton of blogs that review different web hosts, and every review has a link to a "special deal" that is just an incentivized affiliate link from that web host's affiliate program. Sites like Clickbank are offer hubs where companies that don't want to run their own affiliate programs can set up offers to run there, for example. https://ahrefs.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/ https://neilpatel.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing/ https://www.shopify.com/blog/affiliate-marketing https://www.locationrebel.com/how-to-start-affiliate-marketing/ You don't NEED social media to do affiliate marketing (and in fact a lot of social media ban direct affiliate marketing) but it often works out as a source for traffic. Mostly though, affiliate marketing is more or less the same as something like drop shipping or running your own online store; it all ends up revolving around running a blog, doing SEO work, traffic generation, and stuff like that. Disclaimer: I'm not an affiliate marketer myself, but I've written a bunch about it for blogs over the years. Someone more experienced can drop in and tell me I'm wrong if they want. I think we used to have an affiliate marketing thread somewhere too but I have no idea if it's still active. EDIT: it's this, and is archived. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3447030 Nighthand fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Jan 20, 2022 |
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Jan 20, 2022 15:23
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 08:10 |
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Writer Access is the other one I would suggest checking out. It's the one several of my writer friends get most of their lucrative work from, though I have zero idea how much of it is through direct orders, love lists, or whatever versus public orders. I haven't done the content mill circuit in years myself, ever since I was poached by a client who recognize me as the only one who ever sent in non-garbage. But, to give you an idea, I pulled in 85K from my writing last year, and I have at least two writer friends who topped that. IT can definitely get lucrative when you get the right kinds of connections.
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Jan 25, 2022 21:45
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A buddy of mine does the ebay flip thing, once you pick a couple niches and know what you can a) find locally and b) quickly assess, it can be lucrative. It's also pretty feast-or-famine, at least here, because garage sales and stuff only happen part of the year.Astro7x posted:My friends that work for Writers Domain say that Writers Access is more lucrative, but yes, it is more work with fighting for open orders, getting on clients love lists, and a much slower start because of it. I really don't know much about it though. Yeah this is definitely true. It varies from client to client (some of them basically accept anything, some are really picky) but it's definitely more stressful. I will say that my friend who does significant amounts of work on WA says that most of the clients running love lists don't actually care about or read your application; she got on dozens if not hundreds of them just by clicking apply and sending in a blank application.
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Jan 26, 2022 00:43
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One time for Textbroker I accepted a project for a "total website rewrite" that was like 20,000 words worth of website pages they wanted spun out, I think it was about makeup and dermatology and stuff. I did it, and the ~4 days or whatever passed with no comment and it got autoaccepted and paid me for it. Then like two days later I got a long-rear end message from the client about how my content loving sucked rear end and how they were out of the office but they 100% would have requested revisions and probably rejected it because it sucked so bad. Also, would you be willing to revise it for free since it's past the revision period within the system, pretty please? Lmao hell fuckin' no dawg, that poo poo didn't pay me enough to be worth the time in the first place, and after you insult me? gently caress off with that. I later saw it in the open pool again with some preface like "our previous writer sucked and turned in garbage so we're forced to try again" and I was sorely tempted to accept it again, sit on it for a few days, then cancel it, just to further delay them. I didn't, but man I wanted to.
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Jan 26, 2022 22:21
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$25 a day is pretty doable with writing through the content mills, especially once you get established, though it can be feast-or-famine starting out before you get on a bunch of teams. Textbroker looks pretty thin on the ground since they moved everything to team orders so you'd need to apply for those. Writer Access uses casting calls the same way but may be more accessible. I dunno firsthand though about any of them these days, I've been out of the content mills for years now. For reference at Textbroker's pittance 4-star rates, 1,000 words is $14, though a lot of the teams are a bit higher rates than the public pools. Writer Access is generally a bit higher, I think. You can also try Verblio, Constant Content, maybe even Zerys if they still get work.
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May 13, 2022 18:04
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I believe it's kind of a hybrid? Like, companies come in and post prompts and guidelines, and you write something for it, but other people can also write something for it and the company can buy however many of them they want. I have no idea about the practicality of it or how often a person gets passed over (or if companies generally just buy the first things that come in) though. I signed up because a friend of mine said they had a rush order paying her like $400 for a 1200-word post, but I haven't seen anything of the sort, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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May 14, 2022 23:31
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Astro7x posted:I don't really like writing on spec, but I suppose you could repurpose something you wrote for another site? They do explicitly say that if a client doesn't buy what you put up, you can reuse it for a different client with a similar request, or you can use it as a profile sample, so I assume you can also just take it and list it on Constant Content's marketplace or something like that too. I also hate spec writing, so I feel you there. Gologle posted:Thank you guys for the advice. It sounds like Verblio is what I'm looking for? My next questions concern both registration and expectations. Doing a small amount of research about the site, I'm seeing that only 5% of applicants get accepted, which is rather low, do you know their criteria for acceptance or is it needs-based ("they need more writers, so they accept more applicants" deal)? Second, what deadlines do they set or is it client based? Again, at the moment I'm looking for just a small side thing I can do in my free time (being able to pivot to doing it more frequently after a year or so is icing on the cake ofc), having strict deadlines is kind of a bummer, but not a dealbreaker. As far as registration, Deadlines seem client-based but admittedly I don't have any first-hand experience actually writing for them. I was out of the mill game before Verblio rebranded from Blogmutt and changed up their back end, and even then I didn't actually do any work for them before either. It kind of looks like a lot of clients don't have deadlines, which is good if you don't want time pressure, but bad if you want some consistent idea of when they'll swing back in and buy something. Their dashboard looks like this:  Picking a client gives you something like this:  Or this:  Or sometimes this:  And below that you have a chart like this:  Along with the text box to write and submit. Disclaimer: This is all at their 3-star just-registered baby level, things may be different once you've done some work and increased your ranking in their system. Fake edit: Spokes posted:Almost everything on cheatsheet.com, motorbiscuit.com, or sportscasting.com is from Verblio. Just standard SEO fare crammed with keywords. You’ll start by writing on spec but all that stuff is direct assignment meaning there’s no competition or risk of decline as long as you follow the style guide. It can take a while to start getting assignments but assuming you want to do it long term I’d say it’s worth putting a little time in Yeah as with any content mill like this, once you get skin in the game and start getting direct assignments it all becomes a lot more consistent/lucrative/potentially flexible, as desired. But, it can take a bit to get established to that point. How long, I don't personally know. Nighthand fucked around with this message at 02:49 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 15, 2022 02:44
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As far as I know pretty much everywhere just uses Copyscape, or has a disclaimer and tells clients to use it themselves. I have no idea personally what Verblio uses though.
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May 15, 2022 19:29
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I pay for Grammarly and it still fuckin' sucks. You can tell it to ignore certain issues but it's broad categories of issues, so if you wanted to keep one of them but ignore the rest, get hosed. Also it's frequently just wrong. For example:   I basically just use it for a bunch of colored outlines on sentences I should take a look at when I'm editing for my writers, but make judgment calls myself because its suggestions are so awful so much of the time. The "best" part is, I've tried a couple of the other grammar check AI systems and they're worse.
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Jun 6, 2022 17:29
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kazmeyer posted:The funniest thing I ever saw was when I Googled my pen name and found people citing me. It's turtles all the way down. Lol yeah like, my ghostwriting has been on Forbes lmao, don't trust anything online
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Jun 18, 2022 16:48
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IIRC I was one of those people who applied for the wait list and then never followed up on the invite, because by then I had moved away from the mills in general.
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Jun 23, 2022 21:42
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Good lord, it sure did.
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Jul 20, 2022 00:26
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Same. Pretty sure when I took over this thread I was just stepping into content mills and doing Leapforce stuff for a few hundred bucks a month. I'm currently on track to top 100k this year from my writing, so, glad I picked it up and kept it going for folks (even if I haven't edited the op in, uh, years.)
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Jul 21, 2022 21:48
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Honestly tbh I'm still not getting paid enough, I just have a pretty high volume. I have a couple of writer friends doing similar things to me and making near twice what I am. Turns out when you hustle random CEOs into letting you ghostwrite their marketing ebooks or whatever they just throw money in your direction. Kind of wild what's out there, but it's all invisible, you can't just go to a website and sign up and hook those clients, it's all chains of networking from business to business before you end up in that position.
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Jul 22, 2022 01:59
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There's someone in my neighborhood with a low battery smoke detector that has been chirping for I swear to God at least a solid year. Luckily I can only actually hear it when I'm out on an evening walk, or on a really still night when everything else is silenced, but holy hell how do you live like that
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Aug 11, 2022 05:12
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I tried it out and it's not very good. It will write you short chunks at a time, which then end up needing your editing and finesse to tie them together, and it loves to repeat itself in a way that is useless for any writing platform that has a human look at the content for a second. It mostly passes copyscape iirc, since it's largely trained on offline materials (books, magazines) but it's all super generic, not really connected thoughts, at least for the attempts I made with it. They love shilling it as a do-it-for-you tool but at best it can generate something you could use as an outline and fluff up. It's still a long way from "click button, submit to WD" functionality. Maybe if you spend time getting good at using it, you can use it for low-value posts like that, but I didn't care enough since there's no way it can handle what I generally do. Also, Google has been angling to detect and devalue AI-gen content so look forward to that arms race, I guess. The biggest problem with these AI content generators is that they can't generate good writing without a lot of massaging. By that I don't just mean in a technical sense, I mean in terms of the flow of ideas, in critical thinking, and stuff like that. It could be fine for low-end Textbroker or WD stuff, but at that point those platforms are just going to invest in doing it themselves rather than paying writers to do it for them. Combined with google pushing to raise overall quality levels and devalue the spammier content out there, it's just skirting a line where it's a bit more effort than it's worth. I'm sure there's a use case for it, and I'm sure if I took the time to figure it all out I could maybe use it to speed up some filler content here and there, but for my use case it just doesn't get there.
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Oct 4, 2022 17:13
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I'm more than happy to add/edit/update anything in it, or if someone else wants to take over that's cool too. My firsthand knowledge of the writing stuff has dropped off since I moved entirely to private clients instead of the content mills so I'm rusty on it. AFAIK the big ones are still Writer Access and Textbroker, with Verblio and Constant Content as more spec-like work. I also never did the transcription, haven't touched the search rater stuff in almost ten years, and never did tutoring, so those are completely out of my wheelhouse.
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Jan 7, 2023 05:06
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Blogging got saturated and also most of the common ways to monetize it have gotten worse and worse (display ads pay poo poo all these days, affiliate links are hard to get people to click through, etc). Obviously it still works for plenty of people, but it's harder than ever to break into without either name recognition or significant investment. Similarly, Amazon self-pub got worse as a million people got into it and the algorithms got harder to game. There's still plenty of opportunity out there but I think a lot of it is harder to find or with individual businesses/clients, like you really need to use the sites like Upwork and network, or just look for remote work in general like on FlexJobs. It feels like a lot of the entry-level platforms have somewhat dropped off. But, again, that's all from a more distant perspective since I haven't been immersed in it in years. Baddog posted:Maybe I can make "what are ways to make money online these days" a topic for our chat thread? That could work. Getting more eyes on the subject could get people to find this little thread buried away.
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Jan 7, 2023 20:36
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Vanilla feet pics are a saturated market so you'll have to pivot to video and pick an exotic niche, I think. Something like "feet dipped in honey ASMR" or "feet interrupting elsa's birthday celebration" where you step on an array of celebratory confections. As an added bonus for that one, though, you could make an extra bit of hustle from selling the slightly used cake...
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Feb 3, 2023 20:34
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I got a few checks from SurveySavvy back in the day but all those survey sites are just a few cents here and there so it just wasn't worth the time to keep up with.
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May 8, 2023 15:46
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Wild, I'd have thought they'd be the first to go when the AI starts being able to write vaguely-decent-sounding SEO content. But hey, if they keep on trucking, the canary isn't dead yet! Unrelated, I did a pass to update the OP, remove some dead links, reflect some more modern advice, etc. Anybody with a quote in there who would like it changed/updated/replaced/removed just lemme know.
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May 17, 2023 18:24
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1,600 articles a year is pretty reasonable tbh, especially for sub-1K wordcount posts. 4-5x 600-word posts per day rounds out at around a million words a year, which I routinely hit before I dialed back a bit. Depending on the topic I could do that in an hour, two tops.
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May 17, 2023 23:09
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You know how when you Google search for anything right now there are like 5-20 results that have a few paragraphs of bullshit about it and maybe, if you're lucky, a good tip somewhere near the end? It's that.
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May 18, 2023 05:24
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ChatGPT just picks words by what are statistically likely to be in a given order. That's its whole point, to use statistics to make something human-sounding by studying an immense body of human-written work. The more people who use it, and the more similar the topics and prompts are, the more likely its output is to be substantially similar. That's also going to be an increasingly relevant problem for content mills as more and more people saturate more and more common topics with GPT-written dreck, because there's no real history of what it has created being re-added to its corpus (as far as I know?) and even if there is, pure uniqueness is pretty far down on its list of priorities.
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Jul 20, 2023 16:30
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Astro7x posted:The thing is that it doesn't matter if content mills are over saturated with the same common topics. It just needs to look like original content to Google. St least for this blog spam stuff nobody reads Right, but as those content mills poo poo out more and more GPT content, that content gets indexed, making more of it less and less original. Whether or not people read it doesn't matter as much if it's indexed and Google reads it.
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Jul 20, 2023 20:06
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There was a blogging thread a number of years ago but it's such a saturated industry, and social media condensed so much of internet traffic into a few non-blog sites, that at this point that it's pretty hard to get traction and monetize in any significant way anymore. Depending on what you wanted to ask or talk about I could see discussions ending up in tech threads or creative threads or here, who knows. But yeah I don't think there's an active general blogging discussion thread anymore.
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Sep 7, 2023 18:03
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