I started my new career as a copywriter in June of last year. So far, I’ve made a decent amount of money for a start-up solo entrepreneurship. But I’m a ways off from making my goal of matching the salary I made in 2012.
And part of that is because of these damn content mills or farms.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition of what that means:
In the context of the World Wide Web, a content farm (or content mill) is a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views[1] as first exposed in the context of social spam.[2]
What that translates to is it’s a cheap way for a company to hire freelance writers to generate information that’s not going to get caught by Google’s ever-changing algorithms.
There once was a time when freelance copywriters could command healthy fees for the work they produced. A few thousand was not unheard of for a certain assignment. Big direct marketers could shell out even more.
But the problem is this relatively new phenomenon of web copywriting, and in particular writing content for websites. And it seems that many companies don’t want to hire quality copywriters directly. Instead, they go to these companies that subcontract the writers, and subsequently pay them peanuts…or less than that. I think even a jar of peanut butter or a bag of peanuts at the ballpark costs MORE than what some of these content mills pay their writers per article.
How does this affect my earnings? Well, it’s pretty simple.
I’ve advertised myself as a web content specialist for the travel industry who can also do social media and emails. There are only a few of those latter jobs…but more than enough of the content writing.
So I look at these ads, or go to the freelance sites like Elance. I dig a little more, and I find out that most of these assignments are only going to pay about $2 to $20 per article.
And if I try to bid with others from around the world – where that kind of hourly wage is a princely sum – my higher bid is going to lose out, 9 times out of 10.
I don’t go the Elance or sites like it anymore. But I am finding that too many of these content farms want to still pay us writers well below what we’re worth for the “quality” website content, blog posts or anything else they want.
Another alternative is to approach these companies I’d like to work for, with a strong email marketing strategy. I like Ed Gandia’s in particular, and will be using it in the next month here to generate leads. I’ll report back on my results here. Yet another is to cold call. Believe it or not, I’m one of those odd birds who doesn’t mind doing this at all, since I never take a call personally. But that is a last resort.
This whole phenomenon has gotten me to think of possibly going back to direct marketing. But do I really have to write those loooongg letters??
