Online writing has reached a new high. It has come down to a
point where writers now have to struggle hard to find sites that pay extremely
well. There are numerous writing opportunities on sites such as Elance, or
freelancer, but, unfortunately, the prices have come down recently. It’s hard
to imagine writers having to write a piece of content for as little as $1.50
per 500 words.
It’s a shame that writing has just become a tool for
creating back-links. Where are those original pieces, for which magazines are
willing to pay a premium. What has been happening to the writing industry is
hard to figure out. Where does all this lead to?
If things continue this way, I doubt writers will continue
to write as a profession. Online writing is leading itself to a path of
destruction. I am writing this piece with a tinge of sadness. I am sorry to find
even accomplished writers willing to compromise cost. This has led to chaos in the
writing world. The current situation
results, perhaps, due to deteriorating economic condition across the globe.
It’s hard to find sites that pay you really well, unless,
you are ready to slog it out and start sending requests to blogs or sites that
are ranked higher. If you target sites that have Alexa rank of less than 10,
000, then you may get a chance to write for them, and make decent money in the
process. But to be able to write for such sites, you should be a very competent
author. You must be able to play with words, and also be able to produce highly
creative pieces.
It is evident to note that even if you grab writing opportunities
for well known magazines, it’s again difficult to keep getting such opportunities.
There are so many writers out there. You
should be too good, to write regularly for such magazines. Those who want to pick
up writing as a profession must review their decision.
You will have to juggle decent paying writing offers with low,
or unusually low paying writing offers. Sadly, this remains the fact. It has
come down to a situation, where expert writers have taken off their attention
to something else. At least 80% of the written pieces I find across the web
is there because someone needs a back-link. More sadly, website owners accept guest posts that are all crap, written without any flair, and have grammatical
errors because they need content for their site.
If this is what we are going to witness in the coming days –
very few original pieces, grammatical errors, and boring content, then I am
afraid, online content will lose readership. Someone has to stop this trend. Online magazines
are the best thing to have happened after the arrival of internet, and lousy
content can’t destroy them.
It’s high time website owners should exercise more responsibility
and accept only those pieces, which arouse interest. The concept needs to
change. Pay more to your writers, if you have to, but avoid content without a certain
quality.
If you go on filling the pages on your site, just because you
have to, as a routine then your site is not doing justice to the online
community. Every site owner should take a cue from the top sites, and try to understand
how they pay their writers. It is then the online writing will reach the
quality, which offline magazines have.
By Rajiv Sighamony
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