I have an account with freelancer.com (formerly Get A Freelancer) and I have to say it makes me laugh when I read the email notifications that arrive in my inbox every day. These emails are to notify me of new freelance writing jobs and they probably arrive every 10 minutes. Yes, there really is a lot of work available on this website but you would have to be desperate to even bid on any of them.
Here’s an example of a job that was posted today at 10am.
Description
Hi,
I need people who I can send articles to and they can send it back to me within two hours. If you cannot do this, please do not bid on this project. Accordingly, I ask that along with your bid you send a PM stating what hours are you free to do this article. If I accept your bid, I will send you an article around those times and if you accept you MUST send me a PM telling me so that I do not give the article to someone. Depending onyour turnaround time, I might send more than one article to you per day. In your bid please write “I’m ready” to show that you read this project. Bids without this will not be accepted.The pay is .002 X words count. If the article is 400 words, the pay rate will be $0.80 USD Please send your times according to the Pacific Standard Time (PTS) Each rewrite must not be more than 10 words less than the original article. At least one word outof every three words must be different. This article must also make sense grammatically.
This is just one example of what this website has to offer freelancers. Oh, and get this, payment is only by paypal after you reach $10 or two weeks has passed whichever comes first. It is absolutely ridiculous what these people are expecting writers to work for.
I know you are probably wondering why I have an account with this website. Well I opened an account back in 2005 and just never closed it. It is a free account so it doesn’t cost me anything and I like to keep an eye on the way things are going in the bidding world.
This website is really busy and people do bid on these jobs. It amazes me how these people make any money at all. Even doing re-writes you have to put the time in and at $0.80 per article you would want to be cranking out a hell of a lot of these in the hour to even make minimum wage.
I guess quality really isn’t an issue for the people posting these jobs and it is no wonder that the internet is getting filled with useless garbage.
What is your take on this?
Until next time,
Keep writing
Amanda J Evans
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Words fail me! Not often, but after reading that …….
Well.. $0.80 is quite a ridiculous amount to pay for article rewrite jobs. You should however realise that even $0.50 is quite a good sum of money to many people especially writers in less developed countries where the standard of living appears very low!! People take advantage of desperate people who are willing to accept virtually anything to do stuff..
Emmanuel,
Writing Freelance Jobs
Amanda,
OMG that is rich! It would be fun to bid on it just to mess with the cretin a bit.
Absolutely awful! What saddens me is that some poor writer will actually respond and bid, thus encouraging the knucklehead to continue his tactics.
Even if the pay was better, I would hesitate because the person sounds like a real “winner”
George
Yep George,
I was quite taken aback when I saw this one too. I see the $1 and $2 per article ones all the time and yes they get bids. It’s such a pity really because it spoils it for everyone else.
Amanda
Emmanuel,
That is a very valid point you made. $1 can make a big difference to some people and I do agree that these people are just taking advantage. In the end though, they won’t have much look.
Amanda
You’re kidding me, right?
Beverly,
Yep, this is right and there are plenty more of these too. If you take a look at freelancer.com you will see exactly what I mean. Marketers are being told that they can get articles etc written for next to nothing by using these bidding websites. This false information is really having an effect and it is becoming even harder for new freelancers to find proper paying jobs.
Amanda