The concept behind paid-to-write sites is simple – you write the content, it attracts a (hopefully) large audience, the site owner shares its revenue (from advertising) with you. But does it really work? Is it really worth spending hours typing up a beautifully written article, only to be disappointed a week later that you’ve only made $0.30 from the 30 views you got?
The answer —> Freelance writing never pays much. If you would prefer to take a dip into the professional writing market, you are welcome to do so (in fact, I might write a blog on that later). But with professional writing, you are constantly under the threat of Rejection, with a capital R. These paid-to-write sites are just the opposite; they don’t care (as much) if your content is really bad, they don’t care if it makes their site look like a six-year-old’s scrapbook, they will accept anything they can get their hands on, in order to increase their revenue. Hence, you don’t get paid that well. (That’s not a fully justified reason, but just my attempt to explain why our efforts on writing those articles have all gone to waste.) Well, having said that much, I’ll leave the final choice to you, but if you aren’t patient/hate writing, this is not the way to earn money for you.

NB: My definition of paid-to-write sites include: sites where you are paid to post stories and articles, sites where you are paid to post in a forum, sites where you are paid to write reviews of products… sites where you are paid to write in general.
Here are some paid-to-write sites that I’ve tried (the order of the list is of no importance; i.e. if a site is the first in the list, it doesn’t mean that it is the best.

1. http://www.triond.com/

This site has rather strict submission requirements (for a paid-to-write site). You can submit any number of your articles/stories, but they reserve the right to reject your content if they feel that it is too similar to already published content. Unfortunately, they don’t pay very well. Payment is not based on the number of views of your work, but on how many people click on the ads on your page. And since not many people go round clicking ads, you don’t get much payment. So far, I’ve earned $0.01, although I’ve been semi-actively submitting articles for the past 2 weeks. I wouldn’t recommend this site, but if you want to give it a go, why not? Payment is by paypal, once you’ve reached the $10 threshold (i.e. impossible to reach for me).

2. http://www.helium.com/

I’ve had slightly more success with this site, but not much. Everything that is submitted to this site is accepted (unlike triond), unless it is something that they’ve asked you specifically not to write about. Most submissions to this site are non-fiction articles, although there is a catergory specifically for creative writing & poetry. Payment is based on the number of views your article gets. I’ve earned $0.29 from one article, but that’s still a long way off the cashout mark, $25. Payment is by paypal. I wouldn’t recommend this site for earning money, but helium has a wonderful community where you are able to participate in debates and contests, so it is a great place to make friends.

3. http://www.mylot.com/?ref=whitestarr

This is a forum-like site, where you are paid to post comments. Although the site layout & site design badly needs work, there is a wonderful community here. The payment formula is a mystery, but I’ve written one post & got $0.01, so I’m supposing it’s based on how much you write, not how many views you get. A downside is that this site is slow to load (at least for me) and constantly freezes my computer. (I hope this doesn’t happen to anyone else.) Quote from their website: “myLot pays users monthly (on or around the 15th of the month) with minimum account balance of $10 US. myLot carries foward all unpaid and qualified earnings from previous months. All unpaid earnings become unqaulified when account has no activity in the past 3 months.” Payment is by paypal. (Thanks in advance to all who put me – whitestarr – down as the referrer! Look forward to seeing you there!)

4. http://www.ciao.co.uk/

I’m not sure if this paid-to-review site has anything to do with ciao surveys (probably does, otherwise they’ll be firing lawsuits at each other), but it is not the same as ciao surveys. Anyway, I like this site, because it has a very nice community, and (compared to triond and helium), you can earn money almost instantly. Basically, you write reviews on products, which can range from your favourite fantasy novel to your dream car.
The downside of this site is that there are some annoying popups, but I guess that in order for the site to survive (and to be able to pay the reviewers), they are going to need some form of revenue (which they chose to obtain from popups). Definitely download a free popup blocker if you don’t have one already. I’m not sure about this, but since it is a .uk site, it may be that only UK residents can join. If you don’t live in UK, don’t fret. Scroll down to the bottom of the webpage & there are links to other ciao sites for other countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands & Sweden). If you live outside the EU… well, here’s a quote from the UK site, “Although, as a non-UK member, you are very welcome to participate fully in every aspect of Ciao UK, we are unfortunately not able to pay you unless you have a UK bank account.”
Did I mention that payment is by a money transfer to your bank account? Minimum cashout is 5 Pounds.

5. http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/

Unfortunately for us non-UK residents, this paid-to-review site is again unavailable to us. However, if you live in UK (or specific countries in the EU), this is a great opportunity to earn money! The theory behind this site is that if you review on a product & others give you a rating, you will earn an amount of dooyooMILES, depending on the rating you were given. It is fairly easy to earn dooyoo miles – I have only written one review (before I realized that the site only paid UK members), and I already have 360 dooyooMILES. And it wasn’t such a great review either, more like a mad rambling, but I still got 360 dooyooMILES!!! But… (there’s always a but)… 1000 dooyooMILES = £1 … so I’ve earned £0.36, which is really not that bad.

Useful quotes from the website:

“You need a minimum of 55000 dooyoo miles to convert them to cash.” [eyes pop out]
“dooyooMILES are only valid for exactly 1 year. Afterwards they cannot be cashed in anymore.” [keep that in mind]
“dooyooMILES have no cash value and cannot be automatically converted into prizes, gifts, vouchers or cash except at dooyoo’s optional choice.” [what's that supposed to mean?]
“If you don’t have a UK, Isle of Man or Channel Islands address, the only dooyooMILES conversion mechanism available is to donate your dooyooMILES to a UK charity of your choice” [and I can't even do that because you need 1000 dooyooMILES to donate, and I don't have that]

Payment is by cheque (oh dear, I just realized that all of my previous spelling of “cheque” are wrong… I wrote “check”… feel free to laugh at me… I will go back and edit when I have time.)

6. http://www.xomba.com/

This is one that I have not tried personally. You are supposed to apply for a xomba account & a google adsense account, and then post articles on the xomba website. Google adsense will put advertisements on your xomba pages & if anyone clicks on them, you get some money. The catch is – you have to share your (hard earned) money with Xomba, 50-50! Personally, I tend to be suspicious of these sites – who on earth is going to give Xomba 50% of the money, when you can make a free website with free hosting & earn money there from Adsense yourself??? In addition, Xomba has a poor site design, which implies that they couldn’t afford to pay a professional to design their site, meaning that they probably can’t afford to pay writers either.
Quote from the site – “You acknowledge that Xomba.com reserves the right to charge for the Services and to change its fees from time to time in its discretion. ” [Can this get worse?]
This is one good reason why you should always read the website’s terms of use before signing up. Those terms of use are the dark secrets in the hearts of these scammers & they hope that we won’t find them by writing them in an extremely small font & “forgetting” to link them to the main site. Well, I can’t really say Xomba is a scammer. I’ve never tried it. If you gave it a go & found my previous statements wrong, please leave a comment.

7. http://www.associatedcontent.com/

This is a great site, not only for publishing articles/stories, but also for publishing video, audio & images. There’s two ways to earn money, members from the United States are eligible for both, but international members are only eligible for one of them. The type that is eligible for both members from the US & internationally is called “performance payments” – you are paid $1.50 for every thousand page views your content receives (and no, you shouldn’t try to view your page a thousand times to increase your earnings). “Upfront payments” are available to US residents only – you are paid ($3 to $20) upfront for your content. Payment is by paypal only.

8. http://www.constant-content.com/?aref=13950

Finally! A site that pays international members. (If you find out that it doesn’t, please let me know by leaving a comment, so that I can edit this.) Here, you can submit writing (non-fiction articles), photography, videos and illustrations. They have fairly strict submission rules, so I’d suggest you read this before submitting

http://www.constantcontent.com/area/writerguidelines.htm

Constant-content acts as a middle party and acts as a platform where publishers and writers can interact negotiate about the price. The author is paid 65% of the sale price and constant content keeps the rest. Minimum payout is $50. Payment is during the first week of every month, provided that you have reached your minimum payout. Payment is by paypal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 11:33 am and is filed under Make Money Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.