Freelance Writing – ArcticLlama

Like many other online writers, I was intrigued by the recent buzz surrounding the implementation of an HTML tag that lets search engines, like Google, know who the author of a webpage is.

The idea is that if someone is a good writer who publishes lots of useful and well written online content, then perhaps the other things that person writes should be considered in that context.

When Google has information about who wrote a piece of content on the web, we may look at it as a signal to help us determine the relevance of that page to a user’s query.

The offline world implements this same concept in the form of a byline or other authorship credit. For example, newspaper articles written by Bob Woodward have a byline at the top of the article so that everyone knows that the article was written by Bob Woodward, highly respected journalist, and not Sally Smith, a 14 year-old middle schooler up past her bedtime. (Not that what Sally writes is inherently bad, just that until she earns some credibility, one might want to give Mr. Woodward a little more benefit of the doubt than one might give to Sally, depending upon the subject matter.)

Some websites also give writers a byline or a little bio in a author section of some sort. Many times, that writing credit includes a link to the author’s own webpage. The new author tag is implemented as a rel= attribute on that link (or other link) and informs the search engine that the link points to the web page creator’s page as opposed to any other link.

To implement the authorship tag, you just at rel=”author” inside the <a href=”webpage.com”> tag.

Author Tag Must Point to SAME Website

Here is where the engineers at Google get it wrong.

The guys at Google are neither writers nor editors. Nor are they website publishers. They are engineers who build a very complex, very fast, indexing, searching and ranking system. Their goal is to present a user with the most-relevant, highest-quality online publication of information based upon any search query. Unfortunately, their ideals and motivations do not always match up to the way the real world of high-quality publishing and writing works. See How Google Made Me a Worse Writer.

In this case, the search engine company has decided that to be valid, an author tag must point to the same domain as the content page.

From Google Webmaster Central:

The rel="author" link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page.

That only works for a very small subset of writers, and is utterly worthless for every website with a single author since every page could only point to the same place.

There are two kinds of professional writers, those who are employed directly by a publication and those who are not. The latter work either full-time or part-time as freelance writers or other article-for-hire type writers.

For example, many magazines are written, in full or in part, by writers who pitch an article idea and write that one article for that one issue of the magazine. That author may also write an article for another magazine during a different month, a newspaper column, and maybe even articles for online publication. There are many fine authors who do this for at least some of their writing.

The value in the author tag would be in finding, and ranking all of this particular writers publications and determining their quality. Then, one could accordingly boost or degrade online content published by this writer. But, with Google’s implementation of the author tag, the writers work will be linked and compared only across a single website, in stark contrast to how the real world works.

To go back to our example from the beginning, the author tag lets Google group and rank the writings of Bob Woodward on the Washington Post website and give them their due, but no value is passed to any other forum where Mr. Woodward publishes. For example, his books would not be linked to his work at the newspaper, even though that is exactly what people do in reality.

As another example, consider Stephen King who has written books for multiple publishers. His work would be grouped, linked and ranked separately based upon each publisher – and corresponding domain – despite that they are linked and raked in real life by readers, critics and everyone else. A Stephen King book is a Stephen King book, no matter who published it.

For a professional freelance writer like me, the author tag is worthless. I write on the freelance writing blog here, on my personal finance website and on many other websites. However, the Google author tag does nothing to help find, group, and link that content because each location can do nothing but link to itself. So, if you think I am a helpful writer with an easy to read style, the Google author tag will do nothing to help you find more of my writings unless you want to read more here on ArcticLlama.com. Of course, everything here is written by me, so you don’t really need a tag for that.

What would actually be useful is a tag that lets everyone know that everything I write anywhere online is written by the Brian Nelson at arcticllama.com. The author tag doesn’t do that. Another tag does.

Google me Tag

There is another tag Google uses called the me tag. It is used in the same was as the author tag:

<a rel=”me” http://arcticllama.com”> … </a>

The me tag can link to another domain. Of course, now you have to implement two tags, which are primarily valuable to the writer and not the publisher, in order to get any benefit. I’m sure in the naïve, happy, all for one and one for all, world that Google pretends the web lives in this is no big deal. But, out here in the real world where websites routinely nofollow any link that points off-site, most publishers aren’t going to be racing to implement a two-tag system to ensure that the writer gets all their due credit.

Additionally, there is no direct indication from Google that the me tag is used to “as a signal” for improving search results.

Unfortunately, with all of the headlines going to the author tag, it seems that there is a rush among online writers to use it as often as possible with visions of finally getting credit for the quality content they write in Google’s search results pages. I wonder how many of them are getting no benefit at all because they are linking off-site, disqualifying the information they provided in their tags.

One of the toughest things to deal with in any business is rejection. By definition, running your own freelance writing business means that there will be times your work is rejected, or even worse, when you are rejected before ever getting to show what you can do. The former happens when you submit freelance articles, the latter when you submit resumes or query letters.

As a professional freelance writer, you get used to the rejection, especially when it comes from lofty places. There is no shame in having an article for Time Magazine, for example, returned for edits or even as unpublishable.

However, there are times when the rejection doesn’t sting so much as baffle.

Rejected Demand Studios Articles

As regular readers of this freelance writing blog are aware, I use Demand Studios as a source of “filler income” in my freelance writing business. They are open 24/7 to accept and assign new articles. That means when I can’t sleep at 3:30 a.m. at least I can be earning some money from my insomnia.

For the most part, submitting articles for publication at eHow.com via Demand Studios is pretty straightforward. You fill out the submission form, fill in some keywords, through in a couple of references and hit submit.

Check out my review of the 2011 Citibank rewards catalog.

Most of the time, my submissions are published without needing any edits. Around a quarter or so of them come back with some sort of request. I can always tell how long the editor has been working at Demand Studios by what their requests look like. New Demand Studios editors are always cranking out edit requests that ask for the moon and the stars.

When I was in college I worked delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut during the summers back home. In the fall, I’d get a job at one of the local no-name pizza delivery places that had low-prices and catered to the university community. Each time, while being trained on how to make the pizzas, someone who knew that I had worked at Pizza Hut would make the comment that, “We aren’t making $10 pizzas here.” In other words, it was important to realize that these were cheap pizzas, not lots of toppings pizzas.

New editors at Demand Studios apparently don’t get this lesson. They use the same copy editing standard that they had at their last job (or current day job). There is nothing wrong with high standards, it’s just that when you are buying $15 400-word articles about (mostly) inane topics, you can’t expect pulitizer prize winning work. We aren’t writing $100 articles here.

I do the minimum to fulfill their requests and move on. They’ll learn eventually.

Every once and a while, an editor will ask for too much or not find my efforts to fulfill their over the top requests unsatisfactory and they’ll reject my article. You can click here to find out how Demand Studios works.

At first it made me bitter. Then I rolled my eyes. Now, I post it somewhere else, usually HubPages, where, ironically, my article ends up doing better on Google than the article that eventually gets published on eHow (without all of that extra stuff because a new writer wrote something that a more experienced editor accepted) about half the time.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do about rejection. Other times, there are lessons to be learned. And some times, you can take that rejection and just pivot around it to see what happens.

I don’t make a fortune writing for HubPages, especially after Google’s Panda update slapped them down, but I do make some cash and I get plenty of backlinks for my real articles that I always am sure to include.

I guess when it comes from Demand Studios, “rejected” actually means please go publish this on your own someplace else. It will probably do just as well.

And then I claim my next article and hope that I get one of the better editors until the new guy figures it out.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Bright Hub, so much so that until today I have never mentioned or written about them for fear of sending too much competition that way.

When I was first starting out as a freelance writer a few years ago, Bright Hub was one of my first recurring paying gigs. Running a successful freelance writing business requires having at least some source of income that is dependable and recurring. Without such freelance writing clients, it can be difficult to smooth out the variations in income that make freelancing so difficult.

With a place to write for like Bright Hub, a freelance writer can always replace projects that have ended with additional article submissions. Just as important, a writer can always cut back how much they are writing for that website in order to devote additional hours to a newer, bigger or better paying freelance writing project that comes along.

How Does Bright Hub Work?

When I first started writing for Bright Hub, it was the anti-Demand Studios.

Unlike writing for Demand Studios, Bright Hub was a community of writers and editors who grew closer the more they worked together. Writers applied directly to the editors of each “channel,” or topic, for approval. Once admitted to the channel, writers were encouraged to submit articles on virtually any topic within that channel. Almost any number of submissions was allowed at any time. The channel editors ensured that articles were both high-quality and worthwhile. And, constant communication with editors meant that there were no undeserved rejections or dubious edits required like how it works at Demand Studios.

Unlike Demand Studios, open communication between writers and editors was encouraged and as a professional writer, one could get to know each editor and generate useful articles based upon what each editor preferred.

Unfortunately, over the years, Bright Hub has slowly but steadily grown to be much more like Demand Studios, right into the teeth of the second wave of Google’s Panda Update that hit ehow.com so hard.

After a base of articles had been published, writers were no longer permitted to write about any useful topic. Instead, editors became focused on SEO and finding “high-value” keywords. At first, writers simply chose a keyword topic and created an article around it. Then, came requirements that writers use an exact keyword phrase. Finally, came requirements that the exact keywords be used in the article title, the SEO title, the keywords, and of course, within the text.

An assignment system was put into place where writers claim articles. It’s a lot like Demand Studio’s article claiming system except it has the extra step. Demand Studios automatically assigns the writer the article, while Bright Hub requires the editor to approve your claim first. It slows down the process and makes it difficult to shift into high-gear to backfill a drop in freelance writing volume. Now, a writer must sift through “opportunities,” choose an article, wait for an editor to approve it, and only then can you begin writing. You can only claim 10 articles at a time, including those waiting for editor OK.

Next came requirements that each article have a minimum number of links to other articles published on Bright Hub. Then, every article required an image (at least in some channels). And finally, Bright Hub bowed all the way down to the Demand Studios model by requiring a “reference” or “source” for every article.

Each extra step lowers the rate per hour a freelancer can make writing for Bright Hub.

Ironically, each of these moves made Bright Hub more like Demand Studios, all in the name of search engine optimization. While these tactics may have worked, they also had the effect of standing Bright Hub right next to Demand Studios and when Google fired shots at one, they hit both.

How Much Does Bright Hub Pay?

Originally, another key distinction between Bright Hub and Demand Studios was how much they paid. Demand Studios paid a flat rate of $15 per article. Bright Hub paid a flat rate of $20 per article plus revenue sharing.

Like all new websites, in the beginning the revenue share wasn’t worth the paper is wasn’t printed on. Over the years, however, Bright Hub grew into one of the top traffic website online, and a portfolio of nearly 300 articles ended up generating enough page views to make monthly revenue sharing payments of over $200. A handful of articles account for most of those page views, but as with all revenue sharing, there is no way to know in advance which articles will perform the best regardless of how much keyword research you do.

Ironically, for me at least, the vast majority of the articles that generated the highest page views were those that I had developed on my own without any editor keyword research and published before all of the newer SEO rules went into effect. Perhaps more telling, the articles that I had built my own web links to seemed to fare better than those without suggesting that all of that internal keyword research and repetition was worth less than a few links to an otherwise quality article.

Whatever the case may be, in my case, I’m willing to say that each Bright Hub article published eventually earned approximately $1 per month in revenue sharing on average. That made the pay rate $20 + $12 per year for each article, which was respectable given the flexibility and effort for publishing there.

Recently, the pay per article at Bright Hub was lowered to just $10, however. As one of the early writers I was grandfathered at the $20 per article rate for a while, which kept the site as one of my favorites to write for. Unfortunately, the grandfathering came to an end recently as well. Demand Studios, by contrast, continues to pay $15 for most articles, and has recently begun paying $18.50 for certain categories of articles. Even if you include revenue sharing, that means that, on average, Bright Hub articles now pay approximately the same, or less, as the higher paying Demand Studios articles.

Bright Hub pays monthly, usually by the first week after month end, while Demand Studios pays twice per week. For a freelance writer with a solid income stream this is a slight distinction, however, it does mean that trying to pick up and publish more than a handful of articles during the last week of the month is almost impossible at Bright Hub.

Bright Hub Revenue Sharing Pay

The Panda Update II hit Bright Hub hard. Public information from companies like Systrix claimed Bright Hub lost as much as 91 percent of its Google SERPs. The traffic from my own Bright Hub published articles shows a much smaller decline, something closer to a 30 or 40 percent decline, although my small number of articles is hardly indicative of the brighthub.com website as a whole.

Like Demand Studios, Bright Hub escaped the first round of the Panda update pretty much unharmed. Messages from the company at that time took that as an indication of the high-quality and savvy SEO practices at Bright Hub. When Panda II hit, the company bought hook, line, and sinker, into the concept that they lost traffic because lower-quality posts were dragging down higher quality posts.

Ironically, new writer guidelines now say to avoid the keyword stuffing into titles, tags, and descriptions, requirements that were implemented during the last year.

Now Bright Hub’s attempt to regain its traffic involves removing articles that were previously published but now have low or no traffic. The idea is that by removing the “low-quality” articles on the website that what remains will recover to its previous glory. That means that writers can’t ever get revenue sharing on those articles again. Assuming the company is right and traffic does return to other content, then that is not a big deal. However, it is very likely that there is more going on here than just “bad” content dragging “good” content down, in which case, each writer simply has fewer articles to use to earn that revenue sharing that was supposed to be paid “forever” on published article.

The lower overall traffic translates into a cut in revenue sharing payments. While this is not Bright Hub’s fault, per se, it does highlight the fact that revenue sharing, no matter how generous, is transitory and speculative. Bright Hub editors have often touted that the pay per article is not “only $10″ because of revenue sharing.

That claim becomes a little more difficult to buy into now. Not just because of the current traffic cut, but because such a traffic decline is in no way impossible for the future. Articles that get 3,000 page views per month today may only get 1,000 page views next month not only if there is a Google update, but also if someone publishes something new that Google ranks higher. In other words, a professional writer must consider revenue sharing (at any website) to be temporary.

I still write for Bright Hub, although the number of articles I submit each month is a fraction of what I used to feel comfortable with. We’ll see how things play out after the latest round of changes. If traffic returns and finding and writing articles doesn’t get any more time consuming then I’ll probably keep going. Otherwise, I’ll submit onesie, twosie, each month or two to keep from having my articles taken over by someone else. (Oh, I didn’t mention that part did I? Maybe next time.)