Lately, I’ve noticed more and more of my favorite websites seem to be drifting a bit in the realm of solid well written content toward anything publishable that isn’t obviously spam. As a professional freelance writer, this obviously bothers me.
Like many freelance writers, I frequent a site called freelancewriting.com. In general, I stick to their “Morning Coffee Newsletter,” a once a week posting with a list of various freelance writing opportunities culled from sites around the Internet. I do a lot of my own searching, but this makes for a nice backup to make sure I didn’t miss a “perfect project” out there either because I’m not familiar with the website it is on, or that site generally isn’t worth my time.
The great thing about freelancewriting is that it pulls together useful information for writers in one spot, and that is the reason it is one of my frequent stops on the web.
However, I did take notice of a recent article entitled Changes in the Freelance Writing Profession Slowly Turn Writers and Authors into Spammers. The article caught my attention, because I’ve begun to notice something similar in that many freelance writers end up doing various marketing things online that while not actually spam (at least not for us good freelancers) aren’t exactly done for any reason other than self-serving links. Ironically, the article has absolutely nothing to do with that.
Instead, the article is about how agents now take email submissions instead of paper submissions, and oh, by the way, there is a guy who has a website where you can track these email submissions.
That’s it. Nothing about writers and spam at all. Unless the author’s point is that multiple electronic submissions are spam, in which case, his point is also that the product in question helps you manage spam. Since the article is from that site, I kind of doubt that was what they were going for.
So, I have no idea what the title has to do with anything, unless is was accidentally attached to the wrong article. More likely, the title contains keywords that have a higher search frequency than the actual article keywords.
That is quite amusing in an ironic kind of way.