Internet Article Writing on its last days?

The Winds of Change at work again in a profession

The buzzword in marketing over the last couple of years  is video marketing.  Ad gurus and market-savvy professionals have been going gaga over video sharing sites like YouTube, which now ranks next to Google as the most widely visited site serving up as a search engine.  I have read an article several years back predicting that YouTube will be the next  search engine with a more forward-looking trend towards visual search engines.  That's right.  Imagine taking a cellphone snapshot of a new car you just saw, upload it to a site from your smartphone, and it returns with the technical features and specs of the car along with the price. Then just have it charged to your credit card and the following day, the new car in the color you want  is delivered to your house.

Oh well, back to 2012, go ahead and make a search about any topic under the sun on the YouTube home page and you’ll get search results instantly like in Google.  The first time I read it I immediately did some searching on YouTube and true enough, just about every search I made resulted in several result pages of this or that video.  That was in 2006, if I recall right.

Video marketing has also come to be known as YouTube marketing. SEO professionals have long recognized that video as a more powerful marketing tool than articles or words.  People generally prefer to watch a video than read an article and if your website is in that video or any product therein is related to your website, a single video can launch more organic visits to your site than a dozen articles or ad placements could.  The Forrester research conducted in 2009 revealed that your site is 53x more likely to land in Google search if you have a video about your website. 

Readers may want to verify this with a little research of their own if the trend is really catching on. So will video marketing replace article marketing?  Eventually, there’s a high probability it will.  But not anytime soon.  Or maybe I am just overly protective of my bread and butter.  Time to start learning how to make a video about a topic.  At YouTube quality, I don’t see the need yet for High Definition camera, though that helps a lot.  Some smartphones already sport this feature so I guess it’s time to upgrade.

 Let me see, how can I make a video about male enhancement products or breast augmentation in women – SEO topics I have written about many times in the past?  That would be interesting. 

How to screw an internet writer

A new industry utilizing home-bound freelance writers has made its way to the local employment landscape with clients overseas.  It’s not as big as call centers but it is part of the BPO trend in the Philippines and India. Clients like SEO marketers need tons of articles to bring high online visibility to a company’s web presence or create reputation management profiles online.  There are also many lazy students in the post graduate careers who prefer to just pay off writers to do their thesis and dissertations.  It’s a great alternative or additional source of income for the lowly paid employee or the unemployed. 

But because the profession is largely unregulated in the country, all sorts of labor injustices can be heard.  The people who perpetuate the injustice are mostly the middlemen who taken in the writing jobs from overseas clients like web developers, SEO marketers and students.  They are taken in bulk and spread to a stable of writers they recruit.  You won’t hear writers complain. Afterall, why bother when there are other middlemen offering the same income source online without the encumbrance of local taxes and other mandated deductions.

It’s bad enough to be underpaid (see post below), many times, you don’t even get paid.  That’s what Filipino middlemen in the internet writing profession does with their fellow Filipino writers.  Not all for sure.  But the bad eggs easily flourish because the trade is unregulated.  In general, work at home is unregulated. And writers don’t mind being screwed since they welcome the writing opportunity for additional funds from their equally low paying day jobs, regardless of the injustices.

So how are local internet writers screwed?  Here are some:

• On the pretext that a client is not happy with the writing job, the writer loses his right to claim payment or is penalized.  I know of one who penalized an English UP professor for a reputation management article which according to the middleman, falls below client expectation.  That’s because the task is a 30-aritcle task and not paying the poor professor created a hefty savings on his part.   How will the poor writer know that his work has been rejected?  If he knows where the articles are headed, he can always check the site.  In my case, I checked a games review site where the articles are posted and the instances  when the middleman claimed my work was below par and cannot be paid, I visited the site and the article was there. Otherwise, the writer has little choice but to accept what the middleman said about his or her work, hook line and sinker.  

• Many middlemen will impose penalties on wrong grammar, punctuation, diction or not following rules even when the articles you did were already accepted.  I found that out on an SEO fashion article I did when the site where the articles where uploaded still contained the errors I had corrected and for which I was penalized a hefty 30% of my due payment on the task. 

• Then there’s the “Ooops excuse” where accounting records get fouled up so you end up not getting paid or missing a significant amount of what you had expected to be deposited in your bank.  That’s easy to do and you’ll never know if the middleman deliberated on the oversight or was an honest mistake.  When it happens more than once, it becomes a trademark and you need to look for another middleman.

• There’s this one company I worked for which requires its writers to have an account with Copyscape to ensure that no three words in sequence appear on my article that appeared elsewhere. Did you get that, no three words in sequence.  Tell me since when is plagiarism based on three words?  That’s a $0.05 fee you pay every time you check your own work with Copyscape checker. The company claims they do not have the staff to check the article themselves. And yet, they will get back to the writer to revise the article because they found Copyscape 3-word duplicates. Gotcha.

• One company even makes a 10% tax deductions on your pay each time.  But you won’t get any year-end W2 form or other documents proving such tax deductions were made.  that’s because they’re not even registered with the local SEC and it is doubtful they even have a business permit. 

Web Article Writers Get Screwed

Gone are the days when writers are a respected lot.  Publishing houses, the academe, print media and the entertainment business have high regard for them.  Today, with the demand surge in internet article writing to satisfy the never-ending quest for that search-optimized website using keyword-optimized articles, writers are a dime a dozen. 

Students and educated people in their spare time can write.  In fact, many of them have blogs where writing styles are often frowned at by the academe as something below their dignity.  Wonder why eHow.com won’t even allow its writers to use blogs as their reference sources?  It’s interesting to note that even blogs by professors and noted academicians don’t generally get accepted into the circle of source materials, even if their topics are brilliantly written.

But enough said about that.  The bottomline is that internet article writers who come from these group and not having a journalism or mass com degree, a doctorate or a Pulitzer prize to show for their writing skills occupy the lowest position in the totem pole in the writers club.   

First off, they get screwed by the middlemen who employ them.   These are businessmen who take in writing jobs in bulk and spread to a stable of telecommuting freelance writers. Here in the Philippines there are several with some that are affiliates of larger writing companies based overseas.  Like they say, they are may ways to skin a cat.  And there are many ways for middlemen to screw their writers.

That may be excusable if you’re employed by a writing company in Bratislava or Bangalore, but here in the Philippines where most of the writers are preferred by internet marketers in the US and the UK, you have several local middlemen screwing their own fellow nationals. No wonder why this country will never prosper.  Koreans do not screw their own people.  Here, Filipinos do.

Local internet writers get paid ridiculously low rates like $1.5 for every 500 word article when the going rate from SEO clients and e-marketers are in excess of $5.   That’s a lucrative 300% profit margin.  And if the writer happens to work on an eHow.com article which the middleman can easily aggregate, the margins are even better. 

The eHow rate is $15 per 400 word article which the middleman pockets while his poor  writer gets paid proportionately less than $1.50.  In the country, this is called “tubong lugaw” to those who understand.  It gets worst when the middleman subcontracts academic research writing where the rates are just as high but can go to 50 pages in one task. Each page is only 300 words doubled spaced with point 12 Times Roman.  The poor writer gets paid for 15,000 words or $45 when the task is paid at $9 per page or $450.  Nice and easy 1,000% profit margin, right?