More Thoughts on mTurk

Once you get to know how to use certain market place or freelance content agencies, it gradually gets easier to jump from one platform to the next, once work availability slumps. However, I have realized that you just cannot jump headfirst into anything and immediately make a lot of money. Anybody who says otherwise is probably scamming you.

A Few Thoughts on mTurk

As a freelancing platform, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is easy to malign. There are countless microtasks there, and many of them only pay $0.01. Of course, some of those tasks are easy, ala "Boobs or no boobs?" image moderation for message boards. In the realm of writing, however, there are a lot of tasks that grossly underpay and undervalue writers. Take, for instance, requests for 1000 word articles that only pay $2 or less.

Of course, mTurk really isn't the culprit, here. It's only the third party marketplace. The people undervaluing work are the people posting jobs there. It's a lot like faulting a newspaper for posting classifieds for services. Those classifieds are paid for, and the newspaper takes no responsibility (to an extent) for the want ads posted there.

However, the true answer for mTurk is this: in order to make it lucrative, you have to know how to find jobs you can do quickly and that pay well (collectively). This includes taking umpteen qualification tests. Even more, it comes down to effective searching too. So much of today's net reality hinges on finding and using the right keywords while searching. In many cases, I've always found that using actionable verbs are usually better for finding work.

Still, I haven't found a way to break even 5$ an hour. So, the platform is more of a hobby than true worksite, for me, at least.

Minor SEO Writing: Depression Quotes

Sometimes, SEO writing is awfully banal to write. Other times, it's an interesting challenge. Here is an example of what filling an order can sometimes look like. The order was simple. The word "Depression Quotes" had to be used four times... once as the title and three times in paragraphs. For whatever, reason, this couldn't be used -- the submission system bounced it back, and in some writing interfaces, resubmitting will trip their plagiarism automated-bot (since it already has a record of it word for word in the system). No biggie. Not the greatest bit of writing, I confess, but I was only out of ten minutes worth of wasted time writing it.

Depression Quotes

Misery loves company—the phrase has been used so much, it has become a cliché. However, it does not change it from being both true. In times of depression, people seek comfort in knowing they are not alone. Yet, a sympathetic friend or clinical therapist may not always be available. This is when some people turn to literature and find depression quotes. After all, a good piece of fiction or poetry allows a person to feel empathy towards the writer. As a result, this often helps with their personal struggles.

Over the course of centuries, many writers have grappled with depression. For this reason, knowing where to look may prove difficult to the uninitiated. Still, there is one genre of literature that may prove useful. In twentieth century American poetry, there was a group of writers called “The Confessionalists.” These writers include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman and W.D. Snodgrass. Each of these poets grappled with their emotions in unique ways, and they often built up their own personal mythologies.

An interested reader will find depression quotes throughout much of their work. As a result, these writers helped change the course of American poetry. Before them, most verse centered on elevated themes, and these made the resulting literature inaccessible to the common reader. Confessionalism brought poetry to a level many readers could emotionally relate to. Now, decades after their deaths, many poets now write like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Reading will never cure clinical depression by itself. However, coping with it requires dealing with it outside clinical therapy. Developing a list of depression quotes can help with troubling emotion on a day-to-day basis. To this end, confessional poetry can help

Why Haughty Established Freelancers Can Be Annoying

I periodically stuff the terms "freelance writing" and "content mill" into Google and Bing, partly because I am constantly looking for new streams of revenue. As mentioned before, I need to constantly diversify my income. However, there is an annoying tendency that usually occurs high in a lot of search results. It involves the usually vitriol and mudslinging between established freelancers and the people who write for content mills.

To the professional freelancers, SEO-based internet content providing is a source of information pollution. Many internet content providers, on the other hand, make the same mistake self-published novelists make. Since they do it, the believe it is new, revolutionary, and they are out to upend the old guard. Meanwhile, they can be a little tone deaf and egotistical, believing that their content mill writing is of much more cultural significance that it actually is. I have long since grown tired of this debate, so I usually skip it altogether. (Although, it does make for good point-and-laugh material once the mud and insults start flying).

As in any argument, there are valid points on both sides. Typically, the older freelancers try to point out how compensated SEO content cheapens the written labor pool. This is true. Content providers retort with, "that's just the way the professional world is changing." Unfortunately, this is also true. However, there is one thing that really annoys me about the older professionals.

Due to cloudsourcing and technological advances, there is now a glut of writers online. You cannot argue that these people need to live and work by outdated views of what freelancing actually is. Some seasoned professional can make $800 an article writing magazine features. Unfortunately, because they do it, tapping into a decade or more of professional contacts, many mistakenly that other people can do the same. Only, it doesn't work that way anymore, especially if you are entering the freelance market right now, in the middle of a cultural paradigm shift.

It is a lot like a newspaper reporter from the Woodward and Bernstein era getting bitchy about the current state of journalism jobs, while complaining that new writers need to do exactly what they did in the 1970s. Only, print journalism, and print media as a whole, is dying an agonizingly slow death, and it has been hemmoraging full time positions every year. (I know, because I can't find a job).

This is not a simply reduced argument of "SEO writing is great!" It is not -- try writing twenty 200 word articles that uses the word "Botox happy" four times each. It's enough to make you want to ram your face into a wall, repeatedly. Yet, it pays -- and in this shitty economy, many newer freelancers have no choice but to accept it, smile, write it, and then take the money to go buy groceries. That reality, however, is what a lot of older, established freelance writers fail to realize.

Incorrect Approaches To Freelancing

So, as one feels their way through this brave new world of microtasking and cloudsourcing jobs, there is one way to approach work that is counter productive. This is something I have discussed with my wife, at length.

Basically, with the rise of the Internet and more legitimate freelancing opportunities, one often has to gauge their time and whether or not that time is being monetized correctly. However, I do not believe in gauging everything by an hourly rate of pay.

Wage-rates are the domain of traditional work, and when you set at home most of the day, drinking coffee and writing $4 articles about the function of a urethra (for medical websites!), punching in and out of a time clock is an inadequate metaphor. You're a freelancer, after all -- technically every hour can be "on the clock." Plus, not all tasks pay the same. I have written a $15 article in five minutes, once, and a more complex $5 anatomy article in 45 minutes.

So, converting to a variable hourly rate, just for gauging one's level of productivity, is not really helpful. So, I have chosen to look at the day as a whole. How much did I make today? Versus How much did I make yesterday?

Thankfully, those daily totals are starting to improve again --- after a really shitty past two months.

Adventures In Freelancing

So, as has been noted elsewhere (typically, my Facebook and my old wordpress blog), I used to work at Walmart. Actually, two years of my life were spent in a New Jersey store that was in the process of becoming a super center. Working for this retail giant was particular complicated for me. I am a extremely left of center, and I hated the times the made everybody sit through their anti-union propaganda. Yet, even more, I felt like I was in a holding pattern most of anything. I was routinely getting passed over for promotion, even though for both years, I had "Exceeds expectations" evaluations. I seriously had no future there; in fact, the only reason why I ever took a job there was simple: it was stable, and trying to string together part-time college teach work was not. After all, that was roughly 10 years of my life.

So, I left Walmart the first real chance I could get. A lot of my writer friends told me specifically how I could set myself up as a freelance writer. It involved starting with low-pay micro-tasking and cloudsourcing jobs, and then slowly building a list of independent clients. That list was supposed to ween me off internet content providing. So, I sent some writing resumes out, and I get into a number of these companies. Money was good. Very good. I was managing to nail down $100 to $150 a day. I quit Walmart with a smile, and I have worked at home ever since.

Only, it's not a happy ending. Self-employment comes with a lot of risks, ones I seriously didn't take into account. In a way, working for yourself can be compared to investing in the stock market. You hit a good stock, and everything is just great -- great returns on investment and so on. Then, one day, that stock goes to shit. If its all that you've invested in, you are SCREWED. This same dynamic works for self-employment. If you sources of income are not diversified, you are essentially setting yourself up for whole lot trouble later.

In my case, I was writing for a well known and much-derided (by clueless, snobby professionals with their career long since set up and stabilized) content farm. Since I don't want to trigger an email alert, lets just call them Dee-Ess. Everything was fine; I was too busy cranking out how-to articles to really spend time diversifying my work load -- then, over the course of a few months, their content pool dewindled severely. They recently went public with an IPO, and so they decided to take the opportunity restructure. That's their right; after all, they are a business, not a social services agency. However, for me, that has made the last few months extremely hard. The financial security my wife and I were returning to was completely ripped away. No money for groceries, and bank account balances in the negative. I was actively thinking of returning to Walmart, defeated; only thing is, they claim to be hurting in this economy, and they have slashed hours. That likely also means a hiring freeze has been put into place.

I bare no ill will towards Dee-Ess. I plan to still write for them from time to time; however, I have since moved on. Yet, I am now in the position of trying climb out of yet another financial hole. This means a number of publishing related ventures I was trying to set up have gone on hold. As for my sources of income--they are diversified. Yet, it takes a few months to get all of those pipelines primed and flowing.