Nerwen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nerwengreen) wrote2010-04-17 12:52 am
nerwengreen) wrote2010-04-17 12:52 am
ahh, freelance content-site writing...
eHow was really easy. All you had to do was write and submit, and you were done. Of course, if you wanted to make any actual money, you also did lots of SEO research and article promotion, plus you could include pictures of your how-to steps - but it wasn't required.
Demand Studios (which is where all the eHow people are going, now that the eHow version of the program has gone kablooey) is almost as easy. You pick a title that looks interesting, do some research into it, write it, and submit. If it doesn't come back, you're done.
Bright Hub, on the other hand, is chock full of bureaucratic overhead.
Step 1: pick a topic, either from a list supplied by the editor, or you have to pitch it and get it approved. If I'm pitching it, I do some SEO research for a good angle first, using SEOBook's keyword tool. (Or, well, at least I *should*. >.> )
Step 2: research. At this point, if it's a science article, I also figure out what to write in as my references.
Step 3: write it. Probably the most straightforward part of the process.
Step 4: write a summary to put in the teaser space at the top.
Step 5: check formatting. Make sure the individual paragraphs look okay next to the ad blocks, figure out where page breaks should go, and check the editor's individual guidelines for what the article is supposed to be like. (Every editor is slightly different, and trying to keep them straight in Bright Hub's not-well-organized internal system is a major undertaking.)
Step 6: links. Depending on the editor, there has to be 1-2 links to other Bright Hub articles per page. Finding them can be tricky; I just type in stuff that might be related in their search and then read through whatever comes up. It can take several tries before I find enough links for each page. All in all, this can take as long as doing the research for my own article.
Step 7: pictures. One of my editors insists on two per page, but that one just wants game screenshots which aren't too bad. For science articles, I have to collect them off of Wikipedia or something and then also track down their copyright info, which I put into the References section. I also draw most of my own diagrams in Photostudio, which is a whole separate time-consuming exercise. Also, come up with picture captions.
Step 8: more formatting, now that there are pictures. Should they go to the left or the right? Hmm.
Step 9: SEO. At minimum, I need to pick some keywords that people might search on (real ones, not the stand-in tags that Demand Studios editors accept, otherwise some of the editors yell at me), and write a keyword-laden summary paragraph for each page. If there's more than one page, each page has to have a different SEO title, too. As you might imagine, I try to have as few pages as possible because I really hate writing these. Unfortunately I'm longwinded when it comes to the main text, so it doesn't always work out. [The science editors have a habit of changing my SEO paragraphs anyway, so I don't have to be perfect at it, though I try. It's the gaming editor who a) demands 2-4 page articles and b) wants me to do it all myself.]
To get the keywords, I run some of my main points through the SEOBook keyword tool. If anything useful pops up, I put it there and also try to rearrange my main text to include them in a way that doesn't look totally retarded.
Step 10: submit, and if it doesn't come back, it's done. But only sort of, because then you also have to watch the SEO in case you need to tweak it, and also promote. And every year you have to edit it again to make sure it hasn't gone obsolete.
Yeah. No wonder it takes me 2-3 days per Bright Hub article. o.O
Demand Studios (which is where all the eHow people are going, now that the eHow version of the program has gone kablooey) is almost as easy. You pick a title that looks interesting, do some research into it, write it, and submit. If it doesn't come back, you're done.
Bright Hub, on the other hand, is chock full of bureaucratic overhead.
Step 1: pick a topic, either from a list supplied by the editor, or you have to pitch it and get it approved. If I'm pitching it, I do some SEO research for a good angle first, using SEOBook's keyword tool. (Or, well, at least I *should*. >.> )
Step 2: research. At this point, if it's a science article, I also figure out what to write in as my references.
Step 3: write it. Probably the most straightforward part of the process.
Step 4: write a summary to put in the teaser space at the top.
Step 5: check formatting. Make sure the individual paragraphs look okay next to the ad blocks, figure out where page breaks should go, and check the editor's individual guidelines for what the article is supposed to be like. (Every editor is slightly different, and trying to keep them straight in Bright Hub's not-well-organized internal system is a major undertaking.)
Step 6: links. Depending on the editor, there has to be 1-2 links to other Bright Hub articles per page. Finding them can be tricky; I just type in stuff that might be related in their search and then read through whatever comes up. It can take several tries before I find enough links for each page. All in all, this can take as long as doing the research for my own article.
Step 7: pictures. One of my editors insists on two per page, but that one just wants game screenshots which aren't too bad. For science articles, I have to collect them off of Wikipedia or something and then also track down their copyright info, which I put into the References section. I also draw most of my own diagrams in Photostudio, which is a whole separate time-consuming exercise. Also, come up with picture captions.
Step 8: more formatting, now that there are pictures. Should they go to the left or the right? Hmm.
Step 9: SEO. At minimum, I need to pick some keywords that people might search on (real ones, not the stand-in tags that Demand Studios editors accept, otherwise some of the editors yell at me), and write a keyword-laden summary paragraph for each page. If there's more than one page, each page has to have a different SEO title, too. As you might imagine, I try to have as few pages as possible because I really hate writing these. Unfortunately I'm longwinded when it comes to the main text, so it doesn't always work out. [The science editors have a habit of changing my SEO paragraphs anyway, so I don't have to be perfect at it, though I try. It's the gaming editor who a) demands 2-4 page articles and b) wants me to do it all myself.]
To get the keywords, I run some of my main points through the SEOBook keyword tool. If anything useful pops up, I put it there and also try to rearrange my main text to include them in a way that doesn't look totally retarded.
Step 10: submit, and if it doesn't come back, it's done. But only sort of, because then you also have to watch the SEO in case you need to tweak it, and also promote. And every year you have to edit it again to make sure it hasn't gone obsolete.
Yeah. No wonder it takes me 2-3 days per Bright Hub article. o.O
Bright Hub
Some Editors do like links to be embedded in the articles, and the odd image if it's appropriate for the article, but that's not a hard and fast rule. In my experience the Gaming hub is perfectly happy to take articles of 450 words, I have lots like this, games reviews that are 450 words each and are super optimized for the search engines, and they run on from one another as series if I feel 450 words is not enough. Thus double, treble, quadruple payment if there are keywords to merit multiple articles.
Bright Hub doesn't in my experience have any more red tape than eHOW or Demand, in fact it has less and is a great resource for any online writer. With an improved article opportunity system it is easier than ever for me to publish articles. I usually do about 15 a month, but with the new system I hope the Editors will allow me to do more.
Re: Bright Hub