Common Freelance Writer Services For Web Content

The web has a voracious appetite for content. Outsourcing the writing is almost required, and there are many different tasks. The most common web writing jobs that people advertise are as follows:

Writing articles of specified lengths on assigned topics. On the web, this is not usually sufficient: search engines must find keywords (phrases, actually) in articles to know what they are about. This simple version is sufficient for example for lessons in mini-courses and for "private label rights" articles. People who buy PLR articles may rewrite them, or not, and publish them as their own.

Writing articles for web sites or blogs. These articles need to be informative, well written, readable. They should be optimized for search engines; that is, they must contain a particular keyword or a cluster of related keywords to have search engines list them on the first results page for certain searches. The canonical length is 500 words. Usually the topics for the articles will need to be researched.

Rewriting articles. When you buy a "private label rights" article, you get the non-exclusive right to treat it as your own, claiming authorship and rewriting or not, as you wish. Search engines detect multiple pages with essentially the same content and direct searchers to only one of the pages. To attract search engines with PLR articles, the articles must be totally rewritten.

Writing articles for article directories. Articles may be submitted to article directories. Bloggers, ezine publishers, and website creators may use the articles for free as long as they keep the articles intact -- especially the resource box which contains links to a web site. Each place the article is published can bring direct traffic from those who click on the link in the resource box. It can also bring benefits from the resource box link appearing in a prestigious article directory. This is generally the same job as writing an article for a website.

Spinning articles. The search engines look for multiple copies of the same article and they decrease the importance of all but one copy. (They aren't saying precisely what their algorithm is.) Because identical copies of an article appearing several places loses some of the advantages of having multiple links, there is a benefit to rewriting the article when submitting to more than one directory, but that can get to be expensive. Thus there has grown up services that can automate the rewriting. The person publishing the article supplies multiple titles and equivalent version of each paragraph. The service submits different versions the article to hundreds or thousands of directories and blogs by randomly replacing pieces of the article with equivalent ones. The intent is that each version will appear to be unique and the search engines will count the resource box links in promoting the rank of the page they point to. This provides jobs writing "spins" of articles -- rewriting interchangeable titles and versions of paragraphs.

Writing e-books. An Ebook is just a book designed to be read on a screen rather than printed on paper. Since they are delivered electronically (typically in PDF format), they cost nothing to reproduce. The usual length is 15,000 to 20,000 words, the equivalent of 30-40 500-word articles. Fifty to 70 pages is a good length.

Writing sales pages. There is a formula for what these pages should contain, so they should be cheap, but a good writer can make a huge difference. People who write effective sales pages get a substantial payment plus a percentage of the sales they bring in.