I’m Just a Number

The site that I write articles for is one on which individuals or companies can post what they want written, and any writer who wants to can pick it up, provided that they have the rating required for that assignment. I never know where the things I write are used, unless the instructions say what website it is for (more often than not, they will say “this is for a blog about blahdy blah.” So they don’t know who I am, I don’t know who they are, I’m just identified as a number. Although I have, on many occasions, saved my assignments and searched for them on the internet to find out where they have been used.

A lot of sites work like this. Some pay less and aren’t worth my time, while others pay more but won’t accept even my best writing samples when I apply. Similarly, the site that I am on offers an option for a five-star rating (as opposed to the 4 stars that I have) that lets a writer choose 5-star assignments that pay over 7x the 4-star assignments do. But it is too hard to get there.

A new writer can only get as high as 4 stars upon applying, and the only way to increase your rating is to have a lot of your submitted assignments get rated 5 stars by the staff. I have never had one rated 5 stars, so I sometimes wonder if you have to be friends with the moderators to get a 5-star rating. Because 5-star ratings cost the clients so much more, there aren’t as many of them. And therefore, fewer writers with 5-star ratings are needed.

A couple of weeks ago, I applied to a more legit version of this that actually had me email them links to writing samples I had done, instead of making me write an original one just for them as part of an automated application system. Today, I applied to a different one that was more in-between. I have no idea if either of them will even get back to me, but they might.