Just a friendly reminder to everyone that our New Year’s Writing Competition only has a couple more days left until submissions come to a stop, so if you want a shot at winning some cash and a guest blog spot, there’s no better time than now :)

Here’s a mini-update on my content writing experiment. Today was day three. I averaged 60+ dollars an hour on Monday, right at 60 dollars an hour on Tuesday, and today I averaged 75 dollars an hour. Each day I am writing a journal entry regarding the exact time it took for each and every aspect of the project, including the pros and cons of the day. I cover any administrative tasks, time spent (or rather, not spent) on marketing, querying, and cold-calling, and I will be publishing the journal sometime later in the month after I’ve collected enough data for it to be considered credible.

One thing you can rest assured on: I am not cherry picking the data. I am very specifically covering both the pros and cons of the content writing world working for a content mill. There will be a rather lengthy essay published along with the physical journal and data for the experiment, and I will be including screenshots of my logs, paychecks, and otherwise in order to provide proof-positive for all the doubters out there. So far, it’s been a fairly interesting project. In fact, one of the most interesting things is something I find incredibly ironic.

In two year’s time, I’ve yet to have a client request a rewrite from me. Yet, using the particular content mill I’m working with at the moment, I have had two re-write requests in the past 3 days. Both of them were trivial. One was for punctuation, and one was for a request to rearrange a couple of aspects of the data within the article. Both fixes took mere seconds to change. But the interesting thing is this: almost always you hear the content-site haters going on and on about how “horrible” the editing is for content sites, yet I am finding (so far) that the editing for this particular content mill is actually superior to anything I’ve come across in my traditional freelance work.

It’s still too early in the project for this to be considered “proof” of anything, but it is an interesting piece of information, to be sure. No rewrites from traditional clients with editors that content-site haters claim are superior, yet two rewrite requests from a place that content-site haters claim uses “hack” writers and “hack” editors.

A conundrum!

In the meantime, I’m heading up to Ognyanovo tomorrow evening for a much-needed weekend at a spa resort with my wife and her family, and I’ll be spending my weekend reading contest submissions and short story submissions from over at Marginal Boundaries. Hope to see some more submissions for the contest soon!

Happy writing!