Common Freelance Writer Jobs Online

A website needs content to attract the search engines, and that content needs to be text. Outsourcing the writing is almost essential. There are a variety of writing jobs, the most common of which that people advertise are the following:

Writing articles of specified lengths on assigned topics. On the web, this is not usually sufficient: articles need to contain keywords in order to tell the search engines 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, blogs and ezines. 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. Five hundred words is the usual preferred length. 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. Since search engines detect multiple pages with essentially the same content and direct searchers to only one of the pages, in order to gain any benefit from the PLR articles, they need them rewritten to appear unique.

Writing articles for article directories. Articles may be submitted to article directories. People who publish ezines and blogs may use the article without charge. They only need to not change the article and its resource box. The resource box contains links to websites the article's owner is promoting. 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 the article to hundreds of article directories while making random replacements with equivalent text for each submission. 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 these pages, so you may be able to get them written cheaply, but the form without the spirit may not be worth much. People who write effective sales pages get a substantial payment plus a percentage of the sales they bring in.