In between client work I’ve been getting more and more involved in various “make money online” ventures to help supplement my income.

Unfortunately, most of these projects require lots of unique and well-written content. I don’t have the time or motivation to sit down and write all of this content on my own so I’ve been going with third-party service providers to lend me a hand. I think I’ve finally found a service I can rely on for all of my writing and content needs called Textbroker.

At Textbroker, you create an account and then build orders for pieces of content you’d like written. Your orders contain the individual topics you want written about, the expected word count and the quality of the writing you’re looking for. The pricing is based on price per word so higher quality content will be more expensive but have better style and grammar.

When you’re done entering in your specifics, the order is then submitted to the site moderators to be verified and added to the system. Once verified, your order is presented to all of the site’s registered writers who can then pick and choose what pieces of content they would like to write. When a writer is finished with one of your articles, Textbroker’s system emails you and then asks you to login to either approve the content or ask for revisions. It’s that simple.

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s a site I recently had built using content from Textbroker’s members: Vegas Casinos Direct

Ever since my interview with Chris Bibey I’ve been anxious to learn and get involved more with freelance writers. Fortunately, a few projects have come up over the last few months that have required a lot of content to be written. This was an excellent opportunity to try my hand at hiring freelancer writers.

Programmers and designers who work freelance have a sometimes deserved reputation as being a bit flighty and unreliable. Well, I’m here to tell you that freelance writers have earned the same reputation with me after this experience. I’m not going to mention any names but I’ve hired about half a dozen different writers so far and have only had success with three of them. The others either took the money and ran, never to be heard from again, or they were so slow in getting the finished product to me that they caused delays with my projects. For the most part, I was pretty unimpressed with the quality of work I was finding regardless of the price.

To be fair and balanced I decided to see what life was like on the other side of the transaction. I found someone looking for articles to be written about WordPress. I offered my services for $0.015/word and they agreed. My first article was accepted and I was paid promptly. They were happy enough with my work that they asked for a second article to be written. After the second article was written they said they weren’t happy with the topic (it presented a conflict of interest with the site they would be posting it on) so I agreed to write a third article instead. The third article was written and delivered. I never received a reply on the work and was never paid. It was like they totally vanished off the face of the planet.

So I guess the freelance writing game is tough from both sides. Both buyers and sellers alike can be disappointing and let you down. My suggestion, at least from the buyer standpoint, is to stick to someone like glue once you find a writer that is reliable; no matter what their price is. The money you spend on the writing might be higher than most but the time you’ll save will make it worth it.

I’m officially in the middle of the silly season as baseball is days away from getting started. Client work takes precedence over the blog so I apologize for the lack of updates recently. I thought I’d make a quick post today with some brief thoughts I’ve had on a variety of subjects.

• I finally found a newsletter winner for the Single-Use License of Adii’s Premium News Theme for WordPress. I had a really great response to that contest so I definitely plan on running another one soon.
• Along with client work I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a new side project that, unfortunately, I don’t plan on discussing here in any great detail. It’s basically a brand new type of content management system I’ll be using internally to manage a network of sites my friend and I will be launching. Again, I’m dying to talk more about this but in the best interest of the project I’m going to remain silent.
• Thanks to this intense workload I’ve started to dip my feet into the outsourcing pool for some help. This is a topic I’ll definitely be writing about more in the future but probably in a more general sense. It’s been a really interesting experience so far and I’m looking forward to using outsourcing again very soon.

I’m writing this today as a word of warning and caution to anyone who is thinking about getting into the freelance web development game: you are not a special little flower.

The web development market is getting flooded with the explosion of overseas outsourcing and the avalanche of free reference materials. Now anyone with a text editor and a shared hosting account can get into the game and try and turn a buck. The job market is flooded with people that can most definitely work for cheaper and maybe even outperform you.

All Is Not Lost

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Even though the competition right now is as fierce as it has ever been there are steps you can take to set yourself above the rest and make a decent full-time or part-time living from freelance web development.

The days of getting freelance gigs from job boards is over for anyone in an English speaking country. You just can’t compete with the pricing that’s being offered from the Europeans and Asians. Thankfully, there are other ways to use your skills for profit that outsourced work isn’t as likely to interfere with.

Work Local

Most of the businesses in your local area haven’t even heard of the term outsourcing before. If they’re looking to get a project done and you’re fresh and new and looking to expand your portfolio this could be a perfect match. Just beware of long hours for low pay as local clients aren’t appreciative of current freelancing rates.

While this is a great method for anyone just starting out it’s not something I’d recommend to a veteran web developer. Local clients are usually pretty time intensive and people with larger client bases aren’t interested in the hassle.

Work Niche

This has been my own personal tactic for several years now. I found an industry that had a need for quality web development work (in my case, professional minor league sports) and built a quality product (in my case, a content management system) to match the need.

I stumbled into my own little niche mostly by accident but sometimes that’s the best way. If you do a job for someone and think there’s a broader market for the same businesses do some research and give it a shot. Once you become a known face in that market you’ll start seeing more work come in through referrals and word of mouth.

Work Passive

The easiest solution is to just not work at all! When you have down time between clients try and develop some projects that generate passive income. That’s what I’ve tried to do with Fore Score Golf Stats and all of the news aggregators that make up Jack’s Sports Report and so far things are going great. I’m generating money each month with sites that are basically hands-off propositions.

It’s A Big Garden Out There

Let’s put this lame plant metaphor to rest. Even if you are one of millions there’s still ample opportunity for you to succeed. Just remember to try and narrow your focus and worry about competing in small markets and not against small prices.

The jobs being outsourced aren’t jobs you would really want anyway. They’re being presented by people with big ideas and big demands that they can’t meet with their small budgets.

Chris Bibey wrote a post yesterday about avoiding scams at Digital Point. For those of you that don’t know, Digital Point is a very popular webmaster forum where people from all over come together to talk about websites, offer advice and try to fleece unsuspecting souls out of their money.

As I said in my comment on Chris’ post, Digital Point is “one of the dirtiest corners of the Internet.”

It’s also one of my favorite sites on the web.

Even though Digital Point is sort of a den of thieves there are some money making opportunities there. I spend a lot of time in the Buy, Sell or Trade section looking at sites for sale (all the time I was wasting doing this was actually the impetus for building Web Auctions Daily). There are also a lot of great opportunities to find freelancers to outsource your extra work to.

I’ve had some experience both buying and selling things on Digital Point so I’ve put together some tips for people looking to get their feet wet over there.

Buying

• First off, the old expression “buyer beware” applies triple-time at Digital Point. If you get scammed or ripped off you have no one to blame but yourself. There are systems in place to give scammers bad reviews but it’s by no means a fool proof system and it doesn’t get your money back.
• Avoid the “get rich quick” schemes and ebooks. The only people that get rich with those are the people selling them. Use your head here. If someone is really making $300 a day doing no work then why are they wasting their time trying to sell their secrets to you for $4.99?
• Do your research. This applies to buying sites, links or hiring freelancers. Make sure the traffic and AdSense stats are legit as well as the PageRank. This is especially true when buying links. Again, use your head, if someone is selling permanent PR 5 links for $5 it’s probably bogus. If you’re hiring a freelancer make sure to see their portfolio and work out payment before any work gets started.

Selling

• A lot of people post sites, templates, domains, etc. for sale by starting a brand new thread that quickly gets buried under the pile. One neat trick I’ve learned when I’m selling something is to search the particular section I’m thinking about posting in with the term “WTB” (that’s short for: Want To Buy) and see if anyone has asked in the past for something I’m offering. That’s a simple way to fish out potential buyers.
• Be prepared to be insulted. Everyone is guilty of overvaluing whatever it is they have. Your first offers on your sale will probably make you cringe. You can either ignore them or take them into consideration. You won’t get much love if you berate the person who made a low bid though so try and keep your cool.
• Chris touched on this in his post but if you’re a freelancer please, for the love of all that’s good, do not give work away for free. Anyone who wants sample work is just looking to get something for nothing. That’s how the scammers get you.

I’ve droned on long enough. The thing I want to stress is that with some common sense and due diligence you can get a lot out of Digital Point. Be smart and play it safe so you have a good chance of having a nice experience.