Ridiculous Freelance Ad of the Week

Usually, I bag on freelance ads for doing stupid things like offering $0.00002 per word or having unreasonable turnaround times. This one, though, is bad for a whole different reason.

A client needs general fitness articles that are original (no plagiarizing) and at least 550 words long that have been SEO’d for the URLs & keywords listed. They will be paying per article.

They will hire anyone who bids $4 per article immediately. I have attached the guidelines and examples.

Article Writing Guidelines:

You will be creating an ORIGINAL fitness related article (this will be verified, do NOT take paragraphs from other articles, combine them and submit as original) that will be optimized for a specific keyword / URL combination (see attachment for current list). Use this as a guide for writing your articles. Also see the sample article at the end of the attached guide.

When placing your bid, please attach a sample of your CURRENT WORK.

Thank you.

Did you catch it? They will immediately award the job to ANYONE who bids $4 per article. I’m generally annoyed with those who place these kinds of ads for trying to screw over the writers they hire, but this time, I’m actually feeling kind of bad for the potential employer. S/he has put way too much faith in the people on Guru who will bid $4 for 550 words. Apparently no one has explained the concept of “you get what you pay for” to these people.


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4 responses
  1. Mary@Adventures In Freelancing Avatar

    Oh Lorna, this is bad. But I’ve seen similar. Definitely says something for the kind of work they’re looking for.

  2. greta Avatar

    that’s insane!!

  3. Freddie Jaye Avatar
    Freddie Jaye

    Insane, but not uncommon. For years, I did a lot of work for an editor at our local newspaper–features for special publications. She often lamented to me about the quality of stuff she got from her other freelancers. “Management doesn’t care about ‘good’ anymore,” she said, “all they care about is getting it cheap.”

    And the sad thing is, there are plenty of desperate (or third-world) writers who will jump at this opportunity.

  4. Jacob Duchaine Avatar

    Yea, I’m fairly new to the freelance writing field, but when I see these kinds of requests for unreasonably low prices it makes me skip the job, and I’d imagine anyone with a greater level of skill than me likely skips them too. This is the kind of article produced in sweat shops in third world countries by people who don’t speak English.

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