Years ago I got involved in MLM (multi-level marketing). In principle, MLM is not bad, in fact most businesses are actually MLM to some degree.

But there were so many sharks and poor quality MLMs that the quality ones got tarnished.

With freelance writing, the web provides a benefit not seen before, allowing people to work from home easily and effectively. The risk, as with MLM is a lot of sharks and get rich quick clowns have jumped on the bandwagon.

A great many “companies” out there are not valuing the work that freelance writers do. I personally see no difference in my charging $100/hour for IT consultancy, or providing my writing skills for a similar amount. If I am an expert on the subject I am writing about, then I expect to be paid as such. If I am new to a subject, then my background as a consultant and research still means I am valuable.

The following outlines the top five things in avoid, although eLance and Guru can work if you are picky about the work.

1. You pay them:
   I kid you not, there are companies out there that expect you to pay them to write material to put on their site. This absurdity is nearly as bad as letters from Nigeria.
2. Revenue Sharing:
   Basically you are reliant on making money from visitors to your content hosted by the third party. If your article is bringing traffic enough to make it worth your while, why even bother putting it on their site? Make your own site and keep 100% of the revenue!
3. Re-writing Articles:
   Usually in the form of write 100 articles for $1 each. The aim from their perspective is to have content for search engines to crawl, and the thing with search engines, they can tell if content it too similar. So these guys get you to “change” the content for a pitiful fee. It is borderline plagiarism, and does not really hone your writing skills either.
4. Academic Papers:
   I’m not talking about doing work for universities or technical colleges here, but for students. The students essentially want a free ride. Some may even pay well by the looks, but do you really want to go there? Fraud is a crime in most countries.
5. Bid for work sites:
   This one I know from experience as an IT consultant. You will be competing with sweat shops in ex-eastern block countries and India. They can always underbid you, and the work itself is likely for someone other than the person you are working for, with a huge mark-up that you will never see.

You must treat freelance writing as a professional business. Your time can not be replaced, make it worth while. If you take a contract with one of these five, beware, because you could find yourself broke, in trouble with the law or simply passed over as professional companies won’t consider you to be professional with them on your CV or portfolio.

If you are struggling to get that first contract, keep writing your own material. Hone your skills, and put them up on the web (might as well earn some advertising revenue from Google and so on!)

Use that material as your starting portfolio, just because you wrote it for yourself does not discount it’s proof that you can write. Chose a wide variety of subjects, fiction and non-fiction.

Of course this is all purely based on my opinion. But as I said at the beginning, I have been in business a long time. The pattern is the same, just a slightly different industry.