Cointent Writing Services - Your Favs?

[JamesR]

I started out with Retired and Writing but retired that one when I found Text Broker which I have used pretty heavily.  However I have run into limitations with Text Broker and looking for options.

I know some of you use Philipino slave labor

Anyone tried People Per Hour?  Other options for high quality, real cheap content writing?  Not sure Craigslist is the way I want to go.

[Rupert]

James,
Depends on the quality you are after.  Philippinos do cheap.  imho. What is you limitation with textbroker? 

Is it type of content?
Price?
quality to low or High? 

I have had Philippino, Madagascan (for french) a Swiss German Parisian  for German, writing for me, all different qualities, and all different prices.  I have known an article to cost £50, or $1.6.

Someone (cannot remember who,)  posted this.  Not tried it yet:

http://www.purecontent.com/

[JamesR]

Quality - I would say 7 or 8 out of 10
Price - around .02 a word
Type of content - reviews, info pages, faqs - typical web content

Did a bit of searching on Pure Content - comment on a shoemoney page says about $16 per 250 word article and they have a 100 article min.  equals about 6.4 cents a word which is pretty high.

[Gurtie]

purecontent will hit quality but probably not at that price. Good when you need some intelligence behind whats being generated though.

Slightly related - anyone know any good cheap english language audio/video transcription services? I've used some in the past but for ad hoc stuff they tend to be either expensive or rubbish. I don't need any type of industry specific knowledge at the moment, just good accuracy at a decent price, and ability to timestamp would be handy.

[Rupert]

James, sounds perfect for Textbroker.  Love to know the limitations you have hit  

Gurtie, you mean listening to an audio tape, and typing it in?  If so, that has to be straight forward Secretarial.  There must be loads with that skill looking for a job at the mo. Have you tried locally?

[agerhart]

We've been using Craigslist to find writers

[JamesR]

>TextBroker limitations

1) Hard to find good writers.  Once you find them, they tend to be slow.
2) Open orders are hit and miss
3) Can't ask for screen shots or other non-text type work

[grnidone]

Interesting.  I've always had very very good luck finding good writers on TextBroker.  I've only had two bad experiences with them.  Everyone else is very good, very professional.

[Gurtie]

Gurtie, you mean listening to an audio tape, and typing it in?  If so, that has to be straight forward Secretarial.  There must be loads with that skill looking for a job at the mo. Have you tried locally?

you'd think so, wouldn't you?. Mayby now its a new city I should give it a go again! when i tried in london I couldn't get one for less than a week at a horrible rate.

[Rupert]

Ah, yes, I bet London would be expensive. Should be cheaper in the sticks.  might be someone at a job centre even, or put an ad in the post office. Must be plenty of Mums about who could do it.

[Gurtie]

This is Brizzle. All the mums are 15 and feeding the babies neat vodka.

But grandmothers.... yeah I expect a few of them can type.

[rcjordan]

>craigslist

Same here and, overall, it's worked out decently but you are going to have assume an active editor-in-charge role. Even so,  you are going to be panning for gold and only one of five is going to produce something you can use. So I reduced my payout to .005 per word and at that price I can afford to cull or perhaps remix.  I've also found 3 superpro writers via Craigslist --they are pricey .05/word but their work has been incredible.  I've generally used their works as centerpiece articles though at somewhat secondary positions in the network pyramid.

By far the best quality writers were name-brand print magazine freelancers. I bought 2nd rights to their print articles.  Some required some tweaking (usually to make them evergreen) but these are my root articles. Their job is to provide legitimacy.

I also have a "Write For Us" page linked from the footer.  It has brought in a few directly. It's also very handy for quickly regimenting any writer, no matter where I found him.  One writer that came in directly had been trained by Demand Media.  The quality was slightly above the CL average but -damn- the volume and speed he could produce was almost disconcerting.

[JamesR]

@grnidone

Open orders?  what quality level?  How fast of a turn around?  what type of content? care to share any names?

[Rupert]

James, got myself one at TB that writes an article a week, I put 10 up for her at a time, and she has learned how to load it into wordpress.  So now I have little hands on, just the occasional bit of encouragement

Planning to give her more, so rather not share her!  (feel awful saying that should I? )

Gurtie... Grandmothers... good ol' Brizzle.

BTW James.  India is cheaper than the Philippines,  but the work ethic not as good.  imho.  Not a vaste experience, but worth condidering. 

[JamesR]

Planning to give her more, so rather not share her!  (feel awful saying that should I? )

No, you shouldn't

I guess I need to work the Open Orders a bit more and get some more reliable writers that can work quicker.  (and I need to stop being a cheapskate )  However, I would like to have a go to system work I can get things like screen shots and maybe even simple video done at some point.