Rebecca Mastey's Blog

Guest Appearance

I made my first blog guest appearance last week over at Piotr’s tech-money-Linux-life-win blog. If you’re interested in reading my ramblings on taking the first steps to freelance writing, you can click right here and read the post. It’s accompanied by an interesting graphic, which I’m having a hard time deciphering. It’s either a spotted praying mantis or an out of focus fountain pen.

What prompted this philanthropic content for Piotr’s wayward blog, you might ask. It wasn’t exactly philanthropic. As you can see at the end of the post, there’s a nice little link to my new project, Write Translation. I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about getting traffic, until I remembered the obvious. Piotr’s blog is a) cool, b) trafficked and c) relevant.

He was kind enough to write up a guest post for Write Translation, which you can also read (and simultaneously increase my Google Analytics hit count) by clicking here.

In case you’re curious, Write Translation is a little project dedicated to all those non-native (English) writers. Those people who are legitimately skilled at stringing together words, just…in a different language. There’s a problem among writers, native and non, that ends up with clients expecting a 5,000 word article for two bucks. Honestly, it hasn’t gotten that bad yet, but it’s getting there.

So, Write Translation is made for all those wordsmiths that just can’t English. With luck, it will help them English gooder. At the very least, it’ll be fun.

As a final plus, I have learned to spell – but not yet pronounce – Piotr’s last name.

K R Z Y Z E K.

Review – CloudCrowd: Rewriting Website Text for Cash

Amid the myriad of other writing websites available, CloudCrowd stands out with a unique approach. Rather than paying for unique content, or hiring cheap writers to rewrite batches of articles for use on a new website, it pays writers to correct grammar, spelling and flow errors in the copy text of foreign websites.

I have to preface this by saying that when I saw CloudCrowd for the first time, I was a bit miffed. Friends and I have been working on nearly the same project for quite sometime, without the level of success CloudCrowd has achieved. A good idea is never done once, I suppose.

There are two ways to earn cash on CloudCrowd. First, you can complete tasks for cash. Second, you can refer people and earn a percentage of their income. They pay daily,  sometimes twice a day, no matter how much or little money you have waiting in your account. If you need $10 or $15 really fast, CloudCrowd might be a good, painless way to do it.

At this moment, there are 4 task types available.

Review Website Selections and Grade Written Text are my favorites. They’re both fairly mindless assignments, which I can do while my kids crawl all over me. They don’t make much-both net less than $5 per hour-but are perfect for times when you know you should work and just can’t.

Review Website Selections takes a fair amount of brain power, and, while it pays the most, doesn’t really pay enough to be worth it (for me). If it takes 15 minutes to complete one rewrite, you’ll earn $8 per hour. Drop it down to 10 minutes and you’ll get $12 per hour. Assuming, of course, there are enough assignments.

You can earn for three levels of referrals on CloudCrowd.

CloudCrowd has some technical bugs. For example, I still have my entire balance “Pending Payout”, even though I’ve received all of it. The Facebook invitation app works…sometimes.

You do need a Facebook account to sign up and start earning cash.

If you find this helpful and would like to sign up, please use the link in this post.

Authors: Use Document Properties to Your Advantage

Recently, I’ve been branching out my writing from guaranteed sources like DemandStudios and light-weight pay-per-submission sites like AssociatedContent to include higher-end content providers like Constant-Content. Unfortunately, I’ve been spoiled by the DemandStudios copy editors who, while often infuriating in their nitpickiness, actually tell you what’s wrong with an article. The legendary editor at Constant-Content is not quite so kind, and often rejects articles for a single grammar or spelling error. Once the article is rejected, it’s deleted, so you’ve lost everything (including the summary, which can’t be included in the uploaded document). Yikes.

In one such round of submitting-rejection-editing-resubmitting-rerejecting-and-so-on, I realized that I was spending an extra 5 minutes either retyping the summary and keywords or hunting them down in a spreadsheet. While editing photos, a little light bulb went off. Documents have properties, too!

Even if you’re saving an article that you’re posting on a site that doesn’t auto-delete all rejections, use these properties to store information on the document. Microsoft Office has a toolbar with the default property fields, which are good enough for nearly all documents.

• Author: This is, I’m assuming, going to be your name.
• Title: The title of the document
• Subject: What’s it about? Not to be confused with Category.
• Keywords: Comma or semi-colon separated.
• Category: The category it will fall under on a submission website.
• Status: Fill in anything here. I use it to record the submission site and current status.
• Comments: Record the descriptive summary in this box.

When you submit the article, just open up the properties, cut and paste. Extra benefit: you can filter your documents by the website they are published with.

Constant-Content: 10 Ways to Stay Cool Without Air Conditioning

This in-depth article introduces the reader to staying cool naturally during hot months. Written in the conversational second-person, the reader is encouraged to take 10 specific actions to reduce their need for air conditioning. Perfect for green living or ecologically minded websites, this article calls the reader to take action and reduce their energy usage by opening with brief information on air conditioning´s impact on finance, ecology and health.

10 Ways to Stay Cool Without Air Conditioning is available for purchase at Constant-Content.com with usage rights ($15), unique rights ($50) and a full-rights liscense ($100).