I’ve been self-employed for a long time now – really, longer than a woman who still kids herself that she looks ten years younger than her age likes to admit. So, when I finally decided that it was time to try earning a living doing what I do best (and, yes, I mean writing), I went at it the way that I’ve started any other business – by putting in a lot of hours and not expecting to earn very much until I establish myself. An early attempt to gain experience and references by offering my services to small charities for free was only semi-successful. I did gain some confidence and a useful insight into the way a client might think about a writing job but I’d reckoned without the slightly chaotic nature and high staff turnover of local charity offices. Since I wasn’t actually presenting a bill, my plaintive requests for someone to write something nice about me tended to get forgotten as the latest new staff member took over the towering inbox.
With a bit of actual copywriting experience under my belt, however, I headed out into the badlands of the world wide web, to tout my services around the various freelancer websites that litter the online landscape. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s actually quite a sensible one, at first glance. There are a lot of individuals and businesses out there, in need of someone to complete small tasks for them. Likewise, there are a lot of people out there with useful skills who would like to earn a little money doing small freelance jobs, if they can find them. The freelance sites provide a matchmaking service which connects the person in need of work to the person with work to be done. Or, at least, that’s the theory. Quite early on, whilst searching the job posts, I came across a comment that confused me. I was used to seeing phrases like ‘Please don’t apply unless you are a native English speaker’ on job descriptions but one person had clearly reached a pitch of frustration that needed to be expressed more forcibly. They had posted this job three times already, they said, each time asking for a native English speaker and each time ending up with someone who could barely string an English sentence together. Since I was writing a clear description of my skills and experience on each application I submitted I wondered, a little naively, why this person hadn’t been able to figure out who they were dealing with. In any case, I was convinced that I was finally in with a chance of getting work. ‘Pick me.’, I wanted to say, ‘I’m precisely what you’re looking for.’. Needless, to say, with no feedback points on the site and hundreds of other hopefuls from all over the world also applying, I didn’t get the job.
Eventually, and after much fruitless effort, I spotted a job post which specifically stated that the poster would consider applicants with no feedback history on the site. Not stopping to wonder about this generosity of spirit, I applied and found myself web chatting to a friendly person in Bangladesh (to this day I don’t know their name, their gender, or even if it was the same person each time.) who needed someone to write a short marketing email. My contact seemed a bit concerned by my lack of a portfolio but mentioned that, if I did a good job, there would be plenty more work where that came from so, rather than lose my first decent opportunity, I offered to write the email for nothing, as an audition, in the hope of future projects. For about a week after this, hearing nothing back from the person in Bangladesh, I assumed that I’d allowed myself to be conned into working for free. I consoled myself with the thought that it had been an easy task that hadn’t wasted much of my time but still, I was feeling pretty foolish. Then, at last, a message arrived – the person in Bangladesh said that their client was happy and now they had another job for me. I took note of this (to me) unexpected reference to a client – that wasn’t how I thought these freelance sites were supposed to work. In any case, I was so relieved that I accepted a job I didn’t understand, with a ridiculously short deadline (a matter of hours, when it was already 10pm, UK time), for a ridiculously small rate of pay and went without sleep in order to complete it. The short deadline had apparently been caused by another writer abandoning the task after completing a small fraction of it…clearly someone with more sense than me. Over the course of the night, my confusion about the job (which consisted of writing thousands of inane comments about assorted factoids) resolved itself as I came to realise that I was, in fact, writing clickbait…back to feeling foolish, then!
Determined to be more careful about what tasks I accepted in future, I launched myself back into the fray. I answered one post that referred to ‘report writing’ and thought I had finally got a sensible job, until I was given the brief. With a sinking heart, I realised that I was being asked to complete someone’s academic coursework for them. I refused the work, giving the poster a rather stern, middle aged talking to about the evils of cheating and the need to complete her own work. The next day, I saw the same person in a list of applicants for another writing job and realised that, once again, I’d been dealing with a go-between and not, as I’d assumed, the student herself (cue another bout of feeling foolish). In the mean time, my contact in Bangladesh regularly popped up with more jobs for me, some of which were fairly sensible and, although none of them paid enough to keep a squirrel in nuts, I felt that I was making progress. Some of the jobs I took on during this time were even quite interesting – I wrote several articles on web marketing, which is a useful thing for any self-employed person to keep abreast of and I spent a very enjoyable afternoon researching steam boilers for an article in an Australian trade journal.
There was one job that I did try to turn down but was eventually persuaded to take on – two short blog articles about shoes. I pointed out to my contact that the brief clearly stated that the writer must be familiar with fashion writing (which I am definitely not) but, on this occasion they were adamant that they didn’t want to pass the job to someone else, so I reluctantly agreed. ‘Write about what you know’ is good advice for a copywriter and, in this instance, I found myself learning a hard lesson – writing about a topic of which you know nothing at all is damn hard work and will take a stupidly long time. OK…I wear shoes, of course but, so long as they fit, don’t hurt and, if appropriate, keep my feet warm and dry, then that’s all I’ve ever wanted to know about them. After virtually an entire day of trying to get 1200 words out of subject matter that seemed to me to suggest 300 at most, I gave way to a frustrated rant and my otherwise endlessly supportive and sympathetic other half nearly fell off his chair laughing. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are more of a steam boiler girl, aren’t you?’. I did make a small error in the terminology for the shoe job, which resulted in it being the only work that my contact in Bangladesh ever asked me to correct. As it happened, that meant that it was the only job that I was ever allowed to see the client’s reaction to – apparently, other than the small re-write that was needed, they thought the articles were ‘fabulous’!
On several occasions, I was given a job that had already been completed by another writer and rejected by the client. In these instances I was shown the original attempt, along with the client’s comments, so that I could see what had been done wrong. Generally speaking, what had been done wrong was pretty obvious to me – the writer simply didn’t have a very good command of English. It was becoming clearer to me that this must be connected to all of those job posts, pleading for only native English speakers to apply this time, but I still didn’t understand how the confusion arose…surely the people whose articles I was writing had known that they were dealing with an agency of some sort? Then again, I had seen several cryptic comments on briefs that made me wonder. A reference to ‘your previous work’ on one brief had made me ask whether someone else was supposed to take the job but I was told not to worry about it. Likewise, one of the jobs that had previously been attempted by someone else came to me with an angry note from the client expressing confusion about the original writer’s sudden failure to understand the brief, in spite of an initially promising contact. More evidence reached me in the form of a brief that had clearly been prepared by a web marketing firm for their client. That meant that there were at least two middleman organisations between me and the client…or, to put it another way, two organisations taking a cut of whatever the client was paying before my pittance was passed on to me (minus the fee taken by the job matching website).
I couldn’t help wondering what the client at the start of the chain thought they were paying for. After all, it was only by sheer luck that they ended up with me writing their articles, rather than any of the countless numbers of non-native English speakers competing for the same job. Since my contact’s English wasn’t good enough for them to judge the quality of my work, all they could do was to pass completed articles back and forth for acceptance or rejection. If the client’s English wasn’t perfect then a proportion of the articles were bound to be accepted however bad they were. It certainly goes some way towards explaining the garbled English to be found on so many websites. For me, though, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place with a particular job that I was offered – not for a third party client, on this occasion but for my contact’s own organisation. I was asked to write some ‘creative proposals’, suitable to be tweaked for different circumstances. I was shown some examples for inspiration. Each proposal would purport to come from a native English speaking writer, probably US born and with an impressive CV, who happens to be in the market for flexible work as they are looking for new challenges, or have returned to academia, following a life of teaching, volunteering and modelling (?!?), or are simply in need of something to do in between their other high-profile writing, editing and proofreading jobs. These, then, are the job applicants that are rewarded with much of the work, through the freelance websites – fictitious over-achievers concealing parasitic content brokers, farming the tasks out to, well, if the client is very lucky, someone like me.
I was going to end this article on that note but I do feel the need to say one more thing. Whilst I’m aware that I’ve just called my contact a ‘parasite’, I’d like to say that there are far worse out there – I know because I’ve dealt with several. My contact in Bangladesh was always pleasant and friendly and never tried to claim that my work had been rejected, in order to get out of paying me. If I refused a job on ethical grounds, then he, she or they (I still don’t know!) had the decency to seem embarrassed. I don’t even think they were particularly cynical – I think they genuinely didn’t see an ethical problem with the situation, even when they were asking me to create fake identities in order to skim hard earned cash from the people actually doing the work – people like me. Incidentally, I said no to that particular job although, perhaps less to my credit, I didn’t actually state the reasons for my objections – at the time, I was too surprised by what I’d just been asked to do and wanted to think about it, so I said I was too busy to accept work at that point. The thing is, much of the business of the web is conducted along similar lines. By its very nature, the internet is multi-layered – it’s often difficult to figure out just who you are actually dealing with behind all the user names, aliases and avatars. It can leave a slightly nasty taste in the mouth if, like me, you like to keep a degree of trust in your business dealings but I bear my contact in Bangladesh no ill-will and actually consider myself quite lucky to have fallen in with them before meeting some of the more predatory characters that lurk in these murky corners of the web – the lessons I’ve learned along the way could have come at a much higher price!
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