Financial Content Providers
Published March 17th, 2012 | 
When I first got online nearly fifteen years ago, their was a saying that “content is king." The conventional wisdom was that good websites were driven by good content. Then, after the tech bubble burst, it became all about web design. People argued usability v. graphic design standards and so forth. Then, lo and behold, Google comes out with adwords and adsense. Almost overnight, neither content nor design became as important as SEO. Content farms popped up as if web developers had discovered the holy grail. They’d finally figured out how to generated income from online content. Problem was, quality suffered. Every non-writer was a writer, repurposing crap around valuable keywords. Google, having made billions from this practice started to realize that their brand was suffering and other search engines like Bing were nipping at their heels. So they came out with the new Panda algorithm. A change was on the horizon. Now, more changes as ranked will be weighted in favor of content and against SEO.
What that means if you freelance writing online content is there is little room for non-writing generalists anymore. They want experienced journalists who specialize. So if they are hiring financial content providers, they not only want an experiencing writer, they want an experienced writer with a solid background in financial reporting. In order to write stock market tips you will actually have to understand what stocks to buy today.
So content is king once again. That might prove to be a good thing as it will lead to better web sites. But it will also be harder for many would-be writers to compete.
* Mother’s Day is coming — have you purchased your personalized mothers day gifts yet?
Posted in Current Events, New Media, Publishing, content mills, seo writing, websites | 
Leave a commentHow to Get Butt Raped on Ehow.com
Published March 21st, 2011 | Recently, there was a big discussion in the Demand Media forums about the use of certain articles in the new beta segments. Writers “chosen” to write for these sections (Ehow Money, Home and Garden, etc.) typically get paid more than the usual $15 per article regular Ehow writers get paid. The problem is that writers have been noticing that articles they’ve written for $15 are starting to show up in these beta sections and they are crying foul.
It was kind of funny to read the responses, which ranged from calls to legal action (to hear few tell it, DMS has done something criminal, but I don’t think they have to worry about hiring a Criminal Attorney) to naïve acceptance that DMS will rectify the situation if this mistake is brought to the attention of the powers that be. One of the most laughable responses was from a guy who suggested the 2001 US Supreme Court decision, NY Times v. Tassini provided precedent to address the matter in the writer’s favor.
I just have to giggle when I read someone who knows very little about copyright law blathering on about copyright law.
Not that I think the situation is fair or that I want to be defending DMS, but here’s a clue for you clueless idiots: Read Your Fucking Contributor’s Agreement — you know, that contract you’all agreed to when you started writing for DMS. You signed-over your copyright to DMS when you wrote the article and accepted payment. You don’t have any rights to your DMS articles. Therefore, NY Times v. Tassini does not apply to work-for-hire situations like this. It only applies to freelancers who sold their work to periodicals where the rights surrendered were limited to a single publication published in a single medium. Under the DMS agreement, they can publish your work on as many sites as they want and they don’t have to pay you a single extra dime beyond what they advertised when you claimed the assignment.
If you don’t like it, you can quit writing for them. It’s really your only recourse. Otherwise, bend over and spread’em.
Posted in Current Events, Happy Horseshit, New Media, Publishing, Rants, The Writing Life, seo writingNot All Keyword Phrases are Equal
Published October 27th, 2010 | When you do a lot of SEO writing, almost inevitably, you develop a certain fascination with the language of keyword search phrases. I’ve certainly made the point that how people search for information isn’t always inline with what information they are searching for and that not all searches are equal. Take the phrase, "bank job". You type "bank job" into a search engine and, sure, you’ll get results showing banking jobs, but you’ll also get results pertaining to bank robberies and films about bank heists. Even when I examine the searches that bring many people to this blog, I’m astounded by how many of those searches are completely unrelated to my site.
