Monkeys, Machines and Writing in English Pt. 2
Published October 14th, 2010 | 
It is potential to have knowledge in regards to the medicare supplement insurance companies that supply medicare supplement plans enabling anybody to seek out and choose the most effective plan required by evaluating charges offered by them. This train helps in saving money and helps anybody to apply for the selected plan. An insurance coverage that dietary supplements Medicare is named supplemental insurance or medicare supplement insurance companies. Through medicare supplemental insurance firms, folks above sixty five years of age can avail of the Medicare Supplemental Insurance coverage, which may assist them pay their medical bills that can not be done by means of Medicare Part A and Part B. The areas the place Medicare does not help are known as gaps, hence, insurance supplements of medicare are also known as Medigap policy.
The above excerpt is from a rather obscure content mill, but one that exemplifies why mainstream publishers turn up their noses at content mills: low value content badly written and unedited. Aside from that, it’s not even smartly done SEO. The keyword density in the above article is much too high. I can make no sense out of it. Can you?
DS Insanity
Published October 12th, 2010 | The problem with writing articles for Demand Studios (if you’re inclined to do so) is mainly a combination of absurd titles, inconsistent editors and selective enforcement of their own editorial guidelines.
Take a title like diet pills that work. Say it’s a list article. Now, Demand Studios wants “authoritative sources.” They have a how list of website which are blacklisted. A blacklisted source doesn’t necessarily mean the information on those sites are inaccurate. No, what it really means is that using these sites (or sites like them) will draw the ire of Google and affect search engine ranking. Here’s the Catch-22, no truly authoritative source will endorse diet pills or provide real evidence that they work. You will find plenty of evidence about how they will damage your health. But, to fulfill the requirements of the assignment, you have to write an article the lists diet pills that actually help you lose weight. The only places you will find this information is on sites that are prohibited. If you write an article that supports the title, you will get the article sent back because of the sources. However, if you write an article listing diet pills but use authoritative sources that tell you how diet pills don’t work, it will get sent back because it doesn’t fulfill the requirements of the article. Yet, there is no common sense applied by DS. There is no quality control for the article titles posted. So you have hundreds of titles that can’t be filled to the satisfaction of editorial guidelines. If one could edit the titles to match the true information regarding the title according to actual journalistic standards rather than SEO standards. Also, editors, many of whom have little or no journalistic experience, are given too much power. Ultimately, if DS wants to stay ahead of the curve with regards to Google, they’ll eventually have to address these flaws in their system.
Grist for the Content Mill
Published October 5th, 2010 | In a blog post that appeared back in March, freelancer Carol Tice offered her own view about content mills and why "serious" freelance writers should avoid them. I stumbled upon the post the other day while reading a related topic and thought I might play devil’s advocate here. First, Ms. Tice’s reasons for avoiding content mills:
1. It does not teach you to report.
2. It does not teach you to research.
3. It does not give you nurturing editor relationships.
4. It does not teach you to market.
5. It does not enhance your reputation.
6. It’s a model that may disappear.
It does not teach you to report. No, I suppose writing for a content mill doesn’t teach you all that much about reporting. But here’s the thing: Content mill writing is not journalism. Journalism, as defined by my trusty Random House Dictionary states that Journalism is the profession of gathering, writing, editing and publishing news. News. N-E-W-S. A short article about home remedies for acne isn’t nearly the same as a story about police corruption in a particular city. One is gathering of information about a very specific search topic, while the other is a response to a current event. Writing for a content mill is basically SEO writing. As such, writing for a content mill is not supposed to teach you about reporting.
It does not teach you to research. Again, no it doesn’t. But, a couple of points: if you are writing a news article for a magazine or newspaper for the “big bucks”, one presumes that you already know how to do research. If you happen to get a freelance writing job off of a query and you don’t know how to do research, you sure picked a fine time to learn! It’s fairer to say that content mill writing doesn’t usually entail a lot of research, but the better you are at doing it, the easier the task will be.
It does not give you nurturing editor relationships. True enough. You don’t usually have much contact with an editor when writing for a content mill. In most cases, none at all. I’m not suggesting this is a good thing, but I do think, that unless you are completely delusional about your prospects for building a career out of writing for a content mill, you are not looking for nurturing from this particular relationship. On the other hand, some content mills such as Helium and Demand Studios do offer discussion forums and such where advice is given either for good or ill, that one might take for nurturing.
It does not teach you to market. Another fair point save for one thing: Is the author suggesting that this should be the function of a content mill? Now, you know I have published several literary publications over the years. I cannot truly imagine assigning story ideas and essay topic based on keyword phrases and accepting work from writers without a real editorial process. But then again, I’m not running a content mill. I’m not in business to make money off of Google (at least not primarily). A content mill works precisely because the writers don’t have to market themselves. The business model would come to a screeching halt if the “editor” had to spend too much time evaluating submissions.
It does not enhance your reputation. No, I certainly wouldn’t advise any writer to add content mill publications to a resume any more than I’d advise an aspiring poet to admit to having work on Poetry.com, but this does suppose that there are large numbers of writers looking to content mills to that end. Speaking only for myself, when I stoop so low as to knock out an article for a content mill, I’m doing it because its a lazy way to make a certain amount of money quickly without much effort, freeing me to pursue more important tasks (like serious writing). Reputation doesn’t even enter into the equation. Writing for a content mill is something you should be neither proud of nor ashamed of. And writing for a content mill, while not a living, will buy groceries or put gas in the car, or pay for a new suit of clothes. And in these uncertain times, that small sum of money can often be the difference between eating or going hungry. Reputation. Reputation be damned.
It’s a model that may disappear. Possibly, but not this year, and probably not next year. Or even the year after that. I think this is just wishful thinking on the part of writers who don’t like content mills. No doubt the business will evolve to some degree, but as long as Google is in business and making money, there will be content mills because the Internet is a hungry bitch from hell that feeds on content.
I’m not going to tell you whether you should or should not write for a content mill, but I will say that unless you are making big money writing the “important stuff”, there are worse ways to make a little extra money than writing for a content mill.
