Textbroker.Com

While reading through other blogs and websites dedicated to online writing, one company whose name kept on appearing as a potential source of short online writing jobs was textbroker.com. They describe themselves the following way on the front page of their website:

Textbroker is your marketplace for unique and exclusive written texts, created in accordance with customer specifications. You can manage any written task as either client or author with our user-friendly web interface. With Textbroker you avoid the acquisition of texts through tedious and time-consuming auctions. Instead, you are given a reasonably priced fixed-word-rate or, as an alternative, you may opt to negotiate directly to get the best price possible. Textbroker offers a meeting place for client and author alike to comfortably and safely manage all aspects of their writing needs.

From a writer's point of view, one of the advantages of textbroker.com is that instead of haggling over the price of a work (like at guru.com) you will see upfront how much a company is willing to pay for a piece of work. Textbroker.com is also reasonably easy to apply to work for - instead of being required to show samples of previously published work as some companies required, you are asked to provide a writing sample on a topic they have selected. They will evaluate your writing style and then give you a ranking somewhere between 1 and 5, which will determine which writing jobs you can bid on and the corresponding pay rates (it appears that the usual initial ranking most writers receive is a rank of "3").

I decided to give textbroker a shot: I signed up, took the test (writing an article on the topic of places to visit in the town I lived in) and then got a message that it would take 24 hours for them to get back to them. It took actually took a little longer for them to get back to me (more like 48 hours), but when they did they told me that I had received the standard ranking of "3" and I can now bid on all jobs in that category or lower.

A survey of the jobs available shows a plethora of jobs asking for between 300-500 words of content, paying between $3 and $5 dollars. This is definitely not a lucrative market, but I reckon it is good for the experience. Starting Monday, I will be trying to fulfill one job request a workday, which over a month should garner somewhere between $60-100 a month.