Recycle your college essays!

Oboulo.com will PAY for your old college essays! That's right, PAY. Only $10 per essay, mind, but still, if you've got 20 quality college essays or dissertations lying around in digital format, then you can make yourself an easy $200. The deal seems to be, you create an account for yourself at Oboulo.com, submit your essays, and if Oboulo deem them to be of sufficient quality and interest, they'll pay you and offer them for re-sale to interested parties.

Now, I haven't tried this myself, so can't vouch for it personally. I haven't tried it for two reasons: 1. I think all my old college essays are still in my parents' loft. 2. I'm so OLD that all my essays were written in ink on paper. This was a quaint, old-fashioned custom, discontinued in the early 1990s, which meant that you couldn't just copy-and-paste huge chunks of other people's work. You could, of course, copy from books or from other students but, cunningly, it was actually harder work to hand-copy than to write original material. I wonder why they did away with it?

So $10 to type up each of my college essays probably isn't worth the candle for me. If you've got stuff in digital format, though, give it a try. Let me know how you get on.

Ooops!

I promised back in May, Gentle Reader, that I'd let you know how I got on with some of my early finding-writing-jobs ideas,and then omitted to do so (that should probably be 'so to do'.) My 3 schemes back then were:
1. submitting unsolicited articles to magazines
2. proofreading college dissertations
3. starting a personal blog

#1 unsolicited articles
Well, I wrote a blinder on the medieval history of my local town and sent it to the editor of my local rag. (I'd pitched it to them as an idea, and received no response, so decided to write the article to make life easier for them.) After two weeks, still no response, so I sent a polite email asking if they'd received it. Still no reply. I re-sent it a week later and eventually received the curt reply from the Editor, "You've sent this several times now. Please stop sending it." I replied, still politely, that a courteous "Thanks, but no thanks" would have done nicely. I know editors are busy people, but surely a standard "No Thanks" email would cost them little effort and be better PR?

So that, in my admittedly limited experience, is what you get from submitting unsolicited articles. I had, however, made a simple mistake: whilst my material was locally relevant to the paper, my style was not. My preferred writing style is humorous/surreal, and, now I come to think of it, I've never in 20 years read anything remotely humorous in my local paper. Pearls before swine? Luckily, I'm not bitter, and recycled the article on one of my paid blogs.

#2 proofreading college dissertations
Since receiving this tip for occasional writing work, I've discovered that this is actually an INDUSTRY. Foreign students, of limited academic ability, and often of limited English skills, are routinely admitted on degree and post-grad courses for the extra money they contribute to university coffers. There are websites offering to WRITE their degree assignments in return for filthy lucre. Rather than contribute to this travesty of academia, I've commented on it in another paid blog. This may sound prim of me, but I haven't sunk that low. Yet.

#3. personal blogs
I'm told there are X zillion new personal blogs started every day, and that those bloggers you hear about who have given up the day job started in 1997. So far, this blog has earnt me just $0.41 in advertising revenue, so the yacht will have to wait...

Too busy to blog!

Apologies to any readers who've been waiting for the next instalment with bated breath. I've been too busy doing odd writing jobs to write my blog. Which is good, because the whole point of this blog was to share tips on finding work as a writer. So here's the promised progress report, warts-and-all.

#1 Estate Agents' property details
This still provides a small but steady stream of work. Each detail takes me about an hour and they pay me $20/£10. I could do them more quickly, but like to do some online research about the area and its history so that my copy stands out from the crowd (hopefully.) Obviously this isn't a great time for the property market, but you could try to persuade estate agents that this is PRECISELY the time they need good, original and different copy.

TIP: find an online property spec, rewrite it in your own unique style, send it to the agent and offer your services.

#2 Adsense revenue-share
I've completed my guides to the 24 regions of France. I'm on 60% share of Adsense revenue from these pages for the next two years. My first month's share was $13 and my second month's, $17, so the initial return has been disappointing. However, even if the revenue stayed at $13 for two years, that's $312/£168, which would just about pay for the time it took to write them. And if, as I hope, the revenue increases exponentially month-on-month, then I'll be too busy lazing by my private pool to write this blog.

TIP: find a site with Adsense ads, and the sort of copy you think you could improve on, rewrite it, send them your copy and ask for a share of Adsense revenue. Your superb original copy costs them nothing up-front and, being superb and original, will generate more traffic to their pages.

#3 Commissioned blogs.
This started small and has been growing steadily. I answered a small ad who needed someone to blog twice weekly on Modern Languages at $8/£4 a blog. After the first month, they asked me to blog in the General and Psychology sections as well. After the second month (they must like my stuff) they asked me to contribute to Classroom Management and Book Reviews. In case this sounds very specialist, I should point out that I knew nothing about psychology until I started blogging on it...

TIP: look out for 'bloggers wanted' ads.