Transcription
Good afternoon! My name is Julie Ray, and I am a freelance blogger and content creator. This video is about five writing platforms that pay beginners to write.
I'm going to divide them up into three that are kind of like social media platforms where you post stuff, and based on how many views you get, you get paid. I'm also going to mention two writing platforms that pay, which are more like job boards where you accept jobs from clients.
In this video, I'll break down each of the pros and cons, how it all works, and I'll talk about how much money I've made if that's helpful. Let's just jump right in!
Let's start with the platforms that pay by audience. We're going to start with my all-time favorite writing platform, Medium.com. Medium.com works like this: it's kind of like if a social media platform like Twitter and a blogging platform like WordPress had a baby.
Every time you post on that baby, you get paid. So the analogy breaks down a little bit, but the great part is you post stuff. People on Medium who don't follow you but are already on Medium, because it's a great platform, will see your stuff.
Every time a paying Medium member reads one of your posts, you earn a small portion of that membership fee. So from the writer's perspective, you're basically trying to write stuff that's going to be popular, well-received, and well-liked.
From the reader's perspective, you get two free stories a month to read, and if you want to read more of the awesome content on Medium, you are invited to pay five dollars a month. That five dollars is where the writer money comes from.
The reason I love this platform is because there are no ads. It's all about the relationship between the writers and the readers. You write great stuff, you get read, and you get rewarded for creating engaging content. It's just a fantastic platform.
So you get views, and then at the end of the month, as a writer, you get paid through Stripe. I have made—I’ve lost count. I'll do the math and I'll post the number here when I'm editing this video, but definitely upwards of 50,000, potentially coming up to 100,000 dollars writing on Medium.
Now, I'm definitely in the upper percentile, but I know a lot of people who have written on Medium and started earning money pretty quickly. I think it's a great platform. For reference, I typically see people getting paid around two cents per view or about twenty dollars per thousand views if you don't feel like doing the math at home.
Let's talk about how to get started. To get started on Medium, all you have to do is sign up with your email, create a profile, and just start writing. That's a really great thing about Medium: the bar is super low. You can create a profile and publish your first story today.
To get paid is a little harder. There is a boundary of 100 followers, so you have to get 100 followers before you can start getting paid. This can take a while to get. If you're really keen on growing quickly, I really recommend engaging with the community.
Leave thoughtful comments on other people's work, follow other people whose writing you enjoy, post a lot in different publications, and really try to expand your reach that way. I don't recommend doing follow-for-follow because if you're really that desperate for followers, you're probably not going to be writing, and you're not going to be earning that much money anyway.
I find it better to naturally gain about 100 followers and go from there.
Pros of Medium as a writing platform: you can write about whatever you want. This is the nice thing about audience-paid writing. You can write about—I've written about cats, I've written about travel. I've seen other people write about fiction, poetry, self-help, psychology, feminism—anything under the sun.
There are so many readers on Medium that you can find an audience for any topic. And like I said, it's easy to get started. I've created a ton of tutorials on how to get started, so definitely check out my channel if you want more info.
If you want a detailed step-by-step for how to get started on Medium, I really recommend signing up for my Medium starter kit. It is a free downloadable PDF that gives you a guide for what you should be doing on each of your first five days on Medium. You also get a free email course that comes with that, delivered right to your inbox with every single step along the way.
Cons of Medium: you do need 100 followers to start earning money, and that can take some time to get. So it's not like a get-rich-quick situation, but none of these are going to be a get-rich-quick situation.
Then again, like the downside of being an audience-paid platform is that what other people want to read typically matters more than what you want to write if you want to earn money. You can write about anything and earn money writing about anything, but you'll find that health, wealth, and love are the evergreen topics that tend to perform best.
The third downside: Medium pays through Stripe, as I mentioned earlier. Stripe only partners with about 40 countries, so if you're in one of the 150 countries in the world that are not partnered with Stripe, Medium has no way of paying you, which is a huge shame.
I think it's really unfortunate. I hope both Medium and Stripe change their policy soon. In the meantime, if you're in one of those countries, I recommend signing up and creating a profile and getting started anyway.
Even if you can't get paid through the Medium partner program, I have still found freelance clients through Medium, using it as a portfolio. I have built my own audience there, so I think it's still worth trying, even if you can't get paid through the Medium partner program, purely as a portfolio website platform.
Number two: let's talk about Simile. Simile is a really new, interesting one. On Simile, for context, I've earned I think a dollar and 64 cents through Simile. I'll include a screenshot here.
But this is the really great thing about it: it's for creative writing specifically. You know how I was saying on Medium you typically don't earn money if you write about stuff like creative writing? The audience just isn't there on Medium for that. They like tutorials, they like more think-pieces.
Creative writing is not a huge earner. Simile is the home for getting paid for creative writing, and at the moment, they're paying two cents per view, similar to Medium. So if you get a thousand views on Medium, you get twenty.
You can write about—you can post your fiction stuff there, you can post your short stories, creative non-fiction, personal essays—anything you want. How does it work? Really similar to Medium: you join, you create a profile, you get started, and I think there's no gate. You can just publish your first post right out the gate and start earning money on views immediately.
The pros of Simile: it's, like I said, very, very easy to get started, very beginner-friendly. It's also for creative writing. There are not a lot of places to get paid for writing fiction on the internet, and I think it's amazing that the creators of Simile have decided that that's the need they're going to fulfill—writing for people who want to read creative writing.
I also really like that it's a set amount of money: it's two cents per view. You know exactly how much you're going to earn at the end of the month based on the number of views that you have. It's very straightforward, and I really appreciate that.
Cons: I have no idea how stories get promoted to readers. I have no idea how readers find my stories. I don't know if it's chronological; I don't know if there's an algorithm in there somewhere—literally not a clue. They're not super upfront about that, so you might get a lot of stories read, you might not, and I don't exactly know how.
You do need to hit a ten-dollar minimum for the payout, so that means you need to get at least 500 views before you earn any money. The business model, I think, is temporary. They make a big point of saying, "Oh, while we're getting started, we definitely want to give writers two cents per view," but they also make it pretty clear that they could change that at any point.
So those are the pros and cons. If you're basically a fiction writer, and maybe if you already have some people who might be interested in reading your post, or you just want to test out a fiction idea or a creative writing idea, Simile is definitely the place for that.
Writing platform number three is Vocal, and then after this, we're going to go to the two job board ones. Vocal is a weird one. It's kind of like a mix between Simile and Medium. It's not as creative writing-friendly as Simile, but definitely more so than Medium.
The way it works is you create an account, you start writing, you publish stories, and again, you get paid on views. I think Vocal is more based on ad revenue, so you're not getting paid from members; you're getting paid if anybody views your story.
There are pros and cons to that. I think the rate is six dollars per thousand views, so a lot lower than Medium and Simile, and that's only if you're part of the Vocal Plus program, which costs ten dollars a month. If you're not part of that, then the rate is even lower—closer to like three or four dollars a month. Not amazing, but they do have another way of getting paid, and this is what makes Vocal unique: they host writing challenges.
The way the challenges work is they just post basically a prompt. You write for the prompt; they'll have a minimum word count, have some guidelines. The prizes have been really high in the past. I've seen people earn twenty thousand dollars for winning a Vocal challenge, so it's very real money.
Pro: Vocal is super easy for beginners to join. There is a little bit more of a submission process, so on Vocal, unlike Medium and Simile, you do have to submit a story. Once Vocal checks it for plagiarism and makes sure it's not a naughty story or anything like that, then they'll publish it.
So there's sometimes a 10 to 12-hour delay between hitting submit and actually getting your story live. It's also nice that there are other options to earn money beyond just views.
Also, again, unlike Medium, you get paid for non-member views. On Medium, you only get paid for a view if it's a paying Medium member because it's a revenue share program. On Vocal, because it's more ad-sustained, you get paid no matter who looks at your story.
You don't get paid very much, though. In the comments, you don't get paid very much; you get paid about a third per view compared to Simile and Medium. I also find I've heard feedback that the rubric for winning challenges can sometimes be confusing, or sometimes there'll be winners who didn't adhere to the rubric who still won.
I also don't love Vocal Plus as a concept. I don't like the idea that you have to pay money in order to make money. That seems just a little strange to me.
Okay, so those were three writing platforms that pay through audience. The basic gist of all three: you post something, you get views, you earn money. All three of them do have a threshold. For Vocal, you have to hit 35 before you're allowed to pay out, and for Medium and Simile, it's ten dollars.
However, ultimately, if you know your audience on there, you can write and get an income through people reading your stuff, which is pretty cool.
Now let's talk about a different kind of writing platform that pays beginners: the humble job board. We're going to cover two. The first one I want to talk about is one called Scripted. I recently applied to Scripted, and I'm really excited to talk about it with you.
With Scripted, it's simple. It works the same as any job board. You have to apply to Scripted. Scripted will look at your application and say, "Yeah, okay, we'll let you join our pool of writers," or "No, we're not going to let you join our pool of writers."
Once you're in, you'll then have access to a selection of jobs that clients upload from their end. Let's break down each of those steps. First, you have to apply and be accepted at Scripted. Scripted says that they only let five percent of applicants in—roughly one in every 20 people is the acceptance rate.
There's no good way to say this: I took the test, and I thought it was really easy. I'm not a flawless writer by any means, but I found it was a lot of grammar-heavy stuff—15 questions of really grammar-heavy stuff.
I thought about posting the answer key in this video, and I decided not to because I think if you genuinely can't pass the test, then it's likely that you're not going to be writing at a high enough quality to make their clients happy, and they'll probably boot you off the platform anyway.
So I recommend taking the test. Really take your time. Feel free to Google stuff during the test; that's what I did, and I did get some answers that way. They also upload resources to help you just ace that test, so take your time, do some research, and fingers crossed.
Once you get accepted, they prompt you to fill out your portfolio. I recommend doing this as thoroughly as possible because this is how you get assigned to jobs. They'll ask you to upload some writing samples; they'll ask you to talk a little bit about what you write about.
If you don't yet have a portfolio, I recommend writing not a lot—maybe like two or three articles that are geared to industries that you think you'd like to write for, like healthcare, pets, or finance—anything like that. Upload them to a place like Medium, which works as a free portfolio.
Once you've filled out your profile, you will then have three ways to earn money on this writing platform.
Way number one: smart match job invites. The way this works is the client will upload a brief to Scripted, and Scripted will say, "Okay, based on the portfolios that our writers have filled out, we're going to send this out to those writers based on a smart match."
I think it's done by AI. Probably that gets sent to your inbox. It's sent to a small group of writers. If you are the first one to reply to that email and you're the first one to hit accept, you get the job. The job is yours, guaranteed. If not, you are out of luck, and you have to be fast.
You have to be rapid. I once waited two minutes before hitting accept, and I was too late. Somebody else had beat me to it.
So, yeah, just jump in on that one. Also, the client sets the rate, so it tends to be a little lower, but it is a guaranteed method.
Method number two is a job invite. It's similar but a little different. A client will say, "Hey, we want to write about this thing. Who do you think is going to be a good fit?" Scripted sends out that job invite to a group of like 10 or 20 writers.
We then have the option to send a proposal back to the client, and the client will look at the first five proposals, and then they have two weeks to reply. So it's a very hurry-up-and-wait kind of situation.
Afterwards, they'll let you know if you get accepted. You do have a chance to set your own rate here along with your proposal.
Third, it's just like a regular job board. There will be jobs uploaded to the site. You can then make an application or propose how you would handle certain pitches or briefs that the clients have uploaded.
What I really like about Scripted is there's a floor: clients can't pay less than, I think, seven cents a word. That is rare; that is valuable; that is incredible. I love that.
Seven cents still isn't a lot, but compared to something like Textbroker, I mean, come on. You also have access to a lot of different work opportunities, so clients from all kinds of different sectors—no matter what your interest is, you're bound to find something you like.
I like the fact that there are good clients. I've seen clients on Scripted that have been with the platform for like five years, ten years. So that, to me, speaks to the fact that Scripted has a good relationship with writers and a good relationship with clients. That's good; that's valuable.
Cons: apparently, it's hard to get accepted. Again, not to brag or anything, but if they're only accepting one in 20 writers, that's tough. That's a high bar.
I also find the timing can be a little whiplashy. You either have like 120 seconds to hit accept to a job, but then once you apply to a job, you then have to wait two weeks to hear back. Like, come on.
I wish they would put some more pressure on the client side to get us some faster answers. You also will need to do, for a lot of these jobs, upfront work. You'll need to create a proposal for a client, and there's a small chance you'll create this proposal and not make money.
So you'll have to do work and not necessarily get paid. You also need to have at least a couple of articles that can serve as a portfolio.
In short, Scripted is a really good platform for beginners to start getting paid. You don't need a wide portfolio; you just need something that's targeted. I really like that they seem to have a focus on making sure that writers get paid fairly, which is fantastic.
Textbroker: this is not the first time I've reviewed Textbroker. Textbroker is option number five. In my past video, I kind of trashed Textbroker, which I stand by. I thought that their website was super janky, their application was not very clear for writers, and it was hard to understand.
Again, not to brag, but I only got a three-star rating, and I think I'm kind of good. The way it works is you—oh yeah, and their pay is terrible. Their pay is in the gutter; it was bad.
That all being said, I got a lot of feedback on that video that was like, "Look, maybe for you, Julie, high and mighty in your tower, you can accept higher rates, but for beginners, it's good to have a platform like Textbroker where you can just get your foot in the door."
Hey, just editing this video and found out that Textbroker is not accepting new writer registrations until spring of 2023. I'm making this video in January, so it might be a month or two before you're able to sign up, just so you know.
So I'm coming back and giving Textbroker a fair review. The way it works is similar to Scripted. You have to apply. Once you apply, you get a star rating: one, two, three, four, or five. The higher the star rating, the higher paying jobs you qualify for.
On the client side, they will upload job briefs to a job board, and they can specify, "Oh, we want only five-star writers," or "only four-star," or "only three-star." As a three-star writer, I was only allowed to apply for three-star or below jobs, which hurt me and my soul.
So you can get paid three different ways on Textbroker. You can accept jobs on the job board. Those are very simple: you apply—you don't even have to apply, actually—you accept the job, you do the work, you get paid. Very straightforward, very simple.
These tend to be really short, snappy jobs—very easy to do, like a couple hundred words at most. I think I earned 2.42 cents doing those.
You can also apply to join a team. This means that you'll have a more regular relationship with this client. You're like, "Hey, I want to write for you, car company, because I think you're great. Please hire me."
This means that they'll send you regular assignments more frequently than just the one-off that you might get on the job board. If you're a really great writer or your portfolio is really well filled out, you'll have the option to do a direct order.
This is when the client says, "Hey, we want Julie to write this article for us." The pay for those is, as I've said, like the job board jobs at the lowest, team orders medium, direct orders highest.
The pros: really having to think here. Okay, there are some pros to this, right? It is very, very entry-level. You don't have to write a whole blog post; you can just write a little bit of copy, a couple hundred words, and you can get paid.
You don't necessarily have to upload a portfolio; you just have to pass this grammar test. You don't have to make a proposal; you can just nab a job and get paid right away.
Cons: this is a longer list. The pay is very low—it's like genuinely insultingly low. I consider it insulting how low the pay is on Textbroker. And it's not just me; I think if you're thinking about it, you should be insulted too.
You are worth more than what they're paying you. I'm getting all ahead of myself again. It's good to get your foot in the door, but don't do more than a couple jobs on Textbroker because you are worth more.
I also found the application was not very well laid out. It was not set up to help you show off your best self. It was confusing; the instructions weren't clear. The website is super janky, like I said, so it was not a great application experience.
So overall, I hate to say it, but it's probably the best if you want to get paid right away out of all five. It's the worst out of all five in terms of user experience, in terms of the kind of writing that you're going to do, and in terms of the pay potential.
So what I recommend doing, if you're watching this video, is signing up for all five. I recommend giving each one of them the good old college try. I mean, post three articles on Simile, Vocal, and Medium at least.
Apply and see if you can get three jobs on Scripted and Textbroker, and really see which one works for you. Really see which one pays the best, which one you enjoy the most, and which one has the highest earning potential for you in the long term.
You might find that Textbroker is good for just getting your confidence up and just getting a couple jobs and getting your foot in the door that way. You can add some experience to your resume, and then you move on.
Or you might find, I don't know how, but you might find that you love Textbroker and you want to hang out there. You want to live there. Good for you! Amazing!
Or with Scripted, or Medium, like me, or Vocal, or any of the other platforms I've mentioned. Hopefully, this video served as a good place to start. You understand what you need for each of them, and you can go ahead and get started with each one.
I really recommend doing a mix because that way you're not dependent on any one platform, and you've got a good chance of finding something that works for you.
So these five writing platforms pay beginners. I think they're all—are they all great? No, they all have their merits, I'll say that.
I would love to hear what you think of this video. These platforms—are there any other platforms you'd like me to review? Let me know in the comment box below.
And as always, if you liked this kind of video, subscribe. If you want to see more, let me know in the comments. If you hated it, keep that to yourself because I'm very thin-skinned, and I am easily hurt.
Thank you so much for watching this video. Have a great rest of your week, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!