Freelance Work Online - Alternatives to Demand Studios Continued

Ebyline - I recently wrote about Ebyline on Demand Studios Review, suggesting it for those with a bit more experience. 

They are in the beta phase so it may take a little while to get a response from your application. It sounds like a great opportunity if you do get hired, so applying seems well worth the relatively little amount of effort involved. Read more about Ebyline here.

Helium - Helium offers a number of ways for writers to get paid for their content. They have a marketplace where you can claim and write assignments, and then get an upfront payment if yours is chosen for publication. Unfortunately, this operates the way Seed used to, where you will have to compete against other writers who have claimed and written the same assignments. 

They also have writing contests, and have recently begun posting jobs through their publisher network, where you can find more steady work independent of Helium.

Daily revenue share is another option and from what I hear Helium attracts a pretty decent number of page views. I intend to apply, a process which seems pretty straightforward and easy. I will update once I have a bit of firsthand experience with Helium.

Bright Hub - Bright Hub also offers several different ways to publish and earn money from your content. They have three basic categories. The most involved “channel” is the editorial community channel. If accepted to write in this capacity for Bright Hub you will work with a team of writers and editors with specific knowledge on a particular category. You receive both an upfront payment of $10 as well as revenue share on each article.

The other two channels: self-publish community channel and hubfolio personal channel both work independent of editors and pay out in revenue share only. These latter categories seem almost identical. The main difference is that the hubfolio personal channel is more like your own personal blog, with no other writers contributing to the content.

Squidoo - Squidoo is another writing website that is new to me, but not at all new to the world. It was founded in 2005, a year before HubPages, and it works in essentially the same way. You write about whatever you want and can earn money through Google AdSense and affiliate links.

They also have an affiliate program of their own. If you sign up through my link, for instance, we'll both be paid $5 when you reach your first $15 worth of earnings. Then, once you're up and running, you can invite your friends to sign up and when they reach $15 you'll both get an extra $5.

The pay structure at Squidoo breaks down as follows: 5% to charity, 45% to Squidoo and 50% to the writer. I have yet to try out Squidoo for myself, but it looks like a good opportunity. I plan on writing a full review once I get some experience writing on the site.

Triond - Triond is similar to Squidoo and HubPages, except instead of the articles being published on the site itself, they are published on a variety of niche websites. 

I believe you are selling the rights to your work, but you will earn 50% of all ad revenue earned from each article. The earnings come through pay per click and impression advertising.

You can also build a portfolio of your published work through the site on Triond itself.

AuctionBytes - AuctionBytes is a good writing opportunity for those who know a good deal about online auctions, as well as for collectors.

AuctionBytes accepts how to and information pieces, profiles, reviews, tricks and tips, news stories, and event coverage articles. They pay $20 for collector articles and a pre-negotiated amount for non-collector pieces. Required word count is between 100-500 words per article. Interest and knowledge on the topic is more important than previous professional experience.

 InfoBarrel - InfoBarrel is another site that splits ad revenue with writers. There are no upfront or page view payments, but the ad split is better than any other site out there that I know of today.

Writers use their own Google AdSense accounts to earn revenue.

InfoBarrel gives 75% of the revenue to the writers, and only keeps 25% for itself. The site doesn't get as high traffic as HubPages, but it is starting to grow rapidly. I have heard quite a few writers say that their earnings have markedly increased with InfoBarrel recently.

I don't have any personal experience with the site, but intend to change that very soon. Once I do sign up and start writing for them I'll do a full review. Until then, I recommend signing up and seeing what you think.

InfoBarrel also accepts instructional videos, so this is also an opportunity for Demand Studios filmmakers looking for more work.

List My Five - I just found out about List My Five, and it seems like a clever idea for a site. It's essentially just a website with lists of top fives, or "five reasons to..." type articles. There aren't any editors to go through, which is good if you can self edit well, and the earnings are all through ad share. 

Unfortunately, they don't disclose their percentages, and since they're a very new site they don't get much traffic. Still, it might be a fun place to do some quick articles on the side and see where it goes. 

Like with most of the shared revenue sites, writers need to set up their own Google AdSense accounts in order to earn rev share money.

Suite101 - Suite101 is a revenue share website. It's one of the better known sites with this kind of business model. 

They don't publicize their percentages. Some have reported doing quite well with Suite101 once they built up enough articles.

Suite101 claims exclusive web rights for one year. To find out more, visit their Writers FAQ page. 

Seed - AOL’s Seed used to run as an “open content submission platform.” What does that mean exactly? Basically it meant you could log on and see what headlines were available, and then write stories to go with them, as many as you want as often as you want. The downside was that there was no guarantee that your article would be chosen, and when you hit the submit button, you were competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of other stories written to fill that title.

They have since changed the way they operate. They now function in much the same was as Demand Studios operates. There is a database of titles you can claim and you don't have to compete with anyone else.

They also offer long term writing assignments in some cases, for those who qualify.

Pay varies, with most one-time assignments paying between $5 for short tip articles to $50 or so for longer pieces.

Your articles will appear on AOL owned sites, such as Moviefone, BlackVoices, AOL Travel, AOL Music and stylelist.com.

Review times tend to be slower than Demand Studios and there are fewer articles to choose from, but it's not a bad supplement to Demand writing.

Seed also offers an opportunity for photographers to sell their work online. It appears that they operate like a traditional stock photography company. If you’ve had experience selling photographs through Seed, I’d be interested to hear what kind of experience you had with them.

UPDATE: On closer inspection, some articles still state, "Anyone can submit an article. We'll pick one or more to publish." So apparently, you will still be competing in some cases. Look at the description when you click on the assignment to see if the piece you're interested in falls into this category.

Read our AOL Seed review here.

Tutorial Tub - Tutorial Tub is yet another revenue share website, which offers a 50-50 split. Again, writers need to set up their own Google AdSense account to participate.

Since the revenue split is the same as HubPages, less than InfoBarrel, and gets less traffic than either one, I hesitate to recommend Tutorial Tub too strongly.

If you're looking for a bunch of places to publish articles, just to spread things around and not be too dependent on any one or two sites - which I generally do recommend - then it's not a bad additional egg to your proverbial basket.

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