How to Make People Hate You
Hey kids!
Back for another day of Demand Writing. I’ve already hastily written one article and ready to get up to my quota today. I’m trying to hit 6 per day. I usually do about 3 in the morning and then 3 at night. That breaks it up a little. And it’s pretty easy right now since I’m on a little bit of a streak and found more than enough titles in my “special subject area” (no, I’m not telling you what it is).
Things are starting to take off around here. Thanks for coming! And keep coming! And tell your friends. Funny thing, when I first signed up this site and put up the Google Ads, I was getting a lot of Self Defense type ads for some reason (like Google was telling me that Demand was going to come and kick my ass so I should get ready).
Those seem to have gone away for the most part now and I’m getting a lot of freelance type ads. Which is good. But what’s funny is that even as I write this article, what’s one of the ads for on our front page here?
Yep – FREELANCE WRITING WITH DEMAND STUDIOS. Ohh, the irony.
That being said, this increase in traffic has given us a lot more comments. We just got a great one from someone calling themselves PISSED_OFF_CE:
I know you hate CEs. But first let me qualify–I started out at demand as a writer. But it took WAY too freaking long to write articles with any value and with the requested references. So I applied to be a CE. Started doing that a few months later. That’s when I discovered that most of the articles turned in are just SHITTY! I couldn’t believe I had spent so much time trying to write GOOD articles! The ones I have edited have, for the most part, been just crap.
Hahahaha. I hear you sistah!
Actually a very insightful comment. The whole thing is here.
But she brings up something I’ve been trying to hammer in from day one: DO NOT SPEND TOO MUCH TIME WRITING. Hastily research, write, move on.
I’ll comb through the Demand Forums later and see if we could find something else to talk about.
One thing I thought was interesting is the cult-like behavior of the Demand Studios writers in the forum. Gets a little Manson-esque if you know what I’m saying. I’ll see if I can find some good posts.
I’m not sure I understand this site. Is there a known, and popular alternative to “eHow” and having to go thru Demand Studios? My experience writing for Demand Studios has been ugly and horrific. After numerous re-writes to make my latest submission sterile, humorless and exactly to their liking, they then kicked back a final “We can’t publish your article because you did not include a reference.” I found that peculiar because I wrote the How To specifically because there was no other article on the internet like. Worse still was that the subject matter was how to manipulate an electronic image to create an avatar under 8k, yet I was not permitted to upload any of my own images to illustrate the final result. Yuck! I was hoping to get pointed to a site like the old “eHow”, where you could write, get reviewed, and published easily. Without having to write like a robot.
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Those poor CEs! Whomever at DS is spitting out guidelines and updates to guidelines hourly ought to give the copy editors a one page cheat sheet on Demand formatting basics. Just today I was given opposing directions on how to treat references and resources within the span of a couple hours.
Hey, I just saw a tweet on a WaPo story that seems eerily like a Demand story: “Study may shed light on when it’s appropriate to remove wisdom teeth”
Original Demand title: When Should Wisdom Teeth Be Removed?
Don’t mind me…I’ve been writing my ass off since Saturday. I’m so slow, though. I check and double check my own facts, do multiple spell checks. I think I am earning something like a nickle an hour. And my head hurts trying to follow all the murky formatting rules. I wouldn’t do this if I weren’t behind on my bills.
Enjoy your site a lot.
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a new batch of CEs. just got an article approved without a rewrite, but when i looked at the “track changes” i noticed some anti-guidelines alterations. took the actionable verbs out of my ehow and introduced some passive voice. ok, so the flow is actually now much better than what the rigid ds style guidelines allow me to write, but, umm…. aren’t CEs supposed to enforce the style guidelines???
got a weird rewrite request the other day about reformatting my references–violating the style guidelines, of course.
newbie CEs are upon us! god help us ds “veteran” writers.
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