Experience
with the company:
I signed up for an account with londonbroker.net
in 2010. I did this on the
recommendation or a friend who was making money as a writer. I was bit iffy about joining at first because
of the amount they pay per article and the type of articles they want. They have 300, 400 and 500 word articles and
UAW articles which are articles with two re-writes. They pay $2 for a straight 300 word article,
$4.75 for a UAW 300. This put me off for
a bit as most of their articles are UAW and for three 300 word articles I was
going to get $4.75 which is $1.58 per article.
At first I only submitted a few articles
when I could. I was being paid by them
weekly when I had a big enough balance.
Once I really got into the article writing thing I worked more and was
making around $80 a week.
I have to say at this point that I was
quite happy with this. I talked my
friend into opening an account as well and they were also earning a bit each week. For over a year we were all earning off the
site. The site itself is easy to use but
you have to be fast if there are any straight articles on the board as they go
very quickly.
Of course I'm not saying that it has been
clean sailing with the site. The way
that they present the articles are like this.
On the board they tell you the length of the article and the keyword you
need to use. You then have to find a way
to write an article about the keyword.
The keyword has to appear in the first and last paragraph of your
article. The problem is that the keyword
has to appear exactly as stated and they sometimes make no sense and do not fit
grammatically in an article. Even putting
a comma between words stops the article from going through. There is also the fact that parts of the main
keyword can only have a keyword density of 1.5%. So if you are writing a 300 word article
about car insurance you can only use the word car 4.5 times in the whole
article or else the editors reject your article.
The editors can also be a bit of a
problem. Sure it’s their job to make
sure that the articles are to a certain standard but the problem comes when
they reject the article and just say punctuation errors or grammatical errors
but don’t help with identifying them. If
I proof read my article and then submit it I think its fine so I don’t know
where the errors are.
I did have one major issue with the site
when they suddenly disabled my account earlier this year. I received an email stating that I had not
confirmed my email address so my account was disabled. I never received anything saying I had to
verify my email. Only after my account
was disabled did I get the email asking me to verify and once I did my account
was back up.
Other than a few issues with keyword
density and the above problem with email verification I had no problems with
this site. I would and had recommended
it to other people. I stopped writing as
much at the end of 2011 as I got a full time job but I was submitting articles
when I could and getting paid. I didn’t
have any problems with them until recently.
The first problem came when the friend I
had recommended at the beginning submitted an article and suddenly her account
was disabled. She had submitted an
article and then received an email from the editor saying that the article had
mistakes in grammar, punctuation and the general level of writing was not up to
their standards. She emailed them
support about this and all they said was that the decision is down to the
editor and that it was final.
I was a bit nervous about this because
there had been no problems for her before.
Regardless, I submitted an article a few days later and everything was
fine. The real problem came when I did
another article for the site. On Word
there were no problems with the article and I proof read everything. I'm not saying that my writing is perfect but
so far londonbroker.net had not had any problem with my work.
The whole submission process went fine and
there were no problems. A couple hours
after submitting my article I received an email from AMS saying that the
article contained multiple errors in content, grammar and spelling. Because of the number of negative reviews in
the past, your work doesn't meet the quality standards expected of AMS
writers. YOUR ACCOUNT IS DISABLED.
Understandably I was quite shocked. In over a year during which I have written
over 350 articles I have had my articles rejected about 10 times. At the end of the email they state if you
have questions please contact us. So I
contacted them asking what was wrong with the article and what other reviews
lead to the decision of disabling my account.
The reply I have received simply says that they are sorry but my account
has been disabled and that the decision is final and irreversible.
So no answer to my question and honestly
that felt like a brush off to me. I
asked my friend who also had her account disabled and she told me that the
emails I received are exactly the same as hers, word for word. This leads me to think about the fact that at
one point AMS didn't have many articles and they attributed this to having too
many writers. So maybe they are trying
to lower the number of writers they have.
There is no way for me to know but the fact that they approved my last
article without a problem makes me wonder about my account being disabled. Well that and the fact that this happened to
my friend not too long ago.
The verdict:
So what would be my verdict on AMS? The site is not a bad one to work for as you
do get paid. However, I would be wearier
to recommend this site to people now than I was a year ago. The amount they pay per article is lower than
other places like Text Broker or personal hires from eLance and Odesk. Then there is also the issue that they might
disable your account and never give you the complete reason or an email answer
that is not standard.
I would say that joining will be up to you
but I would no longer recommend this site.
