Best paying article submission

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alex.barylski
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Best paying article submission

Post by alex.barylski »

Sitepoint will pay $50 to $100 per article depending on it's popularity...$100 for 4 hours of work...not great...but it's better than a kick in the groin.

What other sites offer to pay their authors? How much do they pay?

I believe Zend offer's their authors payment but I couldn't find the amount anywhere. ANyone know of any other sites which I might submit articles to? As well as remuneration -- which is what I'm really asking as I am aware of dozens of article sites but only a few that pay.
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ghurtado
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by ghurtado »

If you intend to write technical PHP articles for the lucrative aspect of it, you could be in for a rude awakening.
alex.barylski
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by alex.barylski »

Not so much technical...more architecture and best practices but maybe occassional technical articles as well.

Sitepoint pays OK money...but if it takes me 4 hours to hammer out a well written article and I only make $100 at best in a full day I'd make about $200. It would be difficult to constantly come up with fresh ideas...but I have about 50 articles on the back burner already so the ideas are there and so is some body...I just need incentive to polish them up, proof them, etc...

If I were paid say $150/article I could make a decent supplemental income from that.
matthijs
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by matthijs »

And what if you wrote those 50 high-quality articles and put them on your own site in a nice way? Of course you don't get direct income then, but you will get a lot of traffic, many incoming links, higher pagerank, become an authority, etc. And probably land new jobs because of that.

From what I understand many of those sites for which you can write articles get the complete rights of the articles (or at least for a while). That's something I would never accept as a writer. Only if it would pay decent (say 10 times as much).
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Ambush Commander
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by Ambush Commander »

I believe php|architect pays for submissions, although it's not obvious from their website; I can ask Sean Coates about their practices there, if you like.
alex.barylski
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by alex.barylski »

If you wouldn't mind I'd appreciate it...you can PM the details like the length of the exclusivity, $$$/article, etc... :D
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ghurtado
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by ghurtado »

Why PM? Post the answer in the same place where you asked the question, so all who have an interest may benefit.
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onion2k
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by onion2k »

No offence Hockey, but I don't think you're really that good at writing. Whenever you write a long post here it's always a rambling blog-post style affair.
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ghurtado
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by ghurtado »

I second Onion's opinion: writing is not for everyone. You may have the technical skills required by the subject at hand, but unless you pair that up with good communication skills, your articles will never be published in serious websites. It takes a special ability to be able to communicate your thoughts clearly, unequivocally and concisely - no amount of technical expertise can make up for poor communication skills.
alex.barylski
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by alex.barylski »

offence Hockey, but I don't think you're really that good at writing. Whenever you write a long post here it's always a rambling blog-post style affair.
I agree...but I visit probably 2 dozen forums each and every day...if I took my time to proof read everything I wrote I would never time for anything else. I wouldn't even give my forum posts blog status. I'd give them forum post status.
I second Onion's opinion: writing is not for everyone. You may have the technical skills required by the subject at hand, but unless you pair that up with good communication skills, your articles will never be published in serious websites. It takes a special ability to be able to communicate your thoughts clearly, unequivocally and concisely - no amount of technical expertise can make up for poor communication skills.
Have you read my blog? How about the web site? I asked the opinion of some well known and respected authors over at CodeProject.com and with the exception of a few grammatical/spelling errors...they all said it was clear and well written. :(

When I write in a forum I don't really put much effort into making it sound clear so much as just a quick brain dump of ideas or questions. Articles are usually a refinement of my ideas.

Do me a favour and read my articles on CP and my blog and web site and tell me where I'm going wrong and how it could be improved. What's vague or doesn't make sense, what can I do to improve???

http://www.codeproject.com/script/Artic ... amid=26623

I'm not a professional writer by any means but I enjoy sharing my thoughts and experiences with others. I also find it an excellent way to further my understanding of any subject.
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ghurtado
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by ghurtado »

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I wasn't talking specifically about your communication skills, I am nobody to judge that; just pointing out how important it is to be a good communicator in order to write a good technical article.
alex.barylski
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by alex.barylski »

Hey it's all good...I'd still appreciate any commentary you (or anyone else) might have in regards to my articles/website/blog/etc...I'm always looking to improve what little bit that I know about writing. :)
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VirtuosiMedia
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Re: Best paying article submission

Post by VirtuosiMedia »

Hockey wrote:Hey it's all good...I'd still appreciate any commentary you (or anyone else) might have in regards to my articles/website/blog/etc...I'm always looking to improve what little bit that I know about writing. :)
I'd second the suggestion of writing for your own site. I don't think that you'll make enough writing for someone regularly to make it worth your while. The only reason I would write for another blog or site is exposure. Writing for your own site can help you improve your brand and your marketability and that's good no matter if you have your own company or are working for someone else.

I actually went to school for English so I can offer a little bit of general advice:

Audience

Understanding your audience is important to writing, just as it is to user interface design. You should know what lengths of writing work well for the attention span of your audience and you should vary your lengths from time to time. It's also vital to speak the same language. I'm not just talking about a spoken or written language like English or French; there are also cultural and sub-cultural contexts and euphemisms to which you need to pay attention. This will affect what content you produce and also how you present it. For instance, if your intended audience is pro-Linux, writing about Windows frequently isn't going to gain you a very large readership unless you are somehow also able to relate it to Linux.

Writing on the web is different than writing a book because the Internet and books are vastly different mediums. There are many different types of readers and you need to be able to provide something for all of them. Some readers will skim articles and others will read every word. You need to cater to both of them. Here's how:
  • Provide headers and section breaks for skimmers.
  • Vary your paragraph lengths. The variety breaks monotony and you definitely don't want monotony. Visual breaks also will not tire readers as easily.
  • Use summary and conclusion paragraphs and sentences throughout your writing, but only when you aren't being redundant.
  • Lists and bullet points help a lot. Pictures do too.
Simplicity

Reduce complexity. Write as simply as you can. I've seen the quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery many times while reading software articles, but it definitely applies to writing as well: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” It's far better to enable your readers to understand your writing than to awe them with pseudo-intellectual jargon.

So how can you write simply?
  • Reduce concepts and ideas into understandable and smaller pieces.
  • Anticipate questions and answer them in advance.
  • Minimize the number of clauses that you use. Run-on sentences should be reworked into smaller sentences. As a general rule, unless you have a comma-separated list, you should look at a rewrite if you have more than two or three commas or semi-colons in your sentence.
  • Don't assume a reader's level of knowledge. Build your writing from the ground up so that you can be sure that you and your reader are speaking the same language. This doesn't mean that you can't write about advanced or very technical subjects, but it helps if you can at least provide a link for beginners to get up to speed.
Style

Style is what separates the technically competent writers from the writers whom everyone enjoys reading. In fact, compelling style can cover over a lot of writing faults. People like humor, personality, controversy, etc. Weave a story into your writing, make it real and applicable to your audience in some way, tell jokes (if you're good at that sort of thing), make a controversial claim; there are many different methods you can use to incorporate your own personality or even a manufactured persona into your writing. This is called your narrative voice.

There are also a few technical aspects that can affect style. Using active voice is usually a good choice over using passive voice. An example of a passive sentence could be, "Mary was driven to the hospital by John." There is nothing wrong with the sentence grammatically, but it isn't very interesting. Consider the same sentence written in an active voice: "John drove Mary to the hospital." It's much more immediate and interesting and there's actually a bit of tension.

Here's the difference between active and passive sentences:
  • Passive - The subject is the recipient of the verb
  • Active - The subject is the actor or doer of the verb
Word choice is another technical component of style. Again, you'll want to choose words that are appropriate to your audience's culture and education. When you've finished writing something, reread what you've written, look for repeated words, and replace them with similar words where possible.

I'll leave the tips at that for right now, but hopefully what I wrote will help point you in the right direction.
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