Requirements: None specified
Pay: Varies, you set your price for your content
Payment Method: Paypal or wire transfer to your bank (wire transfer only available if you make more than $500 in a month)
Payment Frequency: Monthly
Sign Up:
http://www.constant-content.com/area/registerauthor.htm
What You Need to Know
Constant Content is a little different than many of the other freelance writing sites I have listed. It’s similar in lots of ways to AOL Seed because different authors can work on one assignment, and the requester picks the best submission. This means there is no guarantee you’ll get paid immediately for any work you complete.
If you pass their test (which is short and fairly simple) Constant Content will accept you into their pool of writers. You can choose to either answer calls for content (as mentioned above — more than one writer likely doing an assignment) or you can publish your own content and set your price for it. What you submit is up to you, but it has to be of good quality. Constant Content editors will look it over carefully and ask you to revise it if it doesn’t meet their standards.
If you work on an assignment for a requester and they do not choose your work, there is still a chance it will sell eventually. The article will go into their large pool of content and be available for sale. Eventually, someone may purchase it, and your hard work won’t have been for nothing.
When you sell an article, you can list it three different ways. Your options are usage, unique, and full rights. When someone buys your article for usage, they purchase it to publish as is. Articles can be sold for usage multiple times. Unique rights is similar to the usage option, except that the article doesn’t remain in Constant Content’s database to be sold again. When you sell an article for full rights, you are basically selling your article. The purchaser can edit your article and resell it if they choose to do so. It will also disappear from the Constant Content database. Usage is the only option that allows you to sell the same article over and over.
You get the highest price for full rights and the lowest for usage. Constant Content takes 35% commission off your earnings, so that’s important to keep in mind when you set your prices. Pricing isn’t an exact science, and it’s helpful to go by what other authors are doing. They also have some helpful guidelines on their site showing you the recommended prices depending on your word count. Articles over 1000 words can get over $100 for full rights.
Constant Content has a referral program as well. If someone signs up using your referral link, you’ll get a 5 percent commission of their sales.
I have only dabbled in this site a little bit. I’m testing the waters by submitting some things here and there to see how I do. Many people really enjoy this site, and claim to do well here. You can take articles you’ve published at places like Bukisa and sell them for usage rights, which is neat. However, Constant Content must be able to verify that you are the author of the previously published content, or you could get flagged for plagiarism, so make sure any previously published content has your name or byline on it and that it matches the name you use on Constant Content.
Update: 1-19-2011
I put a total of four articles up at Constant Content around the time of this original blog posting, and none of them ever sold. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have eventually, though. I took the articles down, closed my account, and moved them to the Yahoo! Contributor Network. I have determined that in order to do well with Constant Content, you need to have a lot of content available for sale on their site. The more you have up, the more you are likely to sell. I only ever bothered to put up four articles, so it’s no wonder they didn’t sell. I decided that ultimately I would prefer to earn money off my articles indefinitely rather than receive a one-time payment (other than the articles I write for other upfront pay content sites – which is a have to for getting the bills paid). Constant Content, I decided, is not for me, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t for you! Like I said, a lot of people do well here. I don’t want my comments to discourage you if you’ve put or are planning to put a lot of effort into this site. I just decided it’s not a path I want to take right now.
