I’ve used WriterAccess to outsource content since late 2014, and I’ve been outsourcing around 50,000 words per month there since the start of this year. It’s been my #1 recommended place for outsourcing for quite a while. I have a team of writers there that I really love, but I also send a lot of articles to the general writers pool. Back in the day, I got my start earning money from home as a freelance writer, and WriterAccess was always one of the best places for me to get paid to write. So, I guess I have a bit of a special appreciation for them. But that lovefest has officially ended.
You see, I’ve recently decided to turboboost the content production for my sites. So, in addition to content for any clients that I take on, I have been ordering more and more content for my own sites. And recently I have been plagued with writers at WriterAccess taking my orders and sitting on them until the very last second that they are due, and then releasing them. When this happens, the titles go inactive and I have to go back into my dashboard and re-send them to the general writers pool, which prolongs the time that it takes for me to get a completed article back from the writer. You can see how this can be a problem, right? Especially when you are working on deadlines for clients.
Well, yesterday morning, three different writers abandoned articles at the last minute, followed by an additional two instances of that this morning. And this doesn’t count the times that it happened the previous night, or earlier in the week. And some of the writers had taken more than one title, so they were releasing more than one at the last minute! The writers were rated different levels, so I knew that it wasn’t simply a problem with the skill level of the writers. And let’s be honest, even if they were all level 2 writers, it wouldn’t have changed anything. My instructions include a sample article as a style guideline, some additional information, and a request to ask me any questions immediately upon picking up the order instead of waiting until the last minute.
Frustrated by this growing trend among the WriterAccess writers, I reached out to the staff via their help desk to see if they could suggest something that I could add to my instructions to prevent this sort of thing from happening. In the image below is the response that I got back.
What an amazingly non-helpful response. He may as well have said “We don’t really care, but we’d like more of your money and suggest that you babysit the writers.” The best part is that he immediately closed my ticket.
At this point, I’m mostly just baffled by this response. What kind of business has someone spending thousands of dollars with them and responds to problem with something like this? Needless to say, I’ll be winding down my business with them and moving on.
If you are using WriterAccess for your content outsourcing, or considering them, then I want to you to know that the platform does seem to have some problems right now (at least in my experience). And, in my opinion, they don’t really seem that interested in fixing them. But hey, if you don’t have any real timeline of when you want your content completed, they might work out just fine for you.
Hey, I’m Shawna. I make a living working from my laptop in places like London, Sydney, Dubai, Rome, Oslo, Bangkok, Las Vegas, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. I share how I do some of that on this website.
Wow, I would be pissed about that too if I had deadlines. For how expensive and supposedly premium their service is, I am surprised by their “shoulder shrug” response. There has to be some kind of consequence to the writer for that type of behavior.
I’ve spent a few K there, but mostly on 4 star writers with client reorder rates of at least 45%. The only issue I seem to have is repeated requests for time extensions. In the end, its worth the money for me to get work back I don’t need to heavily edit.
Where will you be moving your work to?
Yeah, they didn’t really give me a good reason to keep paying that premium price, even though I gave them a chance to. When I used to write there a few years back, you would lose your ability to accept new articles for one week if you did this – after that you got kicked off the site. However, that no longer seems to be true since a few writers have done this to me 3 times each!
Next month I’ll be placing an ad on the Problogger job board to see if I can’t find some more reliable people that I can count on. I’ll update how that goes once I get more into it.