By Rachel Presser

One of the first writing-for-hire websites I started working for was WriterAccess, back in 2016. I wasn’t sure what to expect at first and had a couple of teething issues in the first few months, then I started making a significant amount of money on the site–going from $60 to $200 here and there for random articles to reeling in $3,000-4,000 per month. These days, I cycle between both depending on what’s happening with both WriterAccess clients, private clients, and other projects I’m working on.

If you’re looking to make a dependable income from content writing and/or get much higher rates than you would on most content sites, WriterAccess is absolutely one of the top places you need to apply to.

Here’s a thorough breakdown of the pros and cons of making money on the site.

Getting Started

You can start by creating an account here.

The site is currently undergoing some changes, but when you’re starting out you do have a limit to how many orders you can have checked out at a time. Love list, crowd, and solo orders all have separate queues. Solos are always unlimited but it might be difficult to get them in your early days on the site.

If you’re knowledgeable in various freelancing and digital marketing topics though, the WriterAccess house accounts that provide content for the site’s blog and their sister site Content Marketing Conference are an excellent place to start and get those necessary orders for building up your positioning there.

Ergo, I can’t stress this enough: you need a very strong profile to get ahead. Staff and clients WILL be searching them for the right terms, and you need to sell yourself well! Extensively describe your professional and writing experience, have samples for industries, asset types, and company sizes posted, all of which help show what you’re capable of and why the client would want to hire you and have the staff see you as a valuable asset.

Managed Service, Automated Matching, and Casting Calls

What sets WriterAccess apart from other writing platforms is that you have far more earning potential because of a few factors: one of them is setting your own rates, but the other is that you simply have access to a much wider pool of clients.

Some websites rely solely on managed service and others on you making pitches. WriterAccess uses a blend of the above where you can take action to pitch clients, or clients can directly reach out to you:

• Love lists–the client finds you by coming across your profile, you and everyone else on the list can claim the orders or they might assign them to you directly as solo orders
• Casting calls–you apply to posted casting calls
• Open crowd orders–anyone in the appropriate star level can claim them if they’re open
• Automation–”Smart Match Me Up” orders that rely on an algorithm
• Managed talent services–the staff may manually match you up with certain clients

When you apply to casting calls, the next step is often the client adding you to their love list or communicating more about the project and their needs. Ideally, you want to get a solo order because the way that love lists work is that you’ll get an email notice 10 minutes before the orders become available to claim. Depending on how many writers are on the list, you can be constantly refreshing the screen waiting for that drop just to find that someone beat you by a nanosecond!

Solo orders eliminate all that stress as only you can access them. Any writer can claim crowd orders, but higher pay rates on those are harder to find.

Smart Match Me Up orders are the kissing cousin to both of these, because your past orders submitted and profile information are used to algorithmically match you with clients. Sometimes the match will be pretty on the nose, other times you could end up with orders that aren’t in line with your areas of expertise or the pay isn’t commensurate to what they’re asking. These orders automatically go to the next writer if you don’t respond within an hour, but if you’re not interested and happen to see it you can accept the order or tell it to move onto the next writer.

Lastly, some clients pay extra for talent management. These clients are some of the best to work with because they really value the service and are often able and willing to pay higher rates. The staff sells them on the quality of your service and track record for excellence, and keeping everything centralized on WriterAccess.

While you get a plethora of ways to actively sell yourself with your profile and answering casting calls, unfortunately you can’t actively pitch clients without a casting call (though this could change). Message threads also expire, so if you want to reach out to a client or prospect who previously messaged you then you’ll need to open a support desk ticket.

Star Levels and Setting Your Own Rates

WriterAccess has standard rates but also lets you and clients set your own rates for work. Working by word count is the default but there are now options for flat-rate orders. Regardless of the method used, you get 70% and the house gets 30%. So if you charge $100 for a flat-rate order, you’ll get $70 and the house gets $30.

This is the current default pay that you get with the star levels after accounting for the house’s cut (so the client pays 10 CPW and you get 7 CPW for 6-star orders). With the changes coming to the site in 2019 and beyond, Level 2 is going to be eliminated.

By default, most clients will have their order pools set for one of the star rates or a flat rate but if you start working with them to get solo orders, you could have leeway to ask them for higher pay. I find that clients who approach me from the get-go or that I pitch my higher rate to are more likely to meet me with this than clients I already did 5-star or 6-star pieces for.

Since the site architecture currently doesn’t account for letting you set your own default rate, just list it in your profile with a disclaimer!

Pay Cycles and Approval Windows

You get paid every two weeks. This can be a blessing or a curse depending on when orders get submitted and approved. The 15th and last day of the month are your do-or-die dates to get work submitted and approved, so if you finished a job before the 15th, you get paid the 22nd, but you get a revision request on the 18th that doesn’t get approved in time? The staff will try to pay you before the next paycheck is due but if there’s a long approval window and the client doesn’t immediately jump to it then you likely will have to wait.

However, you don’t have to worry about work going unpaid for the most part. If the client goes MIA and doesn’t approve the work, it gets auto-approved at the end of the window (5-7 days by default, up to 2 weeks for higher-level clients) so you will get paid.

The pay cycle is a blessing for this reason, if the client takes forever to approve you don’t have to chase them for payment like you might for private clients and other platforms. But it’s also a curse because too many orders that don’t get approved in time and/or a large order that gets yanked out of the queue for revisions can result in kiting on your bills if you depended on that money coming in.

Support From Staff and Other Writers

WriterAccess has superior support compared to most other content sites. They are very responsive during business hours and if you are having an issue with a client, they will do their best to approach a resolution instead of taking the client-above-all-else attitude many other platforms tend to take.

There is also a community forum where you can talk to other writers and give each other tips and recommend one another to clients, and this has proven to be a valuable resource numerous times!