A Must Read Before You Pay For Any Guest Post And/Or Writing Gig
It was a daunting task, before the advent of many of these freelance platforms, like Fiverr, Freelancer, and Upwork to mention these few, to do a lot of things by yourself, and in some cases, within a very short period of time. And it was especially difficult if the task required one to learn some specialized skill sets to complete.
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These freelance platforms, in addition, have also been instrumental in providing jobs for many folks out there, and in some cases, some of these jobs do pay well, catering to the need of so many self-employed folks all over the world.
And because of the above, many of us, including myself, are grateful for the existence of these mediums.
But, like with many great and unique ideas out there, over time, there are bound to be some disgruntled elements, on these websites, who negatively impact users' experience.
Some of the ways that these individuals make these platforms a terrible experience will be discussed here using my experiences on the Fiverr platform. And I believe that these concerns are also applicable to other freelancing platforms.
Fiverr is one of the biggest of the freelancing websites out there. The platform host folks, from about 196 countries, with over 3 million gigs/services in hundreds of various categories. The Fiverr platform is so big that it is among the 400 most popular websites in the world. Gigs, within a price range of $5 to $10, is ordered on the website every 4 secs.
And so would make sense for the platform to be my go-to and preferred medium for both rendering services and looking for services from vendors of different skill sets.
Many of the jobs that I require are dominantly content writing and search engine optimized (SEO) guest posting. And over time, having contracted with many folks, I have come to understand these gigs properly to be able to write about my observations in the hope that it would help others use the platform more effectively and successfully.
This post will now begin with my observations and recommendations for the writing gig, which afterward, will be followed by my concerns and ways to address them for the guest posting service.
1) The Writing Gig
A writing gig description, before ordering a gig, should give you an insight into how the service provider would carry out your writing task, after all, you shouldn't expect a work of art when the writing of their service description is nothing close to it. For example, to mention these few:
A) Is the service description fraught with errors like spelling?
B) Is there a defined pattern to the writing style, for example, is the service description written in an active or passive voice?
C) Is the service description grammatically correct?
Anyway, many of these can be caught by a native English speaker. But, anyone, even when not conversant in the English language, can at least catch the spelling error. So, at least, watch out for that.
Another observation to watch out for, in general, is the length of the content, the topic and the time frame in which the gig is completed.
For example, if a complex research topic that requires a 1000 words essay is completed within a very short period of time. And you also find out that you cannot make sense of what is written especially because of poorly used high sounding words, then the article was likely spunned, and sometimes, these spunned articles cannot be detected using plagiarism checker tools.
And speaking of plagiarism, I would recommend that before you approve the work and make the final payment, be sure to use the plagiarism tool checker to ensure that the job is unique. This is because you would not want duplicate contents on your platform, which would not help your website rank in search engine.
Fortunately, there many great plagiarism tools, both free and paid, for anyone to easily check the work for plagiarism. And because I now that many of us do not have the funds for the premium plagiarism tool checker, I would limit my recommendation to 2 great free tools:
A) Paperrater
B) Smallseotools
I would highly recommend that you use both tools together to more effectively check the work. And as an added measure, do a search on both Google and Bing for duplicate contents
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2) Guest Posting Service
I would highly recommend that you contact the service provider to give you the name of the platform/website on which the content will be guest posted so that you can do your own due diligence before ordering the gig.
I highly recommend this because I have experienced situations where the gig descriptions, with regards to whether the platform allows a follow or no-follow backlink, or with regards to the platform's domain authority (DA), page authority (PA) and domain rating (DR) to mention these few, do not match the true metric of the platforms, and are most times highly inflated and misinforming.
Even when the platform appears to have strong metrics, which in many cases can easily be manipulated, you should still check to see if it is actually being indexed in search engines like Bing and Google. The higher the number of pages that are indexed, on the platform, the more likely it is that your post will also be indexed.
And now, here are a couple of ways and tools to check if guest posting on a platform is worth the time, effort and money.
Use tools like "Open SEO Stats (Formerly: PageRank Status) " to view the number of pages indexed in many search engines and also view the Alexa traffic statistics.
The ahref free tool will give you the domain rating. The Hoth Free SEO tools and the Moz link explorer will give you the statistics on the domain authority and page authority of the platform. I personally would not really waste my time guest posting to platforms that have a DA less than 25.
There are other websites that can also give you this information, just google them using these phrases: "free domain and page authority checkers" or "free domain rating checker"
The free nofollow link checker, on google chrome web store, can help you identify platforms with links that are designated as a no-follow. It does this by outlining the links in red.
The link checker can also be helpful in confirming whether your backlinks, in a guest post gig, is designated as a "follow" or not.
I will keep updating this post as I observe other things that can negate users' experiences on these cool freelancing platforms.
Thanks for reading and best of luck in your pursuit of great service(s) on these platforms.
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This post was originally published on eFor-real