Air Gun Home :: View topic - Looking for someone to write a couple of Air Gun articles

asiamj · New Member

Hi, I am a newbie here, and I am looking for someone who has excellent writing skills to write a couple of articles relating to air guns. The articles must be unique content and created by the writer. It can be a review on a new product or just writing about the hobby itself. I usually pay $10 bucks an article. If anyone is interested please reply with contact information. Thank you.

broommaster2000 · Moderator

What's it for?

asiamj · New Member

It's for a new webstore selling airgun products. The site is still a work in progress, so I am not ready to provide the URL. Thanks for asking.

AirGunEric · Site Admin

The store owners are not capable of writing their own articles? That doesn't bode well for the expertise one might expect from a vendor...

Jaxom · Senior Member

Concidering that most magazines will pay anywhere from $100 all the way up to $1000 for a 500 word short article.... $10 is an insult.

AirGunEric · Site Admin

If I'm wrong here, please correct me- but it sounds more like these articles might be used as "content" for those "search engine" pages that you get out of a Google search- i.e. you type in "airgun" and then this page comes up, you go there and then find yourself at another ad/search page which is used solely for generating ad dollars from Google or the like. As in no real "store" and not much content- parked domains with a teeny bit more than just ads.

If that is the case, it might be worth pointing out there are virtually no airgun companies placing ads on webpages these days- look at the ads that pop up here. If every 10th ad is gun-related that would be a good day.

Either way- unless you are willing to give the writer full "by-line" credit for the writing or some sort of link to their business activity, $10.00 isn't likely going to motivate alot of people.

Jaxom · Senior Member

Eric,

Sorta... most websites rely one using meta tags for search engines. Buried in the header of usually the index.html or sometimes each page of a site they use the script

<meta>airguns, air guns, air rife, air pistol, pellet, pellet gun, pellet rifle..... </meta>

They can use up to 40 words per page. Then there's hyper taging, which I still don't understand yet, but no matter what you type into your google search line, certain websites will always come up. Most noteble of these websites is one called Nextag.com Don't know what script they're using, just find it very annoying since the links on their pages are basically usesless.

AirGunEric · Site Admin

Google and the other search engines have gotten a wee bit smarter the last couple of years and actually look for "content" related to the Meta Tags- thus why you can often find "articles" on these ad pages.

Someone local to me was doing this awhile back, don't know if/how it worked out (I didn't/don't know them personally). I just find the practice offensive as it takes up good domain "real estate" for no valid purpose to anyone but the domain owner trying to make advertising dollars. I often find it hard to believe an organization with 500 domains is actually making money doing this, but I guess they must be. It must've taken me 40 tries to come up with "airgunhome.com" as everything else that was generically "airgun" related was already registered, mostly by these parked ad pages.

If asiamj is genuinely trying to start up a legitimate airgun business, I stand corrected and wish them luck, but the "article" thing makes me leery.

Amigo · Veteran Member

Eric:
If that is $10 per article per "hit" each page gets, that might be a forum "bidnes" opportunity. If that is not the case, I'd suggest he make the $10 (USD) offer to someone in say...Bangladesh or the Congo.

Rogerflat · Silver Status Member

Usually the MO is a new forum user comes onto a forum and makes some sort of vague offer like this which relates to the nature of the forum and is likely to spark the interest of its users. Once you contact them then they know you are interested and this is like a "warm lead". At that point they'll then hit you with the "pitch" which will sound something like "Well (insert name), since you are such a good writer, you might be interested in signing up for this service in which you pay to be a member but if our other clients like your work then they will pay you to write for them."

They usually feign interest in you or your talents or hobbies in order to coerce you into paying THEM for something when it initially started out as them paying you for something.

Also they could be looking for confidential information from you as well for an event more malicious purpose.

If this is not the case I apologize, but forum members should be aware of these types of scams.

Slavia · Moderator

Interesting that this is the banner hanging over this thread:

cliffspot · Veteran Member

...it's a scam!