An Inside Scoop of Working for eCopywriters

By Lisa Kroulik © November 21, 2011

eCopywriters is a company where you can sign up to write available articles and receive payment via PayPal twice a month. I signed up with them this spring and have earned close to $1,500 since that time. Of all the sites I work on, eCopywriters is my second-largest provider of income. However, I have earned nearly 10 times more at Textbroker, so it the gap between first and second is significant.

When you first sign up with eCopywriters, you are required to submit a writing sample. An editor evaluates it and sends an email within about a week letting you know what level you were assigned to. The lowest level is Level 1, paying .008 a word and the highest is Level 5 paying five cents a word. eCopywriters also lists Levels 6 and 7 in their frequently asked questions, although it also states they have only five levels. This leads me to assume that the sixth and seventh levels are for professionals.

I was originally assigned a Level 2 at two cents per word and I am still at that level. The last group of assignments I got paid for were at three cents per word, but I think that is only for one specific client. At two cents per word, I earn more here than at Textbroker at 1.4 cents a word at Level 4. The caveat is that Textbroker has substantially more work available and tends to be less fussy with revision requests, so it is possible to make more per hour there even though the per word pay is less.

The one thing I like about eCopywriters is the pay is higher and they are taking steps right now to improve the experience for copywriters. For example, each copywriter is assigned a score based on reliability, how often you log into the site to check for work, score of your grammar test, your percentage of revision requests compared to articles completed and the groups you are assigned to. I am not real clear on how they determine which groups to assign you to, but it appears I have been assigned to the same clients I have completed many previous orders for since signing up with eCopywriters.

Copywriters with a score above 80 percent can now claim up to 15 assignments at a time, but they must be completed by the due date. When assignments are first posted, the due date is now five days as opposed to the former 24 hours. However, if someone else picked up the assignment and dropped it, you will only have the time that was remaining when it got released back to the open order pool.

I also like that eCopywriters pays consistently on the 1^st and 15^th of every month.

When writing an article for eCopywriters that contains keywords, they do not provide a keyword counter as Textbroker does. For example, if the keyword phrase was attorneys in Houston, I would need to keep track of it myself when writing the article. This can get tedious when the keywords are nearly identical except that one is in plural form and one is not.

After submitting an article to eCopywriters, it first goes to an editor before being passed on to the client. When I first signed up, I seemed to get 50 percent of my articles back for revision requests. This has gotten better with time as I have learned to anticipate what they expect.

Once an editor approves the article, it goes to the client for approval. I have only received one revision request at the client level, but it was several weeks after submitting the article so it was difficult to remember even writing the article. Keep in mind, I have completed over 2,500 articles for Textbroker and 250 for eCopywriters, so to have something come back for revision weeks after it was written is asking a lot in my opinion.

That brings me to the biggest unfavorable quality of eCopywriters. It can take two to four weeks for clients to approve articles, although that has improved since I first started. You also can’t tell the date that you submitted an article because it isn’t listed.

My last complaint is that the amount of work available is really hit or miss. I check the site daily and can go two weeks without picking up an assignment and then all of a sudden there are 100 or more available. For this reason, eCopywriters is my secondary site to go to for work, but I am grateful it is there.

NOTE: Most of the writing sites I write Hubs about are only open to American writers.