I have was just watching the stream of messages on my Twitter account before starting to write this post and I notice a message that read: “rewrite and submit 15 articles to ezinearticles.com about our product and service…”. I am a contributor to ezinearticles and therefore I clicked on the link and I landed on site that was advertising a freelance job where you would be paid 2 dollar per article, long between 400 and 600 words, on a specific product. They will provide you with original articles, text links and keywords for SEO optimization.

Just two dollars per article.

They require the freelance to be member of ezinearticles and preferably to have obtained platinum status, which is gained after you submit a substantial amount of impeccable articles that get published with no correction. Therefore the freelance that would bid for this job need to have a very good knowledge of English, write in a way that is acceptable to the editorial staff that perform the screening in ezinearticles and still manage to advertise a specific product in 15 different way making a total of 30 dollars. Just the upload of the articles will probably take over 30 minutes.

The job offer also states: “content must be creative and related with our keywords and link content.” It is amazing to me that people with such a level of skill are willing to work for so little and also risk troubles with ezinearticles, that is very tight about advertising in articles. The pay is probably around 8 dollars an hour, as much as you can get with a traditional house cleaning job, and yet you need to have very definite sills. I wonder how much the final customer (probably a company) actually pays for this service of article creation, product promotion and search engine optimization. But again this is the new frontier of marketing: rather than paying somebody to drive around and stick bandit signs on the ground or hang fliers on the front door, you pay people for distributing your message in a slightly twisted fashion wherever possible online and for just a nominal pay. I really wonder what those articles actually contain a the end of the day.

Roberto Mazzoni