Blogmutt is a writing platform that connects writers to website owners for the purpose of ghostwriting blog posts. The customers are usually either too busy to write posts for their business’ blog or simply because writing isn’t their strong suit. If these business owners want to have highly informative content written for their target audience, they need to find someone to write it for them. So they turn to Blogmutt where they can find a pool of writers capable of creating blog posts that meet or exceed their expectations.
Brief History
Scott Yates and Wade Green founded Blogmutt in 2010 and began to take on customers and writers in 2011. Scott mainly deals with the customers, the writers and basically keeps everything running smoothly. Wade is in charge of the website, so he’s the one that fixes any bugs in the system and implements whatever improvements that they have planned.
The Writing Process
Once you’re signed up with Blogmutt and have been accepted, you can research the current customers. Each customer has their own page where you can see the keywords they want, links to their website or blog and a window showing their recent tweets. There’s also usually a paragraph or two stating what they’re looking for. As a writer, it’s up to you to do your research using these resources. You can also view the posts that they have approved and rejected, though you can’t see who wrote them.
So, you pick one of their keywords and use it at least once in the title and in the body of the post. Sometimes you have to work in a ‘contact us’ hyperlink at the end, but it’s easy enough to do. When you’re done writing, you can submit it to the customer. There are no editors except for the customer, so you don’t have to worry about any of that. You don’t have to touch it again unless they want it edited.
Queue/Edit/Posted/Rejected
After it’s submitted, your post will go into the customer’s queue which could be empty or really full. Since it’s a queue, you might have to wait for your turn. This isn’t always the case since some customers grab every single post that lands in their queue all at once or daily. A lot of them only take one a week on Thursday. You can see how many posts the customers have taken in the past week, which is a very useful feature. Once your post is taken, the money is deposited into your Blogmutt account immediately.
There’s no guarantee that your post will sell just because it’s first in line. If they like one of the posts behind you in the queue better than yours, they might just grab that one. I’ve had it happen to me. On the other hand, if they really like yours, they might take it ahead of everyone else. That has also happened to me and I was sixth in line.
If a customer likes your post but feels like it could use some work, then they’ll flag it for editing and let you know what you need to improve on or add in. You can then edit and resubmit it for posting. That’s all pretty self explanatory. Rejections are a no-brainer, too. One thing worth noting about rejections is that you retain the rights to your post if the customer refuses it. You might want to save it to submit it to another customer after editing it a bit to fit their needs. Or, you might want to put it up on a blog for revenue. It’s totally up to you since it’s still yours.
Payment
If I could pick one thing that I’m not really happy about with Blogmutt, it would be the payment method. It really could be worse, but I’m an instant gratification kind of person, plus I often need money fairly frequently even if it’s in small amounts. Still, it’s not a deal breaker.
You are paid $8 for each post you sell as soon as it’s taken by the customer. Since there aren’t any hard and fast rules about word count aside from the fact that it should be around 350 words, this can wind up being a pretty decent amount of money compared to some other places.
You can submit an invoice for payment once per week for whatever you’ve written that has been accepted. Paydays are on Mondays, so you will need to get your invoice in before then.
Pros:
- No editors to deal with and the customers aren’t usually too picky. Nine times out of ten, they will take your post when it’s your turn, if not before.
- The ability to research the customers through their websites and twitter feed as well as browsing the posts they’ve bought or rejected.
- The large variety of topics available to write about and plenty of keywords to pick from with each customer.
- The owners are very active in the forums, especially Scott, and it’s easy to get in touch with them. You don’t wait for a week to get a response if you have a question, concern or suggestion.
- Weekly Pay!
Cons:
- You can’t directly communicate with the customers.. If you have a question, you need to go through Scott. If the customer wants an edit and leaves some instructions on what they want you to do but you don’t really understand it, you can’t just write them back.
In conclusion, I just want to say that I’m really happy with Blogmutt overall, which is fairly obvious since I have twice as many pros as I do cons. Blogmutt is making improvements to the system all of the time, so I don’t even know how long those cons will be relevant. If you’re the type of person who likes to write blog posts but doesn’t want to deal with making a blog of your own, this would be a good option.The pay is fair, the work is plentiful and the staff is awesome, plus it’s nice to get away from formal writing for once. If this sounds like something you would like to do, then head over to Blogmutt and put in an application. Good luck!
