How to Get Articles Accepted on the First Try
Getting articles accepted on the first try is all about choosing comfortable assignments, understanding the needs of your client and continuously improving your writing. Author Kim P lays out the secrets to her stellar revision record, which allows her to spend less time rewriting and more time earning. Read on for more!
Writing great assignments on the first try is an all-around win for authors, editors and clients. The fewer mistakes authors make, the fewer revisions clients and editors request, the quicker assignments are accepted, and the happier the client. Happiest of all is the author who gets paid right away and doesn’t have to worry about the dreaded revision request. I’ve managed to write for some amazing Teams and impress clients and Textbroker editors with my ability to write great articles without revisions. However, things didn’t start out that way. In the beginning, I made more than a few mistakes, but I developed a system that enabled me to reduce my errors and in turn decrease my revision requests. If you’re experiencing a high rate of revision requests, here are my tips for writing error-free assignments and getting them accepted on the first try.
Choose the Right Assignments
Textbroker gives us 10 minutes to view order information and decide if we want to write a particular assignment. However, I don’t think it takes nearly that length of time to decide if an assignment is within or beyond your capabilities. If I can’t come up with a general outline for a topic in less than a few minutes, I move on.
Additionally, I only choose topics that interest me. When I write assignments on topics that interest me, my writing is much more engaging, and I write at a much faster pace with fewer errors. However, the challenge in writing topics that interest me is in finding them. To solve that problem, I started using the assignment pool’s search function, which is a valuable and underutilized feature on Textbroker. I search for assignments by section, keyword, and most importantly by client ID.
Keep a list of clients you enjoy working with, and search for other assignments your favorite clients may have posted in the assignment pool by their client ID. This is one of the best ways to find assignments that you’re much more likely to complete without revision requests. Additionally, impressing the clients with consistent error-free content is a great way to gain DirectOrders.
Understand the Client’s Needs
Receiving a revision request for content with grammatical errors is understandable, but receiving a revision request for an assignment where you’ve followed the client’s description to the letter is frustrating. I’ve seen more than a few of these complaints from authors. It may seem that the client is just being difficult, but maybe those authors confused the client’s instructions for the client’s needs. Following the client’s instructions and understanding the client’s needs are two different things.
For instance, in my early days at Textbroker, I mostly wrote purely informational assignments for niche websites. When I joined my first Team, which involved writing website content for businesses, I had to shift gears in how I fulfilled the client’s needs.
There is a huge difference between writing an assignment on the importance of therapy for an informational website and writing website content for a therapist who is trying to attract clients. While the subject matter may overlap, and even the readers may overlap, the feelings and actions each client wants to evoke in the reader are completely different. As a result, the words you choose and the style of writing you use to convey those messages should be different as well. Make sure you are writing to convey the client’s message and not just follow the client’s instructions.
Track Your Mistakes
One of the good things about mistakes is that only you keep count, and as an author, you should keep track of your mistakes. I think that for most authors, failure to memorize the entire AP Style Guide isn’t what stagnates progress. It’s the little mistakes authors tend to make over and over. You’re going to make mistakes and errors in your writing, and some will earn you a revision request, but learn to only make them once.
I have a file tracking every mistake I’ve ever made in my body of work at Textbroker. Whether it was an error in punctuation, capitalization or style, it went on the list. I constantly edited my assignments against my list, and overtime, my revision requests and errors went down, and I even became a level 4 author. Best of all, I haven’t added to or referred to my list of errors in a while because it’s practically embedded in my brain now, and I’ve become a much better author who aces assignments on the first try.
If you want to lower your revision rate, simply make it a goal. Follow the steps above, and approach each article as an opportunity to impress the client, editors, and most importantly, yourself. Stretch your writing muscles, and eventually you’ll write amazing articles in one go and receive fewer revision requests.
Comments
333093 22. October 2013 - 17:06
Good advice, especially when ariticles require a specific word count.
336757 26. October 2013 - 3:49
This was very helpful! Thanks for the great tips. I am definitely going to take the grammar tests.
343181 7. June 2014 - 14:14
Thanks for the info. This was more helpful than you think.
449573 8. October 2014 - 19:52
Thanks for this. Your writing is definitely engaging; as I finished it I realized it was a perfect example of everything you tried to convey. I appreciate it!
169093 29. December 2014 - 4:48
Nechama,
I would definitely encourage you to keep applying! As you can see in my post, I belong to over 85 teams. When I just logged in, one of those teams had 9 orders on it. But I have had times where I log in and the combined team orders are several hundred. So just as the Open Order Pool has highs and lows, so do the teams. With 25 teams, your chances of having Team Orders are still small. I can't remember exactly, but it seems like I didn't start seeing regular team orders until I was on more than 50 teams. It does seem time consuming sometimes but it really, really is worth it! I have 41 Open Team Applications right now, but I just don't worry about those. Some of them will never accept or deny me. Some of them will eventually close. Just worry about how many have actually accepted you.
Thanks for reading the post, and if you have any further questions or comments, let me know!
282273 3. January 2015 - 12:10
Hello.
I feel so much better after reading that. This frequent topic in the forums is well said here in a nice, neat, evergreen package I can use as a checklist to reorganize my freelance work habits. I will be sure to point others here next time it comes up.
Regards.
231785 16. March 2015 - 0:57
If we work with direct order clients frequently, will our interactions via the messaging system be taken into account when the editors determine whether we followed instructions? I work with one client in particular who messages me for updates and revisions to her original instructions, and sometimes we decide to change the nature of the original order that's sitting in my queue. Will I be penalized for following her new instructions/going with the most recent communication via the messaging system, or will the editors take these kinds of things into account?
282273 31. December 2015 - 14:48
Outstanding post, Textbroker! Is it just me, or do the fireworks in the photograph display like a light bulb with an idea on? Happy, happy New Year to you.