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.