I found this service provider on Warrior Forum couple of years ago. Apparently, they are selling it on various other marketing related forums, as well. They have been around for a long time and still live. Crap articles, abnormal delay in delivery were their unique selling points, then!
99 cents for an article? Ofcourse, it is not a scam. So what is it exactly?
It’s 99 cents per 100 words. As I stated above, I have used this company earlier and totally underwhelmed with their quality of service. All articles were unique and readable but totally irrelevant to the topic I gave! It looked like articles were “manufactured” using the scrape-rewrite formula as against “research-write”
Back then, the process would be,
- You place an order for 10 articles. You will be told that it would be delivered in 10-15 days
- You wait for 15 days and another 5 days as a grace period.
- Patience gone…Ask the status
- You get a quick reply with an apology. Promise of delivery within next 5-7 days
- After 10 days, you yell again.
- Promise of delivery within 24-48 hours
- Finally after 72 hours you get your unique articles
- You read the articles and feel utterly stunned – not because the articles are super-duper; because it’s ridiculous!
I’m NOT lying folks. This is exactly what happened to me and many others!
The current status:
They have updated their website with much better visual representation than earlier. Now they are offering many more services beyond article writing (like web design, video creation, Facebook fan page, link building and even 1st page guaranteed ranking). I may give another chance to this service though normally I don’t give another opportunity to crap writers, but it’s been a long time – so probably worth another try!
I just checked few samples on the site. None of them appears to be written by a native English writer (doesn’t matter to me anyways because I’m not), And it’s no longer 99 cents per 100 words.
If you have tried this company recently (at least in 2012), I would love to know your feedback. I’ll update this review if I try them again.
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3 Comments
99CentArticles.com is crap. The prices seem fair at first but you really do get what you pay for here. The company outsources to writers overseas and based in the United States. They have no real screening process for writers or article quality. They do not copyscape their articles or check them for keyword density or for spelling/grammar mistakes. Apparently this is supposed to be completed by whatever team of writers that are completing the work. There were several complaints on Warrior Forum from writers stating that they had not gotten paid or that the pay rates were very low… again, you get what you pay for. If you are paying a company $7.50 for a good 500 word article and they are paying a writer $2.50, obviously you are not going to get a very good quality article.
I spoke with a few former writers who mentioned that michael also asked them to remove their comments because it was going to or was hurting business. Correct me if I’m wrong, but part of being a business owner is taking the good with the bad and letting people decide for themselves who is the company to use. I was dissatisfied with orders I received from them because they were very general instead of focusing on the topic I requested. While the keywords were used, they were not incorporated in a manner which made the article worth reading. Essentially the articles were about nothing. I have had continual good luck and quality results from TheContentAuthority.com and TheWriteThingContent.com. I have also used iWriter.com but as another reviewer mentioned you do not always get your articles right away or all of those ordered due to the set up. But what I have received has still been good quality.
I recently wanted to join them as a writer. I have a solid writing team of US writers and even a few UK ones. It took 3 emails to them to even get a response. Then when I finally do get a response, the girl I hear from is some sort of third-party owner of a writing company and tells me that the pay rates are $1 for 500 words. No self-respecting freelancer will actually work for those rates. Industry standard is $0.08 to $0.50 per word depending on the article topic and style. I was appalled. I think this is a clear case of “you get what you pay for” and it’s safe to bet that the writers doing the work are overseas workers who will work for cheap, don’t do any research and don’t have any command for the English language.
I actually worked as a writer for 99CentArticles from March 2010 to August 2011. So here is the scoop – the company is own by two 20-something guys who are decent for all intents and purposes but really only care about filling their pockets. They could probably benefit greatly by hiring a few account managers to make sure all work is completed and checked and what not and customer problems are handled instead of trying to do it all themselves. And by themselves I mean Sean/Michael does the client-dealing. The other guy lacks any ability to maintain professionalism when it comes to dealing with clients or writers. While they provide cheap articles, they are drastically over charging customers on other services.
Here is a breakdown of what they pay writers:
$3 per 500 word article (industry standard is $0.008 to $0.01 per word), charging the customer $7.50 – $9 unless you have a warrior forum special or something similar.
$5 per press release (industry standard is $10 to $15), charge customer $28.75.
$3 per page for eBooks (this is my personal favorite because they charge between $7 and $10 per page for an eBook).
I was one writer and was told that I was one of two or three writers. I can only handle so much work in a week. Ryan told me that he outsourced all work I didn’t take on to a company overseas that wrote the articles for $2 a piece. This was a big company, they could churn out 100 articles in a few days. After a few months I moved onto Ebooks and press releases which was fine and I was happy with that, but they were overloading me with work despite telling them I couldn’t handle anymore. Finally I just walked away from them and didn’t look back. They were so rude to me and demanding, it was ridiculous. I was regularly on the receiving end with customers who were upset about lack of communication with them.
Anyways, now the company outsources the majority of their work to Content Revenue, Content Writers Revenue (something to that effect). It’s a very poorly run company by a girl named Melanie, that is primarily overseas writers and the “owner” (Melanie) pays only $1 per $500 words. I mean, I’m all for making money, but not at the expense of other people. If 99centarticles is charging $7, then paying $3 to the outsource and the outsource owner is paying writers $1… whos actually benefiting from this except for the middle man?
I regularly pointed out that another company I worked for – The Content Authority – charged $0.01 per word for articles, paid writers $0.008 and editors got $0.15 per article (their system does most of the preliminary work like KWD check, copyscape, dupecheck, passive verb check, grammar and spelling). No, their profits per article are not a lot. But, after 2 years in business next month, they are completing 30,000 articles steadily per month and have thousands of repeat customers. It’s safe to say that they are doing just fine without shafting the writers and without ripping off the customers.
I can’t say that everything you get from 99centarticles will be crap. I didn’t hate my time with them, at least I did always get paid right away even if it was very little in comparison, but, this is what I know about how they operate and hopefully it will clear some things up and shed some light on things for other people who post reviews.