The story began a month ago when a friend, who lives nearby, lost her job and needed money for food and bills, so I suggested writing articles for people online. She’s really good at writing, so it suited her well. She signed up on the getafreelancer site and was working literally an hour later. Everything seemed great!

She submitted the articles to the buyers and they were all pleased with her work and told her so, but then some of them didn’t pay her. No reason or explanation was given, but they just didn’t follow through on their end of the deal. I felt bad for her because she put so much time into writing for hours, only to be letdown, which would leave a sour taste in anyone’s mouth about working online again. We all know that the internet is a landmine of scams, but even I was surprised that she got burned so soon.

I asked around on forums and found out that this has been happening more often on GAF with members ripping off outsourcers and then reusing the stolen articles for their own use, or to sell to others. The worst offender in this case is a person named Mohammed Sutarwala with the username mohds2. He appears as a large provider to companies and, when they give him work to do, he then hires someone else to do it for him and doesn’t pay them, but he gets paid by the company anyway.

Now, I understand if the work is not satisfactory, but in this case Mohammed Sutarwala (mohds2) said everthing was great (we have the correspondence to prove it) AND proceeded to use those stolen articles that he did NOT pay for the right to use on other sites. We have contacted every site so far and the articles have been removed, but the point is that this is just bad business and should be stopped.

To this SCAMMER : If you really didn’t like the articles by “wandafraser” (and lied to her in the chat), then fine, but since you never paid for them, then they are NOT your property, so stop using them! Be an adult and pay for the work you had done for you! ALL incidences of your infringement WILL be reported to every site you use for this! You have been warned…

- End of Getafreelancer Stolen Articles rant. Be careful and please share this story with others or comment here if you’ve ever been cheated yourself online. I want all scammers to suffer!!

UPDATE: The same sleazeball is now also an Articleblast.com scammer (link to his “freedomto quitsmoking” profile there). ALL the writings listed as being from that author were actually written by “wanda”, and NOT by the person listed!! We have contacted that website about the infringing content and a “cease and desist” letter is being prepared…

• Tip 1: Close all windows other than your post window, and your research windows.  Even music can be a distraction sometimes, it all depends on how good you are at focusing.  If you leave windows open to sites like youtube, you’ll probably find yourself watching music videos, or checking out one of those optical illusions your friend sent you through an email.  Then once you get back to what you were writing you won’t really know WTF you were originally trying to say.
• Tip 2: Write down some of your ideas on a piece of paper.  Kind of like the brainstorming you did back in school.  This will give you something to look back at if you ever lose track of what’s going on.  If you want to be even more Geeky, you could write down an entire outline and then your post would practically write itself.  I doubt you would have much problems staying on topic unless you decided you absolutely had to stray from your outline.
• Tip 3: Use Dark Room for a “distraction free environment”.  As described on the website, “Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.”
  I use Dark Room on occasion, but in my opinion it is a little bit too extreme.  It blocks out beeps from any programs like Norton, MSN messenger, and etc… While this could be very useful, maybe you would miss out on something important.
• Tip 4: Close the doors and lock out all intruders.  If you’re a parent then you probably shouldn’t block your toddlers access, but try and stop the people you care about less from bothering you while you write.  When you’re at home, it’s harder to get work done because of the constant distraction that comes from family members and phone calls.  Then again, I’m not saying you should become some sort of recluse either, absolutely not… socialize!

The Most Obvious Tip:

• Tip 5: Review your post before you post it.  Although this is probably the most retarded tip you’ll ever read for staying on topic, it’s also the most effective.  Even though you may not have been able stay on topic while you were writing the post, you don’t want your random ramblings to escape to your blog readers.  While this tip completely defeats the purpose of this article (since it was supposed to tell you how to avoid needing to remove offtopic strains of text after you were done writing) I still think this is a useful tip to add to the list.  No article should go un-reviewed, even if you were perfectly on-topic the entire time.

One of the biggest ways for you to lose business is to issue a sub-par article that is full of grammar errors and spelling mistakes. Even these can be simple things you may not think about like when to use ‘effect’ and ‘affect’ or ‘their’ and ‘there’. Hence, the reason you hire others to do it for you.

Those professional writers out there make their living writing things for people, taking the thoughts in your head and putting them on paper to make sure you are able to get the right point across, without embarrassing sentences like ‘Your crazy in affect if you didn’t bye this.’ If you caught the four errors in that sentence, then good on you.

The point is, if you had a car, and knew nothing about how to replace the brakes, would you do it yourself or would you pay someone professional to do it? Sure it isn’t cheap, but when you are slamming on the non-working breaks down a hill, will money be the first thing on your mind? Writing is the same way. Don’t let your company go in a tailspin because the press release or article you issued didn’t get the point across. Get things done right with a professional writer who knows how to write and can get your business on the fast track to success with their gift for the written word.