How to Test (or Play) Dodgy Writing Sites

As a person whose been writing and posting online for nearly a decade, I have to admit certain ‘tricks’ I use with a ‘dodgy’ site.

I treat  new sites as ‘dodgy’ to be honest.

In olden days I could do a ‘compete.com’ on a site, learn how many hits it received, how it had been up and pop around to scamadviser and other such monitoring services,  to check their bona fides.

Of course, brand new sites would not have had enough hits to register on a compete nor would they have been up long enough to be flagged as a scam.

That meant that I could not in any way know if the site was real or not before I joined.

So here was my choice; join the site, in good faith, type my fingers off and hope at the end of the day I’ll be paid,  or play the site and if it proves legit, tidy up.

There are two ways I play a site.
One isn’t much fun. The other makes me crack up as I type.

The unfun way is to take already published items, chop them into bits, fatten them up with adjectives and adverbs to reach the ‘minimum’ and publish them under a different title and new nickname and see how it goes.

If the items are published, (nothing wrong with them and changed about enough not to be plagiarism only sub-standard) and I get paid the first time, I don’t relax. It takes three payments on time for me to assume the site is legit.

Imagine how many bits I’d scattered about the ‘Net on what proved to be scam sites that went down, (taking my bits with them), and how few stood up so that I’d be inspired to write new things.

Yes… boring.

Then there was my fun trick.

I would pretend to be someone I’m not, in a profession I know nothing about. I’d write absolute fiction as fact. I’d make it all up as I went along. And because I’d pick something like being a clown in a circus, a ‘profession’ I never held, and never had the slightest interest in, it would have me laughing out loud as I described my ‘training’ and the first circus I appeared in.

I would blather on and on, cracking up so much I’d literally fall out of my seat.

I posted item after item, laughing all the way.

If the site was rubbish, well, so were my articles. If I was paid, well, I’d be a bit shame faced.  If I wasn’t paid well, I got some of the best laughs of my writing career.