By now, everyone (or nearly everyone) has heard about and is aware of sites that offer to pay you to write for them. The idea is that you write a post and then someone pays you for it. In some cases, these sites are nothing more than a community blog where everyone writes and puts their own AdSense ads on the site and hopes for clicks.

The value of these types of site has been discussed and analyzed by many people and I don’t want to replicate that. What I will contribute to that discussion is a good point and a bad point. One good point of them is that it is a way to get people to begin reading your writing and possibly browse on through to your site. A negative point is that you may come up with some really good content that ends up on a site other than your own and directs all the links and traffic to that site rather than where you really want it; at your own site.

Now, if that is all I am offering to that discussion, why am I posting about these sites? Because after ignoring them for quite some time, I have recently checked out a couple of them. In the case of the community blog setup, I don’t see how useful it would really be to even browse to these sites much less write for them and would classify this as selling out. You are sacrificing content that could be used on your site in the hopes of getting a few people to click on AdSense or visit your site.

A bit better than these, are the sites that have people who want an article on a given topic and are willing to pay for it. While they still may not be worth subscribing to, I think they would fall under the category of getting paid. With these sites, you do get paid (if your article is selected) but you still lose because if your article is selected it was probably pretty good (the buyers want the best) and you lose out on quality content that could have been added to your site.

However, there is another way to look at this second category of sites that I want to share with you. These sites have lists of topics and articles that people want written and are willing to pay for. Generally speaking, this means that there must be some demand for these articles. This makes these sites a good place to go to find ideas of topics to write about that may have potential to bring you a significant amount of traffic.