PaidOnlineWritingJobs.com promises to help aspiring freelance writers make money from home by matching them with thousands of highly paid writing jobs.
Become a member and they also promise you’ll get instant access to their freelance writer training guides which cover “everything you could possibly need to know” about making money with writing jobs online.
If you have a spare couple of hours a week, can write English at a grade 3 level or above and have an internet connection then they’ve partnered with hundreds of companies ready to hire you for part-time writing jobs.
They say, even with zero experience, you could be earning a living by writing articles, reviews and commenting on blogs within minutes. Signing up is free and easy and you get to choose your own hours.
Sounds great! What’s the catch?
I decided to sign up to find out.
According to PaidOnlineWritingJobs.com, making money is a simple 3-step process.
All you need to do is:
1. Pay $27 to become a VIP Paid Online Writing Jobs member
2. Go through the “fun and easy” FastTrack Job Training Program
3. Browse the VIP Writing Job Database and start work
Oh ok, so it’s not really free then??
Nope! Once you’ve handed over your email address you’re told to pay $27:
Become a fully paid-up member, sign in and you’ll be in the members’ area.
At the top is a short video with what looks like a video spokesperson hired on Fiverr giving you instructions to:
The training is a joke. All you get are a bunch of very generic blog posts about freelance writing and why companies hire freelance writers.
Reading through it I couldn’t help but get the feeling this was some kind of recycled, auto-generated content that’s been thrown in there to make you think you’re getting something back for the money you’ve just paid.
Let me show you what I mean.
Training Module 1 gives you a very vague overview of what freelance writing is and some tips on landing your first client.
Training Module 2 common-sense tips on how to become a better writer. The main aim of this entire module is to get you to read five posts from copyblogger.com. Seriously.
Training Module 3 is about search engine optimisation (SEO) and how to create content that gets ranked in Google.
The Advanced Training is a random assortment of blog-style posts on why high quality copywriting is important, how to establish and promote yourself, understanding the requirements of online copy, writing for different publishing platforms and so on…
I saw nothing you can’t easily find free elsewhere.
Finally, there are the Bonuses which look to me like a couple more trashy, low-grade ebooks that were thrown in for good measure but have absolutely nothing to do with freelance writing.
The Content Writing Jobs Database
Sorry to say it, but the “VIP Database” of high-paying jobs isn’t what they said it would be either. You’re paying to get access to these jobs when you can view them for free online already.
Take a look, the only jobs you’ll find are ones from Upwork, Guru and Freelancer:
How Much Does Paid Online Writing Jobs Cost?
You can buy Paid Online Writing Jobs for a one-time fee of $27, but three upsells costing $191 bring the total price of joining up to $218.
Joining Fee $27
Unlimited Membership $97
Upsell #2: Social Media Jobs $57
Upsell #3: Paid Online Writing Jobs Arbitrage $37
TOTAL: $218
Click on the Paid Online Writing Jobs’ affiliate page and you’ll and you’ll see the anonymous owners brag about how profitable this program has been for them and how affiliates can get in on the action by promoting it to others. They’re even given pre-written emails they can use to spam their email subscribers.
The same page shows this upsell flow which I’ll include here so you know exactly what upgrades they’ll try and push you into buying:
Paid Online Writing Jobs is a scam because it’s mis-sold as a membership site with exclusive high-paying job offers and freelancer training when what you actually get is a few low-quality ebooks and job listings scraped from publically available writing job sites.
There’s no value in it whatsoever and no reason to sign up – they have no step-by-step training, no support system and no real writing jobs and to expect people to pay for this is criminal in my view.
It’s no different than me going out and grabbing a bunch of recipes from different food blogs and then charging people to access them.
Or what would you think of me if, let’s say, I copied and pasted a few workout programs from fitness blogs then pasted them on my own website, added a link to Google Maps so people could find gyms near them and charged people $27 to get in shape?
This is no different to what the Paid Online Writing Jobs scammers have done.
And to make things worse, these scammers have been using PaidOnlineWritingJobs.com to cash in for over a decade by duping serious work from home seekers into paying top dollar for worthless rubbish like this.