Mahalo Very Much

Mahalo.  It's Hawaiian for "thanks," and is also the second place I went to for freelance writing.

It works a little differently at Mahalo.  You can't just write an article here and there - you apply for a job as a Guide, or a Walk-through Writer, or some other things I don't know that much about because I don't do them.  I know one has to do with writing questions and answers full time and another has to do with forum post writing.

I applied to be a Guide, and once again, acceptance came fairly quickly.  You take a reading comprehension test first, which is very much like the ones on the ACT and SAT, at least back when I took them.  Easy peasy.  100% for me, just like on other standardized test ones I've taken. You're then given a piece to read about writing Mahalo pages and another test to take.  This one, I'm told, I finished in record time, but then I got two answers wrong, so I might have rushed a little too much.  Still, I found it pretty simple.

Next you're tossed into Guide training.  Here, you're paid $7 for every Mahalo page you complete.  There's more work to be done than there is for DMS articles, and the pay is lower.  There are also fewer titles to choose from - if I recall correctly, in the training document there were about a thousand titles.  The plus was, there were lots more I was interested in writing!  Oh sure, the athlete ones I didn't much care about, but bands, authors, plants... there were lots of other things I could get into, which makes the writing much more fun.  For example, here's a page I did in training: http://www.mahalo.com/sum-41

The issue I had with training was the inconsistency.  The How to Build a Page guideline doesn't cover everything, and depending on who edits your work, you may get told to do things differently.  As I mentioned previously, I'm a rules girl who loves to stick by guidelines, so this gave me a minor breakdown.  After freaking out to my training editor, I finally just had to accept a fact:  Redo what you're told to redo and shut up about it.  Yes, one person may prefer it one way and another person a different way, but you're only going to drive yourself crazy if you worry about it.  You have to accept here that your writing isn't just going to go through on the first round, like at DMS.  There are some things, of course, that were consistently expected, and I found that following my gut intuition when expectations conflicted seemed to serve me best.

The things I found less exciting included, of course, the lower pay, though once you're out of training your pay does go up, and there are different things to do at different pay rates at that point as well, just to break things up.  I didn't like that the images on the pages were scraped from Google, though I know lots of websites who do that now, it just gives me the guilties because of the number of friends I have who are photographers that live for those licensing fees.  Or, I should say, ON those licensing fees.  And of course, I'd prefer it if every rule were documented as feeling like I'm flying by the seat of my pants makes me all crazy. Lastly, you don't get a byline for your pages on Mahalo.  I understand that to some extent - they're meant to all look similar, and have a consistent feel, but I do like feeling credited.

What I did like was getting to see what everyone else is working on.  At DMS, you're locked in your own little world to a great extent.  Oh, there are ways to see other people's finished articles (go to the forum, click on their name, which takes you to their profile, which shows the last five articles they've published through DMS), but you can't see works in progress, which I found to be a good teaching tool.  I'd go through work marked "redo" and "done" to see what I thought needed working on, which helped me self-edit a bit more too.  At Mahalo, you claim titles from a common spreadsheet, and so you know who scooped the articles you wanted, too.  But there were always plenty of interesting titles, especially while I was in training, so that wasn't much of a problem.  Also, at Mahalo you know who is copyediting your work, and have the opportunity to ask questions.  This is a huge advantage.  You have unlimited rewrites, another huge advantage.  You're not going to get an outright rejection after one rewrite attempt.  Once you're out of training, you do have minimums you're required to complete, but you can take as long as you need to in the training sessions to get the hang of things.

 While the pay is not as high, it's consistent at Mahalo, and I don't see a big need to have another major agency that I'm working for.  However, I was clued in by another DMS writer about a third company to sign up for just in case I ever have a rejected DMS article, and that's the one I'll write about next.