Writers Work Review: Is It Worth It?

In this Writers Work review, we explain if this freelance writing service can help you find paying work.

As you may know, we regularly feature new writing sites and check them out to see if they’re a worthwhile opportunities or not. Become a Writer Today hired an experienced freelance writer to test this service and prepare a Writers Work review. Here’s what he found out.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aUvK0BLcIKE

What is Writers Work?

Writers Work is a freelance platform that allows writers to find jobs from online clients, complete them, and get paid, all while working from home if you prefer.

There are a lot of writing platforms like this – I have reviewed some of them in the past – and they vary a lot in quality. Some are worth your time. Some are basically scams that should always be avoided. Some are honest but a whole lot of work for relatively little reward.

So, where does Writers Work fall when it comes to quality, ease of use, and value for your money and time?

I signed up and dug into the system to find out for you, and I’ll talk about everything I learned and rate the experience. But first, some basics:

• Writers Work is an online freelancing platform – everything is managed through their interface, including most communication with clients and the content that you send them.
• Writers Work offers writing jobs including general website content, blogging, copywriting, and social media posts. Unlike some platforms, it doesn’t offer website design, transcriptions, editing, or other gigs like that.
• You need to be at least 18 years old to sign up, and have an online account where payments can be deposited.

All right, now let’s dive in and see how Writers Work measured up and if it can help you make money! You can skim to see my final scores, or read more to check out exactly what I thought to help you make a good decision.

Final Rating on Quality: 2 out of 5 Stars

When it comes to writing platforms, it’s important to focus on the actual experience, not what their marketing says (marketing will always make a platform sound easy and lucrative).

There are some red flags when it comes to Writers Work’s approach, but also a couple of things I liked.  

Earnings

How much money can a freelance writer actually make? And can you use it to earn a living from writing work? Writers Work claims that writers can make $20 to $65 an hour working on the platform.

There is no guarantee that you will qualify for the high-paying, $100 articles, and you can’t predict the availability of articles when you sign up (more about this later). From what I saw of the listings and overall process, with significant work you could make around $20 per hour – assuming a steady flow of client projects, which may or may not happen.

With a lot of work, you could possibly make more. But steep competition for the highest-paying articles (which also tie into experience and time on the platform) make higher figures difficult to reach.

Overall, earnings are low to average and largely left up to chance, with limited means to establish a long-term relationship with a client.

Fees

Writers Work charges – a full price of $94 that appears to be permanently discounted to $47. You have to pay this before you can access the site’s services or resources.

Our freelance writer said the Writers Work fee raised a red flag for him. If you would rather use a free service, try Freelancer or UpWork.

We also checked some comparable freelance writing site and found Writers Work pricing is comparable. Flexjobs (a popular freelancing site) costs $49.95 for the year. SolidGigs cost $19 per month. Hello Bonsai costs $19 per month.

These premium freelancing sites charge a fee with the goal of featuring jobs not available elsewhere, consolidating jobs from across the web, or managing the applications process. Yes, you can probably find this work without paying a fee but it will involve more desk research. More advanced freelance writers probably don’t need to pay as they’ll have clients and contacts they can contact.

Note from editor

Refunds

Since Writers Work has a fee, I also need to talk about refunds. The site guarantees a refund within 30 days if the experience is not what you expected.

The Better Business Bureau shows a list of 29 complaints specifically focused on this refund: Some of these people said they couldn’t get refunds on time. At the time of writing, 25 of these complaints were resolved or closed over the past 12 months.

If you’re worried about a refund, use a free freelancing service.

Qualifying

Qualifying for Writers Work is easy (in part because of the payment requirement). You fill out a very simple web form with contact information and your email address to get started, writers seem to get accepted very quickly, and then you can immediately get started learning the tools. There are no tests or qualifications.

App Support

Writers Work offers a mobile-optimized version of their site, although there isn’t an independent mobile app.

From the Client’s Side

Obviously, most of my review is focusing on how the site works for the writers themselves. Most of the site is designed to funnel visitors to signing up to be a writer (and making their payment). However, there is a page for posting a job with a web form to fill out.

The team says that the posting will go live in about 12 to 24 hours, and stay live for 30 days. It’s possible to feature a listing if you want.

Final Rating on Ease of Use: 5 out of 5 Stars

One of the most important facets of a writing platform is how easy it is to learn and use. Some sites are very poor at this – they’re a maze of different tools and data points with poor website navigation, which can be confusing and annoying to learn.

The better sites have very clean, usable sites with tools that help you out without getting in the way. In this respect, Writers Work is well-designed and presents writing work intuitively.

Interface

One thing Writers Work does particularly well is the website design and interface for writers. Everything is clean, easy to read, and simple to understand or use. Pages are minimalistic where necessary to avoid distractions, but informative depending on what data you want to display.

This also carries over to the education modules and resources for new writers, which are well-designed and easy to navigate as you watch videos and learn more about the freelance writing process. The service also simplifies looking for jobs and signing up for them. Its minimalistic approach focuses on the most important information, and the required fields are marked clearly when you’re ready to apply

Writing and Text Editor

Writers Work also has a very good text editor. This is more important to some writers than others. More experienced writers often have their preferred text editors to use, and then simply copy and paste content to wherever it needs to be.

But if you want to use Writers Work’s own editor, it’s complete and usable, providing useful data in ways that don’t distract you from the job at hand.

I especially like the automatic tracking tools included in the text editor, which can save time when keeping an eye on your content metadata. This includes tools that let you know at a glance how many words and characters the body of your content has. Again, this manages to be useful without being too intrusive.

Basic formatting is also included. There are even trackers for how long it would take to read the content vs. speaking it out loud, and – particularly useful for those who are working for a client based on time – a tracker for how long you’ve spent on a document.  

Performance

Website performance was swift and stable while I was using the service. Pages and orders loaded fairly quickly, with no irksome freezes or delays when using the tools. Obviously, this will depend on your own local internet performance as well, but I found no complaints here.

Grammar Checks

Grammar checks are readily available these days no matter what platform you use, thanks to extensions like Grammarly that do a great job of checking your sentences and phrasing for any problems. But if you don’t use something like Grammarly, then Writers Work does include an automatic spellchecker that will note where there seem to be issues. It’s not a full grammar tutor, but it can help you spot potential mistakes.

Article Scoring

Writers Work also includes some great article scoring along with its text editor. You get a readability score and a report on the reading level grade of the content. If you highlight a word, you also have an option to search for definitions or synonyms right in the text editor for easier replacement.

I would have liked to see checks for plagiarism and other tools that are useful for judging the quality of work, but overall the tools should prove useful for any freelance writer.

Goals

Writers Work does have some options for tracking goals and time spent on articles if you want to add a little more structure to your freelance writing. Again, this is a tool that’s probably more helpful for beginners than those who have already built up a freelance business, but it’s still nice to see goal-oriented tools included.

Final Rating on Value for Money: 3 out of 5 Stars

Since you’re paying to sign up for this service, the value you get out of it is really important.

So, does Writers Work offer a lot of value for money? Well…in some ways, certainly for new writers, but your mileage may vary.

Available Writing Gigs

Writing platforms are all about how to find writing opportunities quickly and easily and seeing what’s available. It’s important to be very clear about this point, Writers Work is primarily an aggregator of other job site posts.

Yes, they manage their own postings, but that’s only a minor portion of the site. The main focus is on pulling jobs from other sites like Indeed, Problogger, etc.

The advantage to Writers Work is that they are all pulled into one spot for easy browsing. You can also search based on employment type, location, keywords, source site, and more, which is handy…but not exactly worth paying for.

If you do find a job that you like (the site makes it clear when jobs were posted so you can easily check the most recent postings), you simply click on it to read more and apply. The listing clearly shows pay per article or word, and words needed, which does make it easy to quickly judge the post and move on.

As to how many gigs are available – this can obviously vary over time. When I checked out the service, there were a fair amount of opportunities, but not a large amount. It’s also going to be a bit different depending on your experience.

New writers may need to limit themselves to entry-level jobs which will sharply cut down on available posts. Other jobs may self-limit by simply paying too little.

Again, the primary value of the service comes not from the availability of unique jobs (at least not yet, in our experience), but the ability to view a wide variety of jobs collected from different platforms, all in the same spot.

Applications

Actually applying to gigs is a very hit-or-miss experience on the platform. Each individual listing will have its own requirements. Some will simply have an email address to send a message to. Others will redirect you to a posting on another job site.

Some may have links to online web forms or other processes you need to begin. If you’ve ever searched on something like Craigslist for jobs, then the feeling is a little similar, albeit more organized.

This has benefits and drawbacks. Some posts are very easy to read and apply to with the tools provided. Others take you down a rabbit hole of work that may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Where Writers Work really shines is the jobs that easily link directly to the platform and allow you to use all the platform tools to quickly apply (linking your portfolio, which I will get to down below), and create your content right there, without visiting other sites in the process.

This isn’t always guaranteed, but it’s clearly one of the primary goals of the platform.

Resources

One thing Writers Work does well is provide a “University” for new writers to learn about how to start freelancing. This content is generally very well-presented, acting much like an online learning class that you can explore at your own leisure.

Brand new writers will get the most out of it, while more experienced writers can skim through and take a look only at subjects that interest them.

The University is divided into a few different modules, and each module has several topics, like “Time Tracking and Project Management” or “Publishing Your First Article.” Most of these topics are delivered via video with a section to take notes, and often have supplementary materials you can download if you really want to study up.

For new writers hunting for profitable writing jobs, this may be a key merit of Writers Work, especially since it’s high-quality content.

Portfolios and Profiles

Here’s a benefit I didn’t quite expect but really enjoyed: Writers Work lets you set up your own portfolio using the site’s tools. This is more or less required if you want to create a robust profile that will net you more work, but the process is fairly simple. You upload photos, experiences, and documents to help showcase your work.

Granted, you may have already done this on LinkedIn or a similar platform while building your personal writing brand, but doing this inside Writers Work gives you an easy way to directly link your portfolio without depending on outside sites.

The Bottom Line on Writers Work Review

Writer’s Work contains some useful jobs for writers, but do your own due diligence beforehand.

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