Hello, welcome to Attack of the Fanboy. If you’re reading this, you likely just joined our site as a contributor or you are thinking about joining. You probably have some questions and this is where we will begin. I want to take a moment to thank you for taking the time to speak with us and taking the next step towards publishing your work on our site and getting paid to do it.
While we have discussed payment for your work during your interview and the associated expectations let’s reiterate these now:
- News Articles – $5
- Guides – $7
- Originals – $10
Articles will be taken from the Trello Board that you should have access to at this point.
Now let’s talk about requirements and expectations. There are two types of requirements that we ask writers to meet if they want to be paid for their work. The first is that there is a bare minimum of writing that we require from writers each week.
To maintain your position on our site, whether you are profitable or not, we require that on a monthly basis you have written an article for each day in the month. If there are 30 days in the month, for example, you are responsible for producing 30 articles in the month. From time to time we will shift to different types of content that we focus on so we may ask that you focus on guides one month or lists is another and being flexible enough to handle multiple types of articles and pitch in to get the types of content needed is paramount to both keeping your position on our site and helping the site grow.
Ultimately we are also looking for consistency from you but this has also proven to be the level of contribution where your efforts will be enough to earn you money doing this. Simply put, making money writing about games on our site is going to require some effort. Especially if you want to go beyond making the baseline rates for the aforementioned article types. Maintaining consistency in writing and writing timely content that you get from our Trello Board tasks is your main objective. Lastly we ask that you are working with the site’s best interests at heart. This means that suspected or outright plagiarism will not be tolerated, and we will hold our writers to a certain code of ethics. Payment from your writing is subject to these terms and conditions.
Our bottom line depends on writers adhering to our standards for quality while also aggressively seeking out traffic generating article ideas on their own. While we will hold you to a quality standard we’ll also evaluate how well you are doing in accomplishing your goals of people reading your work. There will not be a hard traffic requirement but we do want to see progress and growth from our writers.
The Hard Truth
While payment is not everyone’s primary focus, if it is for you, it’s important to set some realistic goals for yourself in terms of how much money you are looking to make. Making a living writing online is time consuming and if you are looking to make a full time wage from writing, you’re going to need to put in full time work to get that.
Writing about video games particularly, can be a difficult venture. Sure, it sounds like a ton of fun, and it can be, but it’s not just as simple as sitting down and playing your favorite games and then writing about them. Well it is, but you’re going to need to approach your time with games differently. Taking notes for things like guides, lists or reviews will be paramount in collecting information that you can relay to our readers.
Setting a goal each week in terms of how many articles you want to write and how much traffic you expect to get from those articles is also important. So with that stuff out of the way, there are some great parts about writing about games.
The Good Stuff
Attack of the Fanboy has been around since 2010. In that time we have established a footprint in the industry and we would like to make that footprint bigger. While we have traditionally been a very small team of writers, we have still managed to claw our way into places like Metacritic, Open Critic and other highly respected publications within the industry. We are often invited to attend preview events for games. We attend industry shows like E3 and Pax (and others). We get access to games ahead of their launch dates (sometimes) to put together purchasing recommendations for consumers. If you show that you can handle these things with professionalism, we are willing to give you all the responsibility that you can handle.
So what happens now?
Thanks for taking the time to read this broad strokes message regarding our site and the good and bad parts about writing with us. The next step from here is to learn what we expect from each of your posts using the WordPress editing tools. Use the link below to head directly to this page and get started with learning the tools that you’ll be working with.
Read these tutorials before starting your first post on AOTF
WordPress Writing Tutorial – These are the basics of using the WordPress editor and site specific things you need to know
Writing an Article for AOTF – All the basics that you need to know outside of the WordPress editor.
Using Categories and Tags – Included in the WordPress Tutorial Above. ICYMI
Understanding SEO – About the SEO box on our site, titles, and more tricks to improve your traffic
Article Types
Review Style Guide – Coming Soon
List Style Guide – Coming Soon
Original Style Guide – Coming Soon
Check back for more posts on creating great content on Attack of the Fanboy…
