Scam Warning: Writers.Academy / Travelista.club

You may have seen jobs posted offering "$40 AUD for 1000 words" for either or both of these sites. They seem to be doing very well in SERPS somehow, particularly if you search for something like "travel writing jobs."

Rhys of ImRhys.com has done the hard work in exposing exactly what's going on with this arrangement, so I'm just posting to forward to that article and add a little commentary / extra information. To sum up, this is basically a convoluted affiliate marketing scheme that ends with you breaking even on paying for a year of web hosting so the people behind it can collect a referral fee and build backlinks for what looks to effectively be a private blog network.

As Rhys outlined in the article linked above, here's how it works:

* You sign up for their "training", which then requires you to purchase web hosting for a year through their GoDaddy affiliate link. This gives them a referral bonus, which is used to compensate you (the offered "$40 AUD") once you write and post one article.

* You're then sitting there with a domain and small hosting package that was paid for and $20 in hand, which I guess is nice, but nothing else save "a chance at ongoing work" according to this guy Mike from the company who posted a comment.

Here are the problems I have with this whole thing:

* The offered "$40 AUD" compensation is not technically incorrect, but it's all framed in a way that it could easily be mistaken as a rate offered for ongoing work. You don't find out it's a one-time payment for one article and that you're required to pay $20 AUD ($12 USD) for hosting up front prior to payment until you dig real deep into the fine print. "Write local travel guides" in plural right under the offer of compensation is to me the most directly deceptive bit of the whole thing.

* Also, the specific use of $40 AUD seems a little manipulative. They're recruiting American writers (and presumably other countries), and here 40 AUD is actually about $31 USD. It's true they seem to be in New Zealand, which is closer to Australia and maybe they deal in that currency more often, but I suspect it's more than a coincidence that the only number up there in your face is the larger one.

* There's nothing stopping this company from rescinding the offer at any time. You could in theory pay for the hosting, then they just say "Sorry we're not doing this anymore", and you're stuck with the bill. You have virtually no legal recourse here. GoDaddy must be offering a particularly generous referral fee for this to work out for them, and I wouldn't count on that lasting forever.

* You're also required to interact with them through Facebook exclusively for some reason, or they won't pay you?

* I strongly suspect this whole thing is a "private blog network" backlink-building exercise of some sort, which means that even if you did decide to build this new site of yours up into something, any momentum would be instantly dashed if and when Google decided to flag you as being part of a PBN. One of the selling points is supposed to be that they're "teaching you SEO" ... well if they're teaching PBN as a technique they're teaching you badly outdated black hat garbage that will get your site blown up eventually.

The icing on the cake for me was that comment I linked a little earlier from "Mike M" of writers.academy, which I'm posting some choice screenshots from here in case it "disappears":

I've seen a million shady small business owners like this both online and offline. They come up with some shifty business plan, or start cutting corners at their existing business, and then just CANNOT STAND IT when someone dares to expose or criticize it in any way publicly. So they jump in with these ranty responses, like the nonsense six paragraphs of "whataboutism" here attacking this guy Rhys for having affiliate links. The response always makes them look terrible and is worse from a PR standpoint than just keeping their mouth shut, but they just cannot help themselves. Lashing out and talking shit is even more important than the hustle. They usually descend into peppering personal insults in at some point too, Mike managed to largely evade that here, but give him some time - maybe he'll pop his ass up in the comments section here with some.

For my money, if key terms are buried in fine print, and you're expected to pay money up front before getting money back, then it's close enough to scam territory that I'm going nowhere near it. I'd advise staying far away from writers.academy and travelista.club. Unless you just want to take the free hosting and $20 and ignore them from there :)