Hi Everyone,
I'm not going to name any names but recently there was a blogging opportunity listed and it suggested that after unpaid training, offers would be made for editor or contributor positions. Normally I wouldn't do unpaid training but this looked like a great opportunity and I know companies like About.com have a similar policy.
I attended one week of training and was told I was the first to be offered an editor position but in my opinion, the terms changed. I was told I was being offered a partnership.
I saw a few red flags early on but hushed my gut instinct and approached warily. My first red flag was that everyone in the group of 20 seemed to be being offered editor positions. I saw a wide array of skills in the list of people and not everyone appeared to have the same level of experience so it surprised me that they were all told they'd be editors.
The company listed several scenarios in their job posting and in e-mails to me and I now believe that most of them were hard sales pitches to convince me to invest my time in an effort that might or might not pay off.
The original post said contributors would be paid $5-25 per post and now it seems that paid contributors are not the norm but rather a last resort and the company doesn't expect to need their services. Editors are expected to populate the blogs for commission only and can pay contributors if they want help populating the blogs.
Where rates were originally mentioned and paid training talked about, now the talk is of sweat equity, team work and seeing the big picture. Huge numbers are being thrown out there for earning potential and those numbers sound an awful lot like a MLM sales pitch. I'm all for team and sweat and that kind of thing if I can see that it appears really beneficial to me but in this scenario what I do see is that I had a carrot dangled and then was offered a partnership to run some blogs and share in commission that may or may not ever happen. I already have blogs where I make 100% commission.
I wish everyone who continues on with the training success and I hope the company thrives. Some day I might see a bunch of you making killer cash while I realize that I walked away but I do feel that the terms changed part way through the process and that makes me uneasy.
Perhaps it wasn't blatant deceit but just mostly to protect proprietary information and get people really enthusiastic but in my opinion, it wasn't entirely honest.
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