Remember the stir caused by companies exploiting people in third world countries to produce goods cheaper? The same kind of thing happens through Associated Content every day.

I’m not talking about manufacturing shoes or footballs; I’m talking about publishers hiring free-lancers to produce content for them at a fraction of the profit they make from Associated Content.

The first rule of Associated Content’s Submission Guideline states ‘All content must be created by you. No exceptions.’ by outsourcing to a freelancer you may own the rights to the content, but by submitting it to Associated Content you are essentially breaking this rule.

The internet marketer can feed specific keywords to the freelancer and pay less than a dollar for 400 words or more. Worse than that, they can take successful articles from Associated Content and other sites and have them rewritten. Some will take it even further, and not pay the freelancer after receiving the articles.

The freelancer writer likely does not know about Associated Content. That’s how I started. I was looking for freelance work on and was offered $5 for 5 400 word articles. The marketer made more than this but at least I got an initial payment, which I can’t do otherwise considering I’m outside the US.

If the freelancer, as I did, pastes a line or two of their articles into Google the results will lead them to their article on Associated Content and they can make a lot more money from their work…

The problem is this can be hard to spot, the only real way Associated Content could do anything about it would be to pose as a freelancer looking for work and ban the account which submitted those articles. That would be a pretty big time investment.

In the end, the marketer exploits the freelancer more than Associated Content. They get paid, Associated Content gets its content and in the end, the outsourced freelancer doesn’t know they missed out on anything.

Incidentally, if you’re looking for quick money from writing but you can’t get an instant payment from Associated Content you can be outsourced like this although you will be paid significantly less.