What to Do with Rejected Articles

As a freelance writer, you should expect for your work to be rejected from time to time. If you work one-on-one with a client, or through one of the freelance sites such as vWorker, and a client wants you to make changes to the work, this is easily done, and usually has no affect on your rating. Once those requested changes are made, the client generally accepts the work, and you get paid.

This is not the case on freelancer sites like iWriter. Once a client has rejected an article, the article is rejected. They may ask you to make adjustments, and to resubmit it, and you should do this, providing that the requester has not given you a bad rating. If the requester has given you a bad rating, you don't want to submit any further work to that client.

You should, however, give that client a bad rating as well - especially if you know that the work was good. Do this with the star rating system, without using words. In other words, rate them at one star, and do not leave a message with your rating. Your words could easily get you banned from the site, and this is true for any freelancing site out there. You should also keep a list of clients who reject what you know to be good work, or clients who give low ratings for good work.

I'm not sure how iWriter would feel about me publishing the names of requesters that should definitely be avoided, so I won't do that here. However, if you want my personal list, you can contact me, and I will be happy to share that list with you.  If you have such a list, feel free to share it with me as well!

So, what should you do with your rejected articles? Publish them as fast as you can. Set up a free blog or submit them to an article directory. You can also use them to make Squidoo Pages or Hub Pages. It doesn't matter, as long as you publish them fast. This way, if the requester or buyer is trying to steal the work - and there are many out there who actually do steal the work by rejecting the work - they will be publishing duplicate content, since yours is published first.

A day or so after you have published the work, run it through CopyScape to see if the requester/client was stupid enough to use the work anyway. If they were, report them to their Webhosting service, any company with which they are affiliated, and of course you should report them to the freelance site as well. Do not let them get away with it if you can stop them - but if you can't stop them, rest in the knowledge that Google knows which work was published first, and their site will be penalized for duplicate content.