IAPWE Review: My Firsthand Experience
I’ve always been a freelancer at heart.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been the driven, self-starter type who prefers to carve out her own path in life.
This story begins when a friend of mine who has been writing articles as a side gig told me about one of her clients, the IAPWE.
The International Association of Professional Writers and Editors. Yea, it’s quite a mouthful, I know.
She said she thought of me because I love to write and because I also have a lot of weird, specialized knowledge on topics that most people don’t. I have a semi-strong background in the medical/science niche but I also really just love writing about anything that interests me.
I’m a nerd!
As a part of the process of deciding whether or not I even wanted to apply, I did a cursory review of the IAPWE’s pay rate, which I will cover in the next section.
IAPWE Pay Rate Analysis
At first, the rates almost seemed a little too good to be true but that’s relative I guess.
The times that I’ve been paid to write, I typically received a rate somewhere in the vicinity of $2+ for every 100 words, so when she told me that they paid $20 for every 100 words? Count me in! (Yes, I know some people consider even this rate to be a paltry amount but I’m not one of them!).
Out of curiosity I just looked up pay scales for freelance writers and it shows a median of $24.51 on PayScale.com.
I have actually been able to consistently earn a higher rate since an article usually takes me just over an hour to write (the article lengths are usually somewhere between 300–500 words, although the 300 word ones are more common lately).
Taking into account only their lowest available word count articles, those being 300 words, that earns me $60 for approximately 80–90 minutes of work. Even at a full 2 hours per article, I would be making $30 per hour, which is still higher than the median rate. And, yes, I understand some bloggers and other specialized content writers are paid rates that are orders of magnitude higher than this. Still, this rate was high enough for me and that’s all that mattered.
Did I say I was a nerd? Anyways, moving on…
So I applied.
TL;DR, the IAPWE has been a solid client to write for. The pay rate is great IMO and there are almost always interesting topics to write about. Payment has gone smoothly so far and I plan to continue writing for them whenever I have time. For me, this is has definitely been part-time gig work but the potential is there for working more if they like the way you write.
Applying to Write for the IAPWE
I have applied for a LOT of different freelancing positions in my life. I’ve seen almost every version or permutation of an application form that there is.
The IAPWE’s form is definitely on the lighter side, only asking for basic information like my name and a few questions about the type of content I like to write.
At the end of the application, I was also asked to upload a sample of my writing.
Done. Application sent!
I would say the application process, from start to finish, probably took me about five minutes. It would have taken me less than one if I hadn’t spent several minutes mulling over which sample to upload.
I think they let you upload more than one, or include links to more than one article that you’ve written? But I’m not sure because it’s been a while since I applied and they may have modified the application form since the time of my writing this.
Pro Tip #1: My only advice here is that you should definitely pick your sample carefully. The rest of the IAPWE’s application is so bare bones that I would have to imagine they are weighing their decisions almost entirely on the sample that each writer submits. In case anyone is wondering, that sample that I submitted was in the medtech niche, but it was also a blog post in a more casual style, so definitely not too ‘sciencey’ or academic-sounding.
The Long Wait
After twiddling my thumbs for almost an entire month, I FINALLY received an email from the IAPWE.
I was happy to be accepted but it had been so long that I had kind of moved on by this point and was not expecting to hear back from them.
I also was in the middle of starting a new internship and didn’t have a lot of free time on my hands so it just didn’t seem practical for me to take on another gig.
At the same time, I never like to put all of my eggs in one basket and like to have a few backup plans for alternative sources of income.
Honestly, if my friend had not originally recommended the IAPWE, I’m not sure that I would have signed up at this point because I was just so busy.
I decided I would at least sign up so as to keep my options open in case my circumstances changed at some point and I had more free time open up. There was no deadline in the welcome letter but I didn’t want to wait too long either.
Becoming a Writer for the IAPWE
I went to the IAPWE’s freelancer registration page and was asked to fill out some additional information, which was a bit annoying because some of this information was repetitive from my original application.
After entering some basic information, IAPWE showed me a few optional memberships that I could sign up for if I wanted to or I could also just go with a free signup option.
I went with the free option.
I was also given a trial of one of their memberships for free to check out. I thought that was nice but I’m not sure if the IAPWE is still offering this promotion. I’ll touch more on what the membership was like later or maybe in a followup article since I am mainly focusing on my experience writing for the IAPWE.
Once I completed the registration process, I received an email with a link to the IAPWE’s freelancer area.
AGAIN, I had to create a registration for that portal, which took a minute or two but this was still kinda annoying.
Finally, I was able to view the available writing assignments and all of the instructions for how to proceed.
I would NOT call this a seamless process but I’ve seen worse. Overall, from the time I received the IAPWE’s acceptance email, I believe it took me about 10 minutes to get up and running.
Still, the whole process felt a little clumsy, overcomplicated and more confusing that it needs to be. I am hoping that the IAPWE will make the process a little more streamlined If they haven’t already.
Update: Before I move on to the rest of my experience, I just wanted to update this section because I have seen some freelancers complaining that they were forced to sign up for a paying membership with the IAPWE or that the free trial cannot be canceled.
That was not my experience and it was not the experience of several of my colleagues that either write — or have written — for the IAPWE. None of us had to pay anything to work for the IAPWE.
If I had to guess as to why there’s any discrepancy, perhaps some people view offering a complimentary free trial as a negative, which I can understand because I can’t count how many companies, organizations or services give me a free trial when I sign up. I guess I’m just desensitized to this?
My Experience Writing for the IAPWE
Okay, if you’ve made it this far, I salute you!
The patience you need to read my article is the same patience you will need if you want to succeed with IAPWE, so consider this a test.
Seriously though, the biggest learning curve for me when starting out with the IAPWE was how to navigate their freelance portal.
The freelance portal has a list of different topics that you can choose from along with relevant guidelines and requirements that are listed above each grouping of similar topics.
Once you find a topic, you can begin writing about it and eventually submit it through the IAPWE’s content submission page.
I am going to highlight the next sentence because it may be the most important sentence of this entire article.
Make sure to read the IAPWE’s content guide that explains the process of working for them.
I can guarantee that, if you don’t do this and just start writing, your content is going to get rejected or, at the very least, this will make your time working for them far less pleasant or enjoyable.
I have seen some accounts from freelancers online that said their content was not approved and while I don’t know all of the specifics, if they did not thoroughly review the guidelines, I can see how this would make getting any content approved exceedingly difficult.
My first topic was something about medical devices, which is somewhat up my alley. There were quite a few guidelines specific to this topic and there’s no getting around the fact that they were a major pain at first.
The IAPWE is definitely on the more stringent side as far as guidelines are concerned, compared to some other clients I have worked for. The guidelines are very detailed and there are many of them.
That being said, their guidelines rarely change and are almost exactly the same across all topic groupings.
I am convinced that the difference between success and failure as a writer for the IAPWE is whether or not someone takes the time to fully read and review their guidelines before they start writing.
My first piece probably took me about two hours, which included getting familiarized with the portal, guidelines, etc.
Pro Tip #2: Don’t take this the wrong way but you should consider signing up for a grammar-checking service if you want to save time and avoid revision requests from the IAPWE (their editors are tough!). I still use one to cover my bases in case I get sloppy. The IAPWE offers a grammar checker to members, which is pretty decent, but I don’t know if it has all of the features that some of the dedicated grammar checking services have. Also, not everyone chooses to be a member so you would need a service outside of the IAPWE.
After about 2 weeks or so, I finally heard back from the IAPWE that my content was approved but that I needed to add an additional image and correct some of my citations.
After doing this, they then offered to pay me via Freelancer or PayPal. I chose PayPal to avoid additional fees and I received my payment within 3 or 4 days.
My Overall Impression of the IAPWE
Overall, the entire process works. It’s bulky though. (Similar to how I described the signup process).
Once I became familiar with the process though, all of this became a nonissue.
After all, you only need to sign up one time and, once you understand and internalize their writing guidelines, those guidelines almost never change.
I am glad that writing for the IAPWE turned out to be a good fit for me, although I can see how it might not be for everyone.
My Issue with IAPWE
One issue I have had is the IAPWE’s excessive delays in getting back to me whenever I have a question about anything. I can definitely see how this could create problems if someone has an urgent issue, such as trying to get help canceling a membership while the IAPWE is taking several days to respond.
This issue also spilled over into the content approval process. The IAPWE says it takes them up to 10 days to approve content but when I first started, sometimes it took them almost double that time!
Pro Tip #3: It is important to note that, after completing the first few assignments, they told me they will remove some of the limits that they place on newer writers. For example, after I completed my third piece for them, they said I can now do up to three tasks at the same time, whereas their original limit for newer writers is one task at a time.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, I still haven’t pursued writing for the IAPWE as anything more than occasional gig work and I don’t really see that changing anytime soon.
I would say that the delayed response times is really my only gripe with the IAPWE and how it operates and I hope that the IAPWE will seriously consider bringing on more staff or take whatever steps are necessary to improve their response times.
Aside from this, I think they are a great outfit with a lot of potential as a high-paying (or decent-paying) client that has interesting topics to write about.
I also recognize that the IAPWE is not for everyone. Some of their topics require a bit more research than your average run-of-the-mill content mill, but I don’t mind that because I enjoy learning about new things!
This article turned out being much longer than I had anticipated and I didn’t even get to cover the membership aspects of the IAPWE yet.
I think perhaps that will take an entire ‘Part 2’ or second article because there’s a lot to cover. From their professional development section that has LOTS of training videos on every aspect of freelance writing (as both a craft and a career), to all of the AI writing tools that can create blog titles and paragraphs from scratch and there’s even a tool that rewrites existing content for you; it’s just a lot! (Did I say it was a lot?) Oh and the IAPWE recommendation letter is another thing I’ll have to touch on as well.
Phew! What a journey! I hope some of this was informative or insightful for anyone considering a freelance writing career in general and, more specifically, with the IAPWE.
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