Watch Out for Ghostwriting Scam Projects! – How to Protect Yourself and Your Business
1. Utilize Job Sites
Unfortunately the world of online ghostwriting can be rife with scammers trying to get their hands on content that they never intend to pay for. You’ll encounter at least one of these frauds if you seriously take on ghostwriting.
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What you can do to protect yourself is to sign up with and find work only through established job sites. These job marketplaces are designed to protect the employers and the freelancers. Instead of opening up a website of your own you can utilize these platforms to find genuine employers who have been verified by a community of freelancers.
2. Know Your Rights on the Job Site
All job sites offer some kind of dispute resolution service through their platform. To use this service you will need to follow some rules the job site has set. These sets of rules are specific to each site but mostly require that the communication between the client and the freelancer be through their site only.
This ensures that the site representatives or mediators have a full record of all that has transpired throughout the process so that they can make an informed decision.
3. Use Escrow Services
A lot of job sites provide escrow services to protect both the employer and the freelancer from fraud. Once money is placed in escrow it can only be cancelled (returned) to the employer with both parties’ consent. And the employer can only complete the payment, even though they have already transferred the money.
4. Protect Yourself by Setting Milestones
Setting milestones for payments for longer projects makes sure your client doesn’t run off at the end of a long project without paying at all. Even if your employer decides to drop a project all together half way through it, you will get paid for that work if you have set payment milestones.
The milestones are decided before you say yes to a project and are usually decided by both the client and the ghostwriter’s input. Sometimes however, the clients have pre set milestones according to their schedule and budget.
5. Send Non- Editable Work for Review
Most clients will request that they see the finished product before they make the payment. This is an entirely reasonable request. If you do not have an escrow set up the best thing to do would be to send your client a non-editable locked document that they can read but not use without paying you.
You can also send the part of the deliverable, not the whole. If it’s a set of 10 articles of 500 words each, you can send your client 10 articles with only 300 words for review and upon payment you can submit the articles in whole.
6. Only Send the Editable Deliverables After You Get Paid IN FULL
If a client starts making excuses right at the time of payment and wants to pay only a part of the project’s fee, you should in a polite manner make it very clear that you will send them whatever they pay for.
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