Ethics, ethics, ethics

In your freelance writing career, you’ll likely encounter clients that are simply not worth it. I’m not just talking about businesses that pay peanuts for what should be a $100 article (although there are a lot of those too…), I’m referring to shady companies that want you to compromise your values for a quick buck.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

Writing fake reviews / testimonials – Last year, a company approached me to re-write their homepage. The job seemed pretty standard at first. They showed me the site’s design, the amount of content they needed, and what they wanted to talk about.

Our conversation was going fine until they told me, “Oh by the way, we want to include some testimonials at the bottom of the page, so if you could write those, that would be great.”

“Um, do you need me to interview some of your existing customers?” I asked.

“You can just make stuff up.”

“Yeah, I don’t do that.”

I ended up turning down the job. It wasn’t worth it.

I also get tons of emails from companies that want me to write fake Yelp reviews, positive comments and whatnot. I don’t even bother responding to these messages.

My next example isn’t as blatantly dishonest as the first, but it falls under an ethical grey area, and I highly recommend that you take caution when you’re in a similar situation:

Writing about a client for a site that you contribute to – One of my clients found out that I’m a regular contributor to a popular website, and they asked if I was willing to write a blog post that mentions and links to them. After all, I add relevant links and talk about other companies in my articles all the time, it wouldn’t hurt if I insert a link to a company that was paying me, right?

Actually, yes, it could… a lot. Such an assignment is a conflict of interest, and if the blog found out that I was plugging my client in my article, it would ruin my relationship with the site.

I told my client about the conflict. However, I also said that I would still be able to write the post, provided that I add a full disclosure stating that they’re a client. The company didn’t want to do it because they wanted the link to look natural, so the project didn’t move forward.

Image: Eleaf on Flickr