Looking For Writing Work?

We Are Currently: ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS

DecideOutside.com is all about opening the outdoors to everyone. If someone has never camped before, or gone hiking, we want to help make their experience smoother so they’ll decide outside again in the future.

We’re looking for writers who love the outdoors and have lots of experience with camping/and or overlanding, and/or winter sports, and/or kayaking, and/or other awesome outdoors activities. If this sounds like you, keep reading!

Looking For Ghostwriters

I’m particularly looking for someone who’s willing to write an article that will be edited and later posted under my name.

The exception is if you are an expert in an outdoors field. What’s an expert? Well, if you are prominent in an outdoor magazine or you’ve written a book, then let’s talk. 🙂

So, if you are an expert, you can post under your own name and your bio would link to your website.

Otherwise, the posts will be under my name.

Who We’re Looking For

We are looking for individuals who enjoy the rustic experience of sleeping in a tent and being outdoors.  Perhaps you’re the kind of person who would love spending a day in the forest hiking, bird-watching, sitting around a campfire, etc. We know that your passion for being outside will show through in your writing!  

The outdoors is kind of intimidating if you didn’t grow up in a family that went outside, all the time.
There are far too many blogs that focus on buying your way to the best outdoors experiences, but our goal is to be incredibly helpful for people learning to experience the outdoors and perhaps even branch out and gain some new hobbies and perhaps even a new appreciation for nature.  

What We Would Like From A Writer

Nice To Newbies

We’re looking for people who don’t mind approaching camping or other outdoors activity from a total beginners perspective and helping others understand who may not know about all the jargon, the laws, the customs, and the gear associated with camping.

Being Authentic

It’s important to us for our writers not to just push products, but instead talk meaningfully about information about outdoors topics and related gear.  The goal is to be helpful, so people can feel comfortable going out the door and going camping. Gear, and understanding how to use it is also important, but we’re not only trying to sell gear.

Adapt

It’s extremely important also for us that you are willing to learn and adapt your writing style to our standards. We have a strict format that we want to follow that’s optimized for SEO. Some of the writing needs to be very encyclopedic (even dry), while the rest can have your personality.

This means that after a post we may ask you to redo a few things if it’s too far outside of what we are hoping for. We really hope you catch on to the method and keep learning.

Research

We are also looking for writers not afraid to research. Everyone can google, but we are looking for those willing to dig through some scholarly papers, manufacturer spec sheets, and even willing to make a call to a park ranger for more information on the occasion. We are trying to make really solid content which only comes from solid experience or solid research.

To show that you’ve actually read this job listing, make sure to include the word:  “Giraffe” somewhere within your screening questions.  

Absolutely no plagiarism

Plagiarism online is a bit tricky and it’s hard to know where the lines are. However, it’s very important to us to have original content on our website, and for this reason it is not acceptable research to read other blogs and simply reword others’ content. We do check for this.

Safe

Lastly, it’s important to us to write content that’s safe for the person as well as safe for the environment. For example, talking about burning camp garbage is against Leave No Trace guidelines and we wouldn’t want to post content encouraging that.

Writing Format

For each post, initially, you will be provided with a headline, with a couple of subheadings and maybe some explanation text to give a rough idea of what the post we expect for a particular topic.  

Additionally, we will tell you how big an article we are looking for, and your task will be to research and write the content for the post.  Once you submit a draft, we will edit the post and publish it. We may make significant additions and changes depending on the subject.

Pay


We’re looking for articles around 1250-2500 words in length and we pay by the word.

For your first 4 articles we pay 2 cents a word.

After your first 4 articles we pay 2.5 cents a word.

If things are going super well we definitely will consider higher pay but we probably won’t be paying more than 3.5 a word unless you’re a verified expert.

Summary of Expectations

  • We are not looking for full-time writers, you will be working independently and you will be paid solely for the articles you write.
  • We ask for 2-3 articles a month from you which includes the research necessary for each topic.  
  • Correct English spelling and grammar are required. We prefer English as a first language.
  • A familiarity with Leave No Trace principles https://lnt.org/why/7-principles/
  • A familiarity with common U.S. campground laws, for example state park laws (such as laws regarding gathering firewood, etc.)
  • Articles MUST be original content

How To Apply

Please include the following:

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your outdoors experience.
  • If you have any published content we can review as additional demonstration of your writing, please let us know and we can review what you have.
  • Your LinkedIn profile (if you have one) helps us know you’re a real person if you feel comfortable sharing.
  • Write the style check:

Style Check:

(You will not be paid for this content, this is simply a few paragraphs).

In around 400-500 words, please write about one of your recent outdoor adventures and describe the top one or two mistakes made by beginners in that particular type of adventure.

Email this to [email protected]

What Happens Next

If we like your application, we’ll send you a few training videos that will take about an hour to watch. After you notify us that you’ve completed the training we will ask for an article that we’ll pay you 2 cents a word for. Whether you continue as a writer for us or not we will still pay you (unless it’s plagiarized or of poor quality).

If we do want to keep trying you out as a writer, we’ll ask for 3 more articles and we’ll reassess how things are going after those. If we like what we read we’ll pay 2.5 cents per word going forwards and ask for more articles, and we’ll continue to reassess periodically.

To set expectations–if you haven’t done this type of writing before, a 1250 word post may take you 3-4 hours at first. It is completely possible once you figure out a process for yourself to cut this time in half.