Write for Cracked and Get Paid (in Money)

If you want to get paid to write for Cracked, you can. Right now. No experience necessary, just click here, read it and then scroll to the bottom and click the "Sign Me Up" button. It takes seconds, it costs you nothing and no one is turned away. Upon clicking that, you will be magically transported to the Cracked Workshop forum where people submit articles.

If that doesn't convince you, let me share a story:

I never graduated from college. I went for less than a semester and dropped out for a variety of reasons. When I turned in the slip to drop the English class I'd been taking, the professor told me, "Whatever you do in life, make sure it involves writing." And with that, I embarked on a five-year career in fast food that peaked with an assistant managership at a McDonald's inside a Walmart, which is sort of like working inside a Doritos Locos Taco.

I finally broke free from the rigors of restaurants and settled into a life of taking customer service phone calls and processing medical claims at a health insurance company, an employment path that spanned more than 10 years of my life. I'd resigned myself to the fact that I'd probably work some variation of that same tedious desk job for the remainder of my days when, on Thanksgiving Day in 2007, I read this call for writers on Cracked, just like you're doing now.

Assuming that nothing more than maybe a small check would come of it, I signed up to write for Cracked. Barely two weeks later, the first thing I'd been paid to write since back when I used to sell book reports in high school was on the front page of the site. Over the course of the next year, I wrote more than 20 articles for Cracked. In less time than it took me to get a $1/hour raise at my day job, I'd amassed a writing resume that included several articles that had been viewed more than a million times each.

Sensing an opportunity to tell health insurance to kiss my ass, I started using my archive of Cracked articles to branch out and get other writing jobs. Get all the degrees you want, but nothing is going to look better to a prospective writing employer than verifiable proof that your words are capable of entertaining a lot of people.

Sometime in 2009, as a result of my work at Cracked I landed a job doing freelance writing for a pair of music and movie sites. Later I was hired to run another comedy site, and from there I was offered a job writing for a new site owned by Playboy. So to summarize, less than four years after signing up to write for Cracked, I quit my day job to work full time for Playboy. I know what you're wondering, and the answer is yes, I did get to go to the Playboy Mansion. Only once, though. And I had to pay for the flight myself. But still, if I had never responded to that call for writers back in 2007, I never would have even been invited. And I most certainly wouldn't be where I am right now.

When Playboy sold off their digital business to an international porn conglomerate, I saw it as a good time to explore my options. As luck would have it, Cracked was hiring. After a few telephone chats, I agreed to come on board as a full-time editor (hello again, health insurance!) at Cracked.com in December 2011. Eventually, I left South Dakota, and after stops in New York and San Francisco, I moved to Los Angeles to work from the Cracked offices. You can see the ocean from the room where we have our editorial meetings. Things are a lot better for me now than they were on that brutally cold Thanksgiving Day in South Dakota in 2007.

And the best part is, you can do all of these things, too! My story certainly isn't unique. Just that one call for writers in 2007 brought the likes of Robert Brockway, Kristi Harrison and Ian Fortey to the site. Imagine what this place would look like without those three names around over the past few years.

What I'm saying is, you responding to this article by agreeing to write for Cracked is what keeps this place going. We rely on our pool of talented contributors to make the content you see every day on the site.

And in return, we offer you a few pretty sweet things. For one, there's money. We assume you enjoy that, because we spent a bunch of it on market research that tells us you do. So we thought we'd maybe give you some if you wanted to maybe write some dick jokes for us.

On top of that, there's exposure. Sure, other sites may have less stringent approval standards and will gladly throw you $25 for nearly anything you can churn out, but how many of them can deliver the audience that Cracked does? Getting your first article approved may not be an effortless process, but whatever you lose in time and patience will be of little concern when you're finally able to tell people that you are a published writer on the No. 1 comedy site on the Internet.

So where do you go from here? First, I'd encourage you to click this link, which has all the info you could ever hope to need in order to decide if you really want to write for Cracked or if you really really want to write for Cracked. You will then click the blue button at the bottom and that will take you to the previously hidden, invite-only Cracked Comedy Workshop (again, no one is turned away) where all of our comedy magic is made. You won't know what to do at first, but the first thing you'll see are threads explaining how it works.

And you can be there. All you have to do to get started is click this link.