Wondering if $12 for copywriting work is expensive. An article with relevant content & tuned for SEO within an hour is fairly demanding. A good 500 word article will cost $15 in the market.

I run SEO services & have been using this new startup mediapiston.com as the content provider. I have had good experience so far. They have excellent review process where each article goes through 3 reviewers before it is submitted back to the requester. You can possibly try such a service.

As far as the author, programming & design work would get best rewards and in single chunk.