How Much Money Can You Make Writing Articles for Associated Content
Posted by Edson Phicil on Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Under: Finance
I knew that I would have to cover this topic eventually, but that I still wasn’t looking forward to it. Young writers simply want to know if they can make money writing articles for Associated Content. And if they can, how much can they make. Unfortunately that is not a simple question to answer. I know you won’t be satisfied with an answer like “It differs from person to person,” or “The sky is the limit.” You probably want something more concrete, hard numbers.
The problem is it does vary from person to person, and there really is no cap to how much you can earn. So for all of you realist out there who like nice round numbers, I’ll try to show you how much money you can penitential earn from Associated Content and how to estimate how much money you can earn.
The first thing we need to do is look at Associated Content’s payment system. Associated Content has two ways which they pay their contributors: upfront payments and life time performance payment. To make things simple, we are only going to look at the performance payment.
Performance payment is exactly what it sounds like: you get paid for the performance of your article.
Associated Content uses traffic to measure the performance of your article. The more people that visit your article, the more money it will make. So tell your friends about your article and make a quick buck? Sorry but it’s not that easy unless you have a thousand friends. AC pays baseline rate of $1.50 for every thousand page views.
For those of you who are new to article writing that may sound like an astronomical number. There’s a good chance that you probably never even talked a thousand people in your life time. But you have to understand that the internet is biggest stage in the world. You have to raise your expectations to match it. A thousands page views really isn’t that much. If you write an article that goes viral, you can get that in a few minutes.
Let’s assume that you write one article and submit it to Associated Content. There are really only three basic ways your article is going to perform.
A.Little to no money ever.
All you did was write the article and submit it. You do not try to promote it. You did not try to market it. You depended only on the quality of your writing to make it successful.
B.Fizzled out
You write an article and promote it heavily using tools like social media. Initially your article is pulling in a lot of traffic, but after a few weeks it fizzles down to a low trickle.
C.Steady
You write an article that ranks up near the top of Google. It pulls in a steady amount of traffic for the next couple of years.
Obviously the steady traffic is what you should shoot for and its only possible through ranking up in Google. How much money can an article make if it’s receiving steady traffic? It depends on the topic and how high it ranks in Google. If takes the number one spot, but it on a topic that nobody really cares about then it can make a couple of dollars a month. If it’s in the third spot but on a hot topic, you can get thousands and thousands of views each month.
So how much money your article will make will depend on two factors: your topic (how to pick an article topic that will make you money) and how much you market it. New freelance and article writers usually don’t grasp the fact that they need to promote their own work. You don’t the luxury of having an agent to do that for you.
There is a more accurate way to determine how much money your article can make using Google’s Adwords tool. If you don’t have an Adwords account then you will have to sign up for one, but it is free to use. The tool we are going to be using is the Keyword Tool. It’s a handy device that allow you to look up any key word and see how many times a month people are searching for that keyword.
For this example I’ll be using the keyword “writing articles.” Using the Keyword Tool, I can see that “writing articles” gets searched for 1,300 times a month. Getting the number one spot in Google would mean that I would get around 40% of that number. Which are 520 visits a month. At that rate, I’ll be making $1.50 every two months.
And thus the secret to making money with Associated Content: you can’t expect just one article to make you strike it rich. Yes there are some keywords that get a couple of million searches each month, but those are harder to rank up for in Google. The key to making money in Associated Content is finding many keywords that generate a good amount of searches each month that you can rank up for on Google.
If you think of each article as a seed, you will see why it makes since to plant a lot of seeds. What farmer planets only one seed? If I wrote four articles a month, each making about $1 a month, eventually my monthly income will become quite sizeable. After 1 month, I’d be making $4 a month. After 6 months, $24. After a year, $48. After 2 years, $96.
Now, look at the difference if I wrote 1 article a day, instead of four a month. After 1 month, I’ll be making $30 a month. After 6 months, $180. After a year, $360. After 2 years, I’ll be making $720 a month a big difference from $96.
With Associated Content, some articles will make you a couple bucks each month, others will make you a lot more. I know this doesn’t really answer the original question, but there are just too many variables. Just stick to the principle that the more seeds you plant, the more food you will have come harvest time.
The problem is it does vary from person to person, and there really is no cap to how much you can earn. So for all of you realist out there who like nice round numbers, I’ll try to show you how much money you can penitential earn from Associated Content and how to estimate how much money you can earn.
The first thing we need to do is look at Associated Content’s payment system. Associated Content has two ways which they pay their contributors: upfront payments and life time performance payment. To make things simple, we are only going to look at the performance payment.
Performance payment is exactly what it sounds like: you get paid for the performance of your article.
Associated Content uses traffic to measure the performance of your article. The more people that visit your article, the more money it will make. So tell your friends about your article and make a quick buck? Sorry but it’s not that easy unless you have a thousand friends. AC pays baseline rate of $1.50 for every thousand page views.
For those of you who are new to article writing that may sound like an astronomical number. There’s a good chance that you probably never even talked a thousand people in your life time. But you have to understand that the internet is biggest stage in the world. You have to raise your expectations to match it. A thousands page views really isn’t that much. If you write an article that goes viral, you can get that in a few minutes.
Let’s assume that you write one article and submit it to Associated Content. There are really only three basic ways your article is going to perform.
A.Little to no money ever.
All you did was write the article and submit it. You do not try to promote it. You did not try to market it. You depended only on the quality of your writing to make it successful.
B.Fizzled out
You write an article and promote it heavily using tools like social media. Initially your article is pulling in a lot of traffic, but after a few weeks it fizzles down to a low trickle.
C.Steady
You write an article that ranks up near the top of Google. It pulls in a steady amount of traffic for the next couple of years.
Obviously the steady traffic is what you should shoot for and its only possible through ranking up in Google. How much money can an article make if it’s receiving steady traffic? It depends on the topic and how high it ranks in Google. If takes the number one spot, but it on a topic that nobody really cares about then it can make a couple of dollars a month. If it’s in the third spot but on a hot topic, you can get thousands and thousands of views each month.
So how much money your article will make will depend on two factors: your topic (how to pick an article topic that will make you money) and how much you market it. New freelance and article writers usually don’t grasp the fact that they need to promote their own work. You don’t the luxury of having an agent to do that for you.
There is a more accurate way to determine how much money your article can make using Google’s Adwords tool. If you don’t have an Adwords account then you will have to sign up for one, but it is free to use. The tool we are going to be using is the Keyword Tool. It’s a handy device that allow you to look up any key word and see how many times a month people are searching for that keyword.
For this example I’ll be using the keyword “writing articles.” Using the Keyword Tool, I can see that “writing articles” gets searched for 1,300 times a month. Getting the number one spot in Google would mean that I would get around 40% of that number. Which are 520 visits a month. At that rate, I’ll be making $1.50 every two months.
And thus the secret to making money with Associated Content: you can’t expect just one article to make you strike it rich. Yes there are some keywords that get a couple of million searches each month, but those are harder to rank up for in Google. The key to making money in Associated Content is finding many keywords that generate a good amount of searches each month that you can rank up for on Google.
If you think of each article as a seed, you will see why it makes since to plant a lot of seeds. What farmer planets only one seed? If I wrote four articles a month, each making about $1 a month, eventually my monthly income will become quite sizeable. After 1 month, I’d be making $4 a month. After 6 months, $24. After a year, $48. After 2 years, $96.
Now, look at the difference if I wrote 1 article a day, instead of four a month. After 1 month, I’ll be making $30 a month. After 6 months, $180. After a year, $360. After 2 years, I’ll be making $720 a month a big difference from $96.
With Associated Content, some articles will make you a couple bucks each month, others will make you a lot more. I know this doesn’t really answer the original question, but there are just too many variables. Just stick to the principle that the more seeds you plant, the more food you will have come harvest time.
In : Finance