Writing online for an income has never been so difficult. When I wrote my first article and published on Triond, it used to earn at the rate of $5 per 1000 views. That was back in November 2006. Today the same article earns at best at $1 per 1000 views. It totalled $7.37 out of 2362 views in all these years. Now there are many other articles on Triond, the lowest of which today earns $0.3 per thousand views. Forget about picable.com, it is pitiable. It never earns a cent and nobody would ruin a photograph by reducing its size to a VGA resolution.
Back in those days it was easy to earn couple dollars every month by just writing few articles and reading them yourself wherever you could find a computer with internet connection. Even picable pictures used to earn $1 per 1000 views and I considered that to be pitiable in those days. Now I look back say to myself LOL. The lowest an article could earn in those days was $2/1000 views. So it was easy to test what topic would pay better just writing one for each topic and reading them yourself in all internet cafes in your town. After a couple of weeks the results are there. In fact the earnings were updated instantly in those days.
I found that gomestic articles used to earn the highest at the rate of $7 per 1000. That too I considered to be bad, because just then I experienced a $17 per 1000 rate earning on helium. Later helium stopped third world population from accessing their site and I didn’t know if at all anybody would read my Triond articles and how.
Triond was brand new and a decent one compared with helium experience. It was unsuspecting but it wasn’t the best at the time. With helium, I looked for similar alternatives but there were none else. I used to post for Triond and notice that I was the prolific writer there. Triond used to post lists of prolific and hot writers on the main page and mine was there for more than a year all because nobody new the site in those days.
I developed a simple strategy as there aren’t many prolific writers at that time. Each topic has its own page and each subject has its own website like gomestic, quazen, bizcovering, computersight, etc. I had noticed that my articles were there for many before another writer published on the same topic and that the first one at the top of these pages used to get a trickle of traffic automatically. Well, that earned me few dollars. It is a great strategy in terms of dollars if compared with any of today’s strategies.
Fast forward to the present, things aren’t the same anymore. Earnings rates of less than a dollar for thousand impressions are very common. It is a great deal if you get more than a dollar rate. However Bukisa has been the biggest game changer in my experience. It had uniquified and accelerated the whole process of testing what would work. It was automatically optimized for the best SEO power. While Triond has same page rank as Bukisa, it does no good as the articles are posted on other sites which are ranked lower than the main page.
Despite finding out how SEO works and applying on new and old articles, with each passing month it became more and more difficult to maintain the consistency in traffic. One of my articles about book value per share (2007) was ranked fourth after Wikipedia in its first year. Year after year one site after another got published targeting same topic. If you search for knowing book value per share (its title) you would still find it at first (hopefully same results for everyone). (By search engine I always refer to Google, there is no point in generalizing when its share is more than 50%) Today I can’t find my article at all for the original phrase it used to get some traffic for its first 3 years online.
Things have changed at a rapid pace in the last few years. While earnings are going down, internet usage as well as online publishing is going up. Despite key changes in Google Algorithms, more and more competitors are developing online. The competition is so intense and the after effect of Google Panda so bad on Triond sites, that it virtually became impossible to generate any traffic from search engines through popular SEO techniques.
As Triond moved to Chitika which seems to pay only for search engine traffic, those Triond writers who write for the sake of community would never see a penny. I have noticed that like Bukisa, Triond too stopped paying money for page views where the audience is its members. This is sensible. But it also makes life difficult for many writers. Because it essentially increases the break-even barrier for Triond writers before they can appreciate writing for that site. This gets exaggerated with the low earning rates on varying topics.
For example, if you have 1 article and get 100 views for it, you would earn 1 cent at the rate of $0.25/1000 views and 60 of those views are from fellow writers and 40 from search engines. So it really took 100 views to earn 1 cent. Be glad about it.
On the other hand, if you have 100 articles (wrote them out of hurry), assuming similar traffic diversification and earning rates, you would need to wait till you get 10,000 (=100x100) before you can see 100 x 1 cent = $1 cumulative earnings. This is the reason why many beginner Triond writers today don’t see any earnings despite thousands of views. You can read these complaints all the time or every month on Triond’s monthly payment update blogs. I too wouldn’t have figured out this, if I haven’t started writing in another account.
I have opened this account as a favor to my sister who has a long way to get to writing better in English, forget about writing with SEO. I took this as a challenge to help her improve in online writing and earn stable income while fully working at home. Given all my experience of the past so many years, I should be able to do help her get there.
So far in one weeks active time (without socializing of course), I am already at two badges and 3 cents. Above shows the first ramp in visit trends.
Despite all the losses in earning rates, increasing competition, I still find hope. If anyone actually looks at the above example calculation one would regain hope. Lack of clarity on why earnings are low can be very discouraging. Though it forces you to accept lower earnings, it atleast shows light at the end of the tunnel. That if you set some goals and do only certain things and wait till certain amount of time, you would get expected results. It would be very frustrating when results don’t match our expectations. Through experience I even learned to overcome this. Thanks to this, whole of 2011, I had some passive income more than enough to pay bills.
Most often new writers are utterly discouraged, because these are the real testing times for online writing. May be things may get even difficult and tough. But one can see this as a way of elimination. If more and more newcomers start writing online, how can the system sustain everyone? It will eliminate the last ranking writers and retain the top ones.
This last week has been a great week for me. I had a paradigm shift and after more than a year, resumed where I had left off. It is every exciting when I get new ideas everyday and think about online writing whenever I find little break. This is what I struggled to do for a long time and wondered what a time waster I am. But sometimes I recognized the failure to be not by mistake but because of a wrong approach. It is amazing now that my perspective had changed so much for the better.
The challenges ahead are bigger and tougher. But I guess, I have just found my long term path. I am devising such strategy that makes it competitive by not being general, but by applying those attributes that are specific to me. Did you too find your long term path in online writing?
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