Hello all, Michy here first.

Susan was speaking to me about how difficult the job of freelance writing is, especially in the beginning, when you have no clips, are getting rejection after rejection, only negative feedback and not a lot of positive, and you are wondering if you’ll ever make any real money at this crazy thing called writing.

The post she made below I am sharing with you because I have a feeling some of you have thought the same things before too. This post of hers was an ‘assignment’ I gave her, and I think she re-connected to that part of her that remembers why she writes in the first place.

Remember, when you are feeling your worst, reconnect to that part of you that writes for the love of writing, find the passion, and let the words flow from that place – that place where rejections don’t matter, where you know you would write always, even if you never made a penny at it.

Let’s see what Susan had to say to us:

Living the Dream

Who was I kidding? I wasn’t a writer. At least I wasn’t the kind of writer that people wanted to read…or buy.

I felt like I was pretending to be something I wasn’t. I felt like I was bobbing along in an endless see of disappointment with no hope of ever reaching the shores of where I wanted to be.

I didn’t expect the writer’s life to be like this. I wasn’t sure what I really expected, but I know what I was hoping for and it didn’t include the multitude of rejections that gathered in my inbox or my mailbox. I knew there would be rejections, I just didn’t know there would be so many.

Did what I had to say interest no one? Was my writing really that bad? Was I really cut out to do this?

Each rejecion I received was a devastating blow.

“Chin up. That means you’re one step closer to being published,” they told me.

But I didn’t feel any closer. If anything, I felt even further away. At least before I submitted each piece, I had hope. I needed that hope to follow my dreams. Dreams without hope were just wishes.

Once upon a time, I felt like every step I took was leading me closer to fulfilling my dream. Even as it was happening, I could see the universe working its magic on my life.

Knock, knock…there’s an opportunity.

Six short months ago I was chomping at the bit to quit my full-time job to commit to freelance writing. I wanted it so bad I could taste it. So I couldn’t understand why fate would bring me so close to my dream only to slam the door in my face and tell me no.

I was ready to give up.

How Bad Do You Want It?

I got in touch with Michy and told her how I was feeling. As I sat there on Instant Message with her, I had tears streaming down my face as I told her I was going to give up.

“Write me an article about how you’re feeling right now,” she told me. “Then finish with reasons why you know you need to keep trying.”

Keep trying? I could handle the first part. I could go on and on about how each rejection I received sent me spiraling even further down into a pit of discouragement. But how was I going to handle the “keep trying” part? What could I say?

As I prepared dinner that night, I thought about what I would write. I had my notebook close by and as a thought would pop into my head, I wrote it down. And I thought, Why do I want to keep going? Why do I want to keep putting myself out there?

And then I heard the voice. You know…that voice that whispers in the back of your mind?

It said, “How bad do you want it?”

I’ve been around long enough to know that there are a lot of people in this world who want to be a writer. I’ve also been around long enough to know that not everyone is going to make it. I think what sets them apart the most is their determination to succeed.

Did I have that determination?

As unlikely as it may sound, my answer was yes. Oh, it obviously wasn’t in an easily accessible place. After all, I was ready to give up just a short while before that. No, I had to reach down deep to find it.

But it was still there.

I Believe in You

A couple weeks ago, my mother asked me how the writing was going. When I told her it was chock full of rejections, she was quiet for moment. Then she said, “You can do it. I believe in you.”

My mother knows me as well as anyone. There have been many times in my life where she has known me far better than I have known myself.

And she believed in me.

As much as I needed to hear that, I knew that the real question was did I believe in myself? Did I really think I had what it took to be a writer?

Honestly? I don’t know.

But I do know that I’m never going to find out by giving up. When you give up your dream, you have nothing left.

So I will continue on this path and I will keep my hope and determination close to my side as traveling companions.

I will live my dream. Not someday, but now. Even if the now is full of rejection, I’m still living the dream. I realized that it’s all a part of it. I may never be one of those writers who beams with pride at a rejection. But I can still be a writer who tried.

I can still be…a writer.

My mind has traveled a path
No one will ever see,
This path is mine and mine alone
It starts and ends with me.

My feet have walked this path
This path that’s meant for me.
They’ve walked the stones and hills and dales
That only I could see.

My tears have stained this path,
These tears were shed by me.
With heavy heart and joys unknown,
These tears were shed by me.

My heart has known this path
In times I could not see,
It sang its song and held me strong
To follow its melody.

And as I travel this path,
This path that’s meant for me,
In perfect love and perfect trust
I will follow eternally.

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Susan Sosbe freelances part time from her home in Indiana. She has written over a hundred articles online and hopes to break into the world of print publications soon. She shares her home with her significant other, two sons and her dog. You can read more of her writings by clicking here.

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One of my favorite things about freelancing and writing is what’s about to happen tomorrow morning. I’m leaving to go to the Galveston area for a month, take a bit of an extended vacation, and yet, I can take my computer with me, and still make money doing what I love from just about anywhere a laptop can get power.

There’s nothing like it. When I start to get a little down on being stuck in the house and all alone (writing is a very solitary job, you know) I can pick up the computer and go somewhere else.

If you’re a freelance writer, a writer or any kind, and you don’t have a laptop, I suggest you get one soon. If you’re thinking of freelancing, invest in a laptop. Seriously.

I learned something from my AC Month-long challenge. I don’t like writing in a vacuum.

See, fiction writing is mostly written in a vacuum you create in your head, and inside that vacuum, you build a viable universe, a world in which your characters and novel exists for real, but you get little feedback as the writer and creator of that universe. While the characters talk to me in my head, once the novel is written, the only feedback I’m going to get is from editors, agents, publishers – and most of those are going to be ‘thanks but no thanks’.

When sending in magazine articles and queries, it’s very similar. We get a lot of negative feedback about our writing, but not a lot of positive feedback, and then add to that, we sit in houses or offices all day and write all alone by ourselves, and it’s no wonder a lot of the best writers of our time are insane.

Anyone would go insane if they had to be alone that much, living and working in a vacuum.

I’ve coached writers who have left their office jobs to write, and I’ve warned them… however much they think they are going to enjoy the peace and quiet, and they might at first, if they aren’t aware of the way being alone all day long, day in and out, doing nothing but writing is going to affect them, they are in for a huge surprise.

It’s hard to stay motivated when all you get are rejections and little positive feedback. It’s hard to stay positive about a writing career when things are all in this writing vacuum. I had an IM conversation with Susan Sosbe last night, where she was talking to me about these very feelings. Tomorrow, I’ll put up an ‘assignment’ of sorts that I made Susan write out. It helped her. I think it will help many of you too.

My advice in this blog is to make sure when you’re freelancing or writing from home that you make the time to socialize too. Get that laptop and go sit in the park or at a coffee shop. Be around people during the day. You’d be surprised how much you really do need it.

Secondly, find some positive interaction as it pertains to your writing. For me, I have two things that keep me sane – and it was the month-long AC challenge that showed me this.

See, when I can get several hundred bucks per article in print, I have, many times, wondered what it was that kept me coming back to AC over and over again, knowing they often frustrated me and paid a lot less than print venues did.

I just don’t like the vacuum. AC, with the feedback, comments, forum and such along with making money keeps me from feeling I’m in that vacuum.

The other thing that keeps that vacuum from absorbing me into a writer’s depression is my writing forum. Without it, I might very well be criminally insane and not just clinically so (giggles).

Look for Susan’s assignment sometime tomorrow… until then, stop by the forum and share with us in this thread all the things that keep you from being in a writer’s vacuum. What do you do for yourself when the rejections are rolling in that keep you motivated and keep you writing and moving forward anyway?

Love and stuff,
Michy

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I’ve been seeing recently some improper use of the word ‘nor’. I know that a lot of you have been informed that either / or is the ‘positive’ and neither / nor is the ‘negative’. Because of this, I’m seeing people use ‘nor’ improperly when it should be ‘or’ just because the sentence contains a ‘negative word’.

Negative words include: can’t, not, cannot, won’t, will not, don’t, do not, no, etc.

JUST because a sentence contains these negative words doesn’t mean you use ‘nor’. You ONLY use ‘nor’ when it is being used with the word ‘neither’ or ‘neither implied’.

Let me explain how ‘nor’ is being used wrongly first, then I’ll explain the right way.

WRONG:

“I don’t think we should go to the store, nor should we go to the lake.”

RIGHT:

“I don’t think we should go to the store, neither should we go to the lake.”

You see, it’s important to understand that ‘nor’ is the ‘or’ counterpart, not the ‘either’ counterpart. If you can’t replace the ‘nor’ with ‘or’ and have it still make sense, then you can’t use ‘nor’.

Example: I don’t think we should go to the store, or should we go to the lake.

See how that changes the meaning?

Negative: I don’t think we should go to the store, neither should we go to the lake.

Positive: Either we should go to the store, or we should go to the lake.

Hummm…

Negative revision: Neither should we go to the store, nor should we go to the lake.

I mean, really, who talks like that?

Now, let’s look at listing when using negative and or.

WRONG:

I don’t want that truck nor the car.

RIGHT:

I don’t want that truck or the car.

JUST because it’s negative (don’t) doesn’t mean you use ‘nor’. What don’t you want? That truck or car.

Now, how could you write to use nor?

Negative Example: I want neither the truck nor the car.

Got it?

I know, it’s probably confusing you, but the thing to watch for is this: if you aren’t using ‘neither’ in the sentence, don’t use ‘nor’. If you feel you should use ‘nor’, check yourself and see if perhaps you truly mean ‘neither’ instead.

Example: I don’t want chocolate and neither do I want vanilla.

Make sense?

I hope so… I’ve only recently started seeing this, so I’m not sure why I’ve either not noticed it or somehow there’s a sudden rash of contagious ‘nors’ running around the internet.

Either – or

Neither – nor

Negative doesn’t mean nor, unless neither is included!

ARgh. Now I’m confusing even myself.

Did you get it? Please, tell me you got it!

Love and stuff,
Michy

-AC is giving out a $100 award for the Best Book reviews published in April. Be sure to publish as many great book reviews as possible, with or without an assignment.

A few years back, I worked in acquisitions for a small publisher. I had an assistant who read through all the emails first and forwarded only those on to me that met the submissions guidelines. Everything else, he rejected.

Today, I am taking submissions for the Accentuate Writers Contest, the Unsent Letters blog and print collection and the Accentuate Erotic Short Story Anthology.

The difference between a few years back and now is that now I don’t have an assistant going through the slush pile of submissions weeding out those that don’t meet the submissions guidelines.

You know… I have something to say to all you aspiring writers out there…

FOLLOW THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES!

Less than HALF of the submissions I’m receiving follow the guidelines I have posted to the letter.

Seriously.

Freelance writing is a lot more than just being a good writer. It’s a business. I’ve talked about this many time before, but to be a professional freelance writer, you have to do a lot more than write. You have to query, invoice, market, get clients, submit and run your freelance writing career like the business it is.

If you can’t even follow the simple instruction, or even the more complicated ones, you’re a lot less likely to get an editor to even read your work.

Think about it this way – would you show up to a job interview in shorts and flip flops with a resume with typos and misspellings?

Probably not. As a freelancer, the submission is the same as the ‘interview’ and if you don’t follow the guidelines, then you’re showing up dressed wrong for your interview.

But there’s more…

You know how you’ve heard some editors say they will toss out any submissions that don’t adhere to guidelines, without even reading them? This is true of not just freelancing but novel submissions to agents and publishers too.

Well, I know now why they do that.

There is a direct correlation between the quality of the writing when comparing to those who did meet the submission guidelines versus those who didn’t, with a few notable exceptions. In fact, those who followed the guidelines properly are far and away better writers, cumulatively, both mechanically and emotively than those who failed to follow the submission guidelines.

I have my email set up to move submissions directly into a folder, based on the subject line of the email. I tell people to put a particular subject line on their submissions. People who fail to do this (and there’s a lot of them) might end up without their submission being seen, because I get LITERALLY over 1000 emails per day. Many come into my bulk email and many I scan quickly. There’s a chance I will simply miss the email if it doesn’t come into the right folder.

It’s not an arbitrary guideline I’ve put up just to make your life harder. It’s a guideline I put up there to make my life easier, and ensure you get reviewed in a timely manner.

The other guidelines for style are to make it easy for me to format and edit if I purchase your writing for publication.

When you make my job harder, I offer you less money because I had to do more work. If you make my job too hard, you won’t get an offer at all.

So the moral to the story is: make an editor’s job as easy as you can by submitting your writing following the submission guidelines to the letter, submitting the proper way, and by editing and perfecting your writing so it’s as close to publish-ready as possible. Not only will this improve your chances of being published, but it might even improve the dollar amount offered to you when you are published–not just for me or my ventures, but others as well.

Follow the guidelines! Put your best writing foot forward!

Love and stuff,
Michy

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Love and stuff,
Michy
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I woke this morning, and as usual, went to check my overnight page views on AC. Aimee’s account (my challenge account) actually has earned more than half of last month’s bonus in just the one week or so for this month. Sorta goes to show that when you’re first starting out, promoting a bit so folks can find you is sorta important for your bottom line. Trust me, when you have been with AC longer, promoting won’t be necessary at all if you write good content that is properly findable on search engines will do all the work for you. Right now, if you’re newer (less than a year or so) you need to plant the seeds to get your content started growing.

It’s strange to me, since we veterans tell you Associated Content newbies that you don’t have to promote, and while we ARE right about that, in the beginning, promoting does seem to be crucial to getting ‘known’. You do need to get traffic flowing your direction so the links on your profile are ‘seen’ and ‘known’ to Google bots. You do want to increase your page rank. Plus, the more places you can be ‘found’ on the internet, the more likely others are to stumble across your writing and follow you. Developing a readership is crucial to any online writer, regardless of the site for which you write.

It’s really the same practice for getting your websites and blogs seen too. AC, Helium, other content sites aren’t any different than running your own site, sorta. Your home page is your profile, and then your articles are pages on your site, and you need to at least write quality content that sort of relates to the ‘theme’ of your site.

Again, this is why it would be awesome for AC to offer us a chance to write articles and categorize them on our profiles by niche or theme or category or something.

As for blogs and websites and other content writing, it’s all really very much the same. If you take the same strategies you use on AC to write and promote and you do the same thing on your blogs (SEO, keyword phrases, good titles and topics, timely but evergreen information, promoting, etc.) your blogs can become quite successful on page views and revenue (if you’re monetizing). The hope is to get your content to go viral… going viral for content is a good thing, not like a computer virus. Viral content means that people want to read it, comment on it, link to it and otherwise pass it on to others, essentially doing the promoting for you.

A lot of folks don’t seem to get how to monetize blogs like that. Each blog should have a niche topic, and you should write keyworded but informational posts about your niche if you want to monetize your blog.

Essentially, if you’re writing for ANY online content site, information-rich properly SEOed content is what every site needs and wants. Doesn’t matter who you’re writing for. When some people ask for SEO content, they mostly only care about the keywords so they folks can find their sites and buy their products. For writers who are paid on ad revenue (whether it’s a blog, content site, or other website), it’s the information that is important because there are no products to sell. The information IS the product.

So when writing online, no matter where you’re writing, the practices you should use are nearly identical. The steps are the same for every online site:

1. Quality, well-written, information-rich content
2. Properly keyworded for SEO (keywords phrases too)
3. Timely and topical content that can be evergreen too
4. Properly promoted without spamming
5. Linking to high-quality sites
6. Getting links from high-quality sites
7. Viralability
8. Lather, rinse, repeat

So whether you write for Suite101, Helium, Associated Content, Daily Article, Textbroker, Elance customers, Guru, private customers, blogs, your own website… you will use the same practices for every piece of content as any other site.

If you’re having problems monetizing your blogs, consider focusing your blog topic more tightly and have more than one blog for different topics. This way, you get a good following for people who want to read about your niche topic. For example, if you have a pish-posh blog that is one post about parenting, one post about healthy eating, one post about saving money, one post about relationships, one ramble about personal stuff, etc… no one is going to want to follow you to read except people who know you personally.

If, instead, you have an entire blog that is about parenting and a separate one about healthy eating, then you will get followers, a readership, that is interested in what that blog is about without having to wade through blog posts about things they aren’t interested in.

Target your readership, market your niche, follow the instructions above, and you’ll see page views (in total) increase across the board, and monetization is easier and you’ll get a better clickthrough if your doing your own monetization and better page views if someone else is monetizing it.

Good luck & happy writing!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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This is another one of those little nit picky peeves of mine, when I hear someone say, “Laundrymat.”

Back in the ’50s or so, the name ‘laundromat’ was used to mean an ‘automatic’ laundry, a place to automatically do your laundry. Generally speaking, Word will capitalize Laundromat, but the lexicon doesn’t require capitalization of the word.

The word was termed this way in reference to the automated ‘automat’ restaurants, where food was purchased through special vending machine type servers.

It is important to note that the word is: laundromat, when you are referring to a place to go to wash your clothes where you pop quarters into machines to do it.

It is not a laundrymat or a laundry mat. It is Laundromat or laundromat.

That’s today’s editing tip.

Love and stuff,
Michy

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Before I get to numbers and stats and compare the challenge to Helium, I want to share something that was said to me about 10 articles back by the CM.

“Thank you for this and your many other well-written submissions. As always, we appreciate your use of personal experience, which gives your submissions a unique flavor. Keep up the great work. -”

I think you guys need to realize this. THIS is what AC is needing, wanting and looking for. It’s how they are setting themselves apart. When you finally read my articles that I put up for this challenge, you’ll see that nearly every one of them has “I” language, and I start the article with some personal story. This is something I do on my real account (an account where I’ve only received ONE rejection and it was in the new queue when the rules changed) and it’s something I did on this AC challenge account too.

Interestingly enough, Helium recently sent out an email stating that we should limit the use of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘we’ language, saying it was unprofessional. The two sites are wanting drastically different things. I know Suite101 wants third person for most of their stuff. Three sites, three requirements.

I received two rejections and requests for resubmit on this challenge. The first one was for a Call, or what’s not called an Assignment. I realize where I went wrong. The Assignment wanted to title of the album/song in the title, and I did not do that. They rejected the Assignment saying I did not follow the guidelines, but I was pretty sure my way was better… of course, I have years of experience at this and most of the CMs don’t, and most newbies don’t either.

TWO REJECTIONS – RESUBMITTED

Therefore, this article: Power Ballads of the ’80s was published for free, because I refused to change the title. It ended up being one of my triple digit page view articles, at a little under 200 as of today, and it will continually get decent page views, being sorta evergreen.

This article: How To Remove Earwax Safely, was also rejected. The reason for this was because I didn’t cite an sources. They specifically said that if this was from personal experience, I should state that in the article. They don’t mean to write: Source: Myself or to put at the end, “This article is from personal experience.”

What they mean is what I did. I went back and added this, “My son has had frequent ear infection as a child, so I have learned over the years, both from our pediatrician and personal experience, how to properly clean ears and remove earwax without damaging the ear.”

I put that very close to the beginning of the article (second full paragraph) and sent the exact same article in and got an offer. Again, personal experience is what they wanted. They truly mean it when they say they want information from the ‘source’. They want you to ‘write what you know’ from your personal experience with it.

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INDEXING IS PROBLEMATIC

Let’s look at the cons going on right now. Currently, out of the 50 articles I have published on this profile, 8 of them are not currently indexed with Google. Of the ones that ARE indexed, only five of them are indexed with the pretty description instead of the ugly code. Those that did index on their own, usually did so within an hour of publishing or two. Those that did not index took well over a week or more to index, and ONLY indexed after a friend of mine posted them on her blog.

A new AC writer is not going to know about indexing. I kept track of the indexing situation and the ones that did not index show a MARKED decrease in page views compared to those that did. When I say marked, I mean the difference between 20-30 page views and over 150 page views. That might not seem like much, but we’re talking about four weeks only. Imagine if that were to stay the same over several months or a year?

People are being given upfront payment in part based on their previous performance of articles, so articles that aren’t performing well are hurting more than just performance bonuses, but they are hurting upfront offers too.

Please, I beg you, post every new article on an indexed blog or site to get it indexed as soon as possible. Drive traffic to your article immediately after it publishes so Google will pay attention to it. Us veterans on AC tell you newer/newbies that you don’t have to promote if you write properly for the web, and this is true if and only if Google actually picks up the articles in the first place!

However, comparing indexing to Helium, it’s important to know that usually only the first 3-5 ranked articles on Helium are going to get indexed by themselves unless you promote the content, so it’s not a huge issue for AC to make indexing part of the procedure (such as promoting being slightly required to get picked up) but AC should tell the writers on the site that this is the case, clearly in the FAQs with an explanation of how to check for indexing and what to do if you are not indexed. DO NOT submit to the Google Submit URL because this could hurt AC in the long run. That only needs the top level domain.

AC should continue to look further into the indexing situation, but a stop-gap measure would be to come forward and admit there is a problem and tell the members of the site what to do to fix it (ie: check for indexing, posting on other indexed sites, promoting, driving traffic, etc.) It will help new writers on the site realize they aren’t sucky writers after all; their content just couldn’t be found, and if they learn to promote properly to get indexed, it only benefits AC AND the writer too!

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WAIT TIME FOR APPROVALS

This is the single biggest CON to the entire AC experience. I love the upfront payments, I love the payment nearly every day, I love the bonus and the upfront and the options for different licenses and such. I DETEST the long wait times.

AC can tell me until they are blue in the face how it is better than print publications, but AC needs to realize they are NOT a print publication and they don’t pay ANYWHERE near what print pubs pay. WHEN AC starts offering steady two digit and three digit upfront payments on every article, I’ll wait a week or two. Until then, the wait shouldn’t be more than 24-72 hours, MAX. Anything more than that is very discouraging and it actually precipitates slowly writing and less articles.

It’s tough to load up a queue of articles, see a bunch of them sitting there unreviewed, and then continue writing more to stack up the queue. The natural tendency of human nature is to wait until a few clear out before writing more, and this is especially true of someone brand new to the site.

They got better toward the end though, and review times were 1-2 days on average. But boy, the beginning was rough. I waited nearly a week for the first Assignment (Call for Content) got reviewed!

I wrote 51 articles for the AC challenge, but only 50 were approved prior to the challenge closeing. For Helium, I wrote 65 for the challenge, and they were all published immediately.

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PAYMENTS

The lowest payment I received were the freebies I put up – my choice. Of the ones I submitted for upfront payment, the lowest I received was two Assignments for $3.25. I knew that’s what they paid when I submitted them. The lowest ‘offer’ I got was:

Going Green on a Budget – $3.89
Thank you for this submission, Aimee. Unfortunately, due to the prevalence of content on AC on this topic, we cannot offer a higher Upfront Payment for this submission. As always, we encourage you to do a quick search of our content library before submitting content on popular topics such as this one so that you can create a more unique, niche-driven submission.

Like how they used my name there? Well, my fake name. I like that personal touch. After all, if they are going to ask us to be more personal, maybe they should be too. I do feel AC gave me decent communication through this, but I never emailed them for anything specific. I should have though, when they changed the title of this article: Preparing Your Home, and You, for Spring. Sorry CM, but that’s not the proper use of a reflexive personal pronoun. that wasn’t the title I submitted with. (Shrug)

My highest paying article was actually the How to Remove Earwax Safely, the one that I talked about above that was originally rejected. It received $5.16.

Two articles tied for second place at $5.11, and they were:

How to Train a Blue Heeler Puppy

How to Talk to Your Doctor About Alternative Therapy and Medicine

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AVERAGES

My average payment ended up being: $3.52 per article if you include the free ones, and $4.77 if we don’t count the free ones.

My average page views right now are 77 per article. However, 5 of those articles were just published yesterday and have no views, so if I take them out, it bumps me up to 106 page views on average. That’s not too bad for the first full month. It should continue to rise.

HIGHS AND LOWS PAGE VIEWS

My highest page view article is 486 page views. The lowest that has page views is 7, published on the 6th and not indexed (When to get a second medical opinion) Most articles are between about 80-150, with a 20 on the one piece of poetry I put up just out of curiosity to see if poetry performed any better now than it did years ago. It doesn’t.

For a newbie, getting featured WORKS. Write content that is targetted to get featured. I had three pieces featured this first month – yes, three! and all three have much higher page views than those that weren’t featured.

HELIUM VS. AC MONEY

I think it’s important to note that the maximum one can make in upfront payment on Helium even if they have the max stars AND write to an empty title, is $3.50. And to get that, you must have five writing stars and write to an empty title. So on upfront payments, Associated Content SMOKES Helium.

However, on page view payments, for a new writer, Helium outshined AC. Unfortunately, I can’t do a fair comparison though. On AC, I earned almost $6 in performance bonus in the one month. On Helium, I earned about $23 bucks on performance bonus alone. Okay, but… and it’s a big but… I was doing the Helium challenge under my real name and posting links to things I wrote on my blog, on my forum and on other social networking sites to get the page views up to that point. On the AC challenge, I was not able to do that, because Aimee Berkley doesn’t exist on those site!

Helium ended with a total of $185.92 for 65 articles, and of those, one of them was a Marketplace article for $52.00.

AC ended with $182.16 for 50 articles, and none of them were special calls or assignments.

AND on Helium, I had to promote and rate articles to get to that amount, while on the AC challenge, I was in a vacuum and spent no time promoting or rating.

TIME SPENT VS DOLLAR MADE: HOURLY RATE

Helium’s hourly rate ended at: $2.46 per hour.

AC’s hourly rate ended at: $9.16

That’s not a typo. I actually, per hour spent, earned over $6.00 per hour more at AC than I did at Helium. AND that’s above minimum wage in every state of the US, and I did it all with my feet propped up in the recliner on my laptop. Now, that’s not that bad. And guess what? As you get better, your offers go up, and your performance bonus builds on itself and you get raises. Within a year, that could be significantly higher. I haven’t checked my hourly rate on my real account. That might be something I do before the end of my Suite101 challenge in May and see where it stands compared to this challenge account.

But it gets better. Guess what I can do now? I can take every one of these articles that I submitted to AC as non-exclusive and move them over to Helium in a month or so, and add another $1.50-3.00 to my wallet, as well as accruing the revenue and increasing my stars over there.

The two sites do tend to work well together for now.

SITE GLITCHES

The site glitches at AC are very frustrating. One morning I couldn’t get into the site and another evening I couldn’t get the pages to load at all. This slows down my time, and it does hit me at the bottom line. Helium only went down ONE time when I was doing my challenge with them, and it was a scheduled maintenance and was very early in the morning. The super slow page loads are hurting us not only in the amount of time we spend working on the site but also when the readers get too bored to wait for the pages to load and leave.

AC really needs to get a handle on the site maintenance. If it means a complete restart, that’s what they need to do. The site has been problematic every since I’ve been with them – it’s been in ‘beta’ mode for nearly four years or so now. That needs to stop. You can only hang your hat on beta mode for so long before someone who knows what they are doing gets in there and does it.

It’s better than it was… but it’s not good yet.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I submitted everything for free as DO and everything for upfront payment was submitted as non-exclusive, NO distribution, upfront payment.

• It appears the more articles you have pending in the queue on the same day, the lower the average of the offers are that day. On days I only had one or two articles, my offers were $5 or over, and days where there were three or four, I often got under $5. I’ve noticed on my real profile that this seems the case too. Three or more articles at once seems to lower the overall average. TIP: If you don’t publish many articles in a week, spread them out instead of submitting them all at once and see if your offers average higher. Doesn’t do much to help those who publish daily.

Promoting immediately after publishing helps drive traffic and will get articles indexed faster, most of the time. If you are going to promote, do it as soon as you can after publishing and your chances of getting indexed seem better.

• The only articles that got featured were ones with pictures. If you can find one quickly on Stock Exchange, do so, but don’t spend a huge time on pictures. If it takes you more than three minutes to find and upload a picture, you’ve wasted more time than having a picture will bring you in page views. REMEMBER: most visitors will come to your writing from search engines and won’t even see the picture until they get
  to the article itself. It won’t entice anyone but maybe AC members to click on your articles.

Look at the Google Hot Searches/Top Searches and find ones that can be both hot searches and evergreen. For example, my article on Just Like Sugar received about 200 page views in this challenge, and it was a hot search, but it should be evergreen too. Unfortunately, AC removed the trademark symbol on that one. I wasn’t happy about that. They removed it about three days after it published. (Shrug)

• Get links to your profile out everywhere. Your profile links to your articles directly. Even if the Google spiders go out on AC, they might not get your articles if you don’t get links in to your profile that it indexes regularly. Everywhere you go on the internet that you can without spamming, get your AC Profile link up on those sites and then you will increase your page rank. It’s best not to change your name, because even though the incoming links will still get to your page, the page rank will drop!

I received targeted calls that were based on my niche – food and health – although the calls were for less than what AC was paying me upfront already, so I saw no reason to claim them. I did, however, get a targeted $10 partner call two or three days ago. Because of the challenge, I did not think it was right to accept it, but it goes to show that if you niche your writing or at the very least, make your niche more obvious than other writing, partner calls can come in as early as one month into it.

• I don’t see the purpose of the Assignment desk for general writers. There was nothing that paid much there, or anything that paid more than I was already getting, and almost all of the Assignments were free performance only articles. Also, the Assignments were really pushed in my face, so that a newbie might not even realize they can write on other topics in the beginning. That might need more clarification for some newbs.

Comment on other articles. I’m not saying to go out of your way to read more than you usually do, but if you do read an article, comment on it. Almost every single article Aimee commented on resulted in someone coming to an article of mine, and I’d say MOST of those people came back to read more. Having a following on AC helps page views. I can say this with definitive proof.
EVERY article I publish on my real account right now gets 300-700 hits within the first 1-2 days. It is you amazingly wonderful people on AC that do that for me. I don’t start getting search engines traffic until three or five days after publication. The first surge or page views I get is from my 640 fans and friends on AC. Build up a readership, a good base, that will give you a solid following. It’s amazing the difference that can make.

Doing this challenge showed me just how much every one of you mean to me… I missed the comments from the familiar faces. I missed the emails saying I had a comment. I like getting those emails. I do NOT like working in a vacuum, so for me, it is YOU GUYS who make AC the great place that it is. The money part is all secondary at this point. So thank you to all of you for that.

LASTLY and IMPORTANTLY

I’d like to give a nod to the first person to find me and realize that Aimee Berkley was really Michy. Rissa Watkins was the very first person to send me a private message and she knew it was me, because she says you can’t miss Michy’s style. What a nice compliment. Give her some page view love.

After her, the following AC members found my profile and commented on it regularly:

Momie Tullottes

K. Karl

You two ladies kept me sane through this challenge, because I knew, even though you weren’t sure it was me or not, you would at least comment. Your comments through the challenge were very uplifting to me. If you do the same to other newbies on the site, I can tell you right now, it makes a difference. Thank you both for that.

Also, I’m pretty sure the following people found me and knew it was me, or at least suspected:

Sophie emailed to welcome me and was super sweet.

CC Allison noticed me when one of my articles was featured, and she wrote to congratulate me! Thanks Allison!

Kristy Martz-Burmeister left a few comments for me, and they were thoughtful comments, not just smilies or marks.

Unwirklich Vin Zant came by a few times and commented too, after I was featured.

And of course, thanks to EMohrman and theBarefoot for keeping my secret. They both knew who I was, though Randy only commented on one things, and E, well, he’s got too much ego to actually lower himself to comment! Ha!

Did I miss anyone? If I did, I sincerely apologize and if you’ll comment here, when I do my next update, I’ll recognize you and link to your page!

Okay, does anyone have questions? Ask them here or pop by the thread on the AC forum and ask them there. I’d love to answer them if I missed anything.

I start the Suite101 month-long challenge in May and we’ll go until the end of May and see how they differ, and then I’ll be able to write up a full report on all three sites and tell you which is the best bet.

Right now, AC is the best bet for people with a little SEO experience, who want to build up some residual passive income while making a part-time active income web writing from personal experience.

Helium is good for new writers who are still perfecting their craft and learning keywords, to get experience, published fast and easy – OR – for those looking to squeeze a few more pennies out of their nonexclusive content, or to write for the marketplace (Yes, I’ll address the question I got about the marketplace in another blog next week.)

All right… moving on… questions? Comments?

Love and stuff,
Michy

BTW: Aimee Berkley is the name of the lead character in my newest break out novel called Eat it Up. The picture, however, is a picture of my beautiful daughter!

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The challenge will officially end in a couple of days, and when it does, it’ll take me a couple of days to compare and report the results of the final stats and numbers.

In the meantime, some interesting things have happened.

First, my challenge account, less than a month into it, has already been offered targeted assignments (used to be called C4Cs). Three of them were for less than $4, but two of them were partner calls for $10.

Both of the partner calls that were for higher rates were pertaining to the types of things I had most predominately been writing about already.

I think that goes to show that if you really write on a niche topic that AC needs, getting partner calls and higher paying assignments can happen as early as a month into.

Because it was a test account, the challenge account, I did not accept the partner assignments. I don’t think it would be right to do that under an assumed name. But I do think the fact that less than a month into it, when you write quality content, a new user can get targeted too.

I think keywording is important in being selected. AC is likely looking for someone who shows they are a little past the initial learning curve.

Indexing remains problematic throughout the challenge, as do longer review times than other sites that review after posting or don’t review at all. The review times have, however, drastically improved, across the board.

I think it’s important that AC understands that when they get the queue for reviews backed up and are slow in making offers, people get bored and they wander and submit elsewhere.

We are seeing new sites coming up and other sites starting to offer more in the way of money and benefits, so AC isn’t the only game in town anymore. To stay competitive, AC is going to have to get a handle on the site glitches and review times and stay on top of them. While AC is making better upfront offers than most of the online content sites in general, they are not the only site making upfront offers now, and they are not the only one offering page view payments either. AC needs to realize these other sites might just learn from AC’s mistakes, and AC could be in trouble.

Look at how much Helium’s payments have increased in just a few short months–they went from pennies paid to those who have worked their way up being able to make a solid upfront payment and decent pennies for page views. Helium is definitely becoming competitive to these other sites that have paid more historically. They aren’t quite there yet, but they are moving in that positive direction.

As other sites continue to improve and increase their payment and opportunities, AC has some massive competition that is on the way up, while AC is somewhat stagnating.

Is the new CEO of AC going to make a difference? Will the writers on the site or the employees/staff at AC going to feel a difference? I don’t know, but I do hope we see AC making some positive changes soon too.

The one thing I can say I do like about AC is the dual payment plans. Not only can I get a lump sum payment once per month, but I also tend to get paid a little every day. There’s not another site on the internet that I know of that runs payments nearly every single day. For some people, that 10-25-50 bucks nearly every day for steady writing on the site can really come in handy while waiting for other sites to make their once per month payments.

That right now is the big difference I see between AC and the other revenue payment content sites.

Anyway, the challenge is winding down… I’m mostly just waiting for the ones in queue to get reviewed and published, and then next week, I’ll do the final results of the AC Month-Long Challenge as well as the comparison to Helium at this point.

Then we’ll prepare for the Suite101 challenge.

I really want to thank AC for letting me do this challenge. I’m pleased with the results in general and I’ve learned a lot about AC and about what it’s like to be a newbie from it. It’s changed the way I think about the newbie experience on AC and I hope that means it has changed the way I will relate to new AC writers too. (still refusing to call them sources).

More next week!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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