Sitting at home in your pajamas with a nice cup of coffee at your side typing away at your keyboard sounds like a pretty good living for a lot of people. There is no boss staring at you, no traffic to fight in the morning, just you and a broadband connection as a way to make a living. While this is a goal for many people, achieving that goal can be harder in reality than the theory suggests.
I came across Associated Content recently as one way of making a few extra bucks online. The basic idea is that you write an article, submit it to them and they make a payment offer to you for the rights to publish that article. If you choose to offer to them as an exclusive, there is a higher potential payment, but you also cannot republish the article anywhere else nor remove it from their site in the future. If your article gets popular, you can also make money from Performance Payments, where they pay you based on the number of views that your article gets.
How much can you make from Associated Content though? Chris Bibey shared his results from publishing articles on Associated Content and showed an average payment of $6.46 per article during a month of writing. Depending on how fast you can write a quality article, that may be worthwhile or not. If you can write 5 articles an hour like Chris, it can add up to a decent hourly wage, but if its taking you a long time to finish even one or two articles, you average wage starts making working at McDonald’s look better in comparison.
What if you wanted to make writing your full time income source though? Let us say you had a goal of making $2100 a month, which would equate to $25,200 a year. That is not a huge number by most standards in the United States, but some places that would sound good.
Therefore, $2100 goal / $6.46 per article equal 325 articles in a month. Yikes, that is a lot of writing!
Assuming 30 days in a month on average, 325 articles divided by 30 days is roughly 11 articles per day with no days off. If you wanted weekends off, such as July, you would have 24 days or 13.5 articles per day. If you wanted to work a 8 hour day, you would need to average 1.35 articles in the 30 day example or 1.7 articles per hour in the 24 day month example. Going back to Chris’s example, if you could write 5 articles an hour you could easily surpass these goals in less time than the examples.
The trouble with this idea though would be burnout. Could you really develop ideas for 325 articles that Associated Content is willing to pay for? Could you make yourself sit down and write all that material? Then the question would become what about next month? Could you do it all over again? This example would equate to around 3900 article per year, which is a lot of writing for $25,200 per year if you followed the example rates here. This example also did not take into account any taxes, which could easily take 25 to 30% of your pay since would be self-employed, so you would have to earn that much more to cover your taxes if the $25,200 were your income goal. Of course, if you were good enough to write that many articles, chances are you would have found better paying sources or alternative income methods along the way. If nothing else, you might have developed a blog instead where you can fully benefit from the advertising revenue that the traffic for your articles would generate along with other monetizing possibilities such as affiliate marketing.
Consequently, this idea might not work as a full time income source, but it could help lead you to other clients in the future. It could also serve as a nice way of making a few extra bucks to add to your income. If you wrote for 1 hour, a week even or 20 articles a month, which could be an extra $130 in your pocket. I did sign up for Associated Content to check them out and will give it a shot to see what happens. I’ll be the first to admit that seeing the latest income reportfrom Chris made me a little wishful for that type of success that he has reached, but I know it is a matter of doing the hard work and marketing that can eventually lead to those types of numbers.
