Associate Content approved my recent articles today and made me offers. That is the fastest turnaround I have had with them so far. Up until now it has always taken me at least a week to get offers for anything (but I was also submitting more articles. They might deal with them in batches and the ‘bulk’ submissions are slowing them down???)

The speed of approval was the good news. The actual offers weren’t that great. My article titled “Speed Write Your NonFiction Book Using Dictation” got a whopping $5.10 offer and my article titled “How to Fly Without Getting Sick” got a truly underwhelming $4.61 - and that one was an exclusive submission.  Since it ended up taking me about and hour to write and submit each, I’m way off my target goal of earning $20/hour.

On the slightly brighter side, I’m $9.71 closer to my new monitor. That is better than last week, but I’ve got a lot more writing to do!

Since I didn’t see much benefit to submitting an exclusive article, I think I will submit most as non-exclusives so I can use them again and squeeze some more money out of them (but that money will not be counted toward the new monitor purchase.) The writing article will be going up on this blog immediately - I might get some Adsense income from that one.

So here is the running tally:

2 Articles Sold - $9.71
Balance Required to Buy Monitor - $590.29 - $790.29
Remaining Number of Articles to be Written at Current Average Price ($4.85/each) - 122-163

Looks like I have a ways to go. I had better find some more profitable subjects if I want to get this done before my 14 week old daughter graduates college.

Back to the article mines,

The Go-To Guy! 

In my last post on this project I mentioned that I had cranked out 11 article outlines on a cross-country airplane flight and just needed to flesh them out before uploading them to Associated Content to sell.

My hope was that I could spend a few hours one afternoon or evening to crank out the finished articles and submit them, but life hasn’t quite worked out like that. Living with a 15 week old daughter in a studio apartment is challenging and the ups and downs of her day have a huge impact on the time and energy I have to work on this project.

Starting today, I’m trying to get the process moving again by writing one article on my subway ride to work. From the time I sit down on the train to when I arrive at my stop, there is about 20 minutes for me to work. This is just about right for the time I allotted for drafting each article.

Today I wrote an article titled “Speed Write Your Non-Fiction Book Using Dictation.” The total article length was just under 700 words. I typed it up over lunch and submitted it to Associated Content.

One of the drawbacks to working this way is that I hand write each article and then go back and type the hand written text before submitting it. I’m not a very fast typist, so this added another 20 minutes to the process. Including about 10 minutes to log in and upload the article, I have spent about an hour creating and submitting this article. That is going to reduce my overall hourly rate for writing - but I’m getting closer to my monitor and taking advantage of time that is usually not profitable to get the work done.

I also decided to submit this article as a non-exclusive article. The subject matter is relevant to a couple of projects I am working on, so I want to have the freedom to re-use the text (although I will probably rework it before using it anywhere else.) I will submit future articles as exclusives to see if the payments offered are better. If the difference is small, I’ll just keep doing non-exclusives to keep my options open.

If you would like to see the types of content I have been paid to write, visit my user profile at Associated Content.

Who knows, if I can get a seat on the subway going home tonight, I might knock out another article!

**UPDATE**

I wrote 1 1/2 articles on the train ride home. I typed up and submitted “How To Fly Without Getting Sick” as an exclusive submission. It took about the same amount of time as the earlier article to complete and submit. That’s 2 down and 8 1/2 articles to go in this first batch.

The Go-To Guy!

It is time for an update on my writing challenge.

This past weekend I traveled cross country for a conference (New York to Los Angeles.) I decided to devote a portion of my westbound flight to writing articles for this challenge.

I planned to write on subjects I was familiar with which would limit the amount of research required. I also chose topics that would not require quoting lots of facts and figures. The topics were writing and home improvement.

There was one home improvement topic I needed to do a little research on, so I had about 25 pages of printouts from a quick Google search on Thursday night. I relied on personal experience for the rest of the articles. When I got started writing, I fell into an interesting pattern.

As I started to write, I found myself outlining the articles with just enough detail to capture the idea and provide an outline of the complete article. Because I wasn’t laboring over details, I got on a roll and moved through the articles quickly.

In less than 2 hours, I outlined 11 separate articles - 9 on my original topics and 2 that just popped into my mind when I got in the groove. (That works out to 11 minutes per article.)

This process reminded me of when I worked on an automotive assembly line building cars (this is just one of the many interesting jobs I’ve held!) When you break a project down into the primary steps of production, and then complete one step for multiple products at the same time, you move much faster than if you complete every step for one product before starting the next product. You get into a rhythm and you stop thinking about the process and just do the work.

The outlines still need to be expanded into full articles, but I think that can be done quickly since they are already clearly outlined - I’m just expanding the thoughts into complete statements.

I should have the first batch ready to submit for payment within a few days.

The Go-To Guy!

There is nothing like having a specific goal to help focus your work. I want a Dell UltraSharp 2407FPW 24 inch LCD Widescreen Monitor! I also want to get it using money I earn online using nothing but my computer, freely available Internet resources, and my writing skills. Lastly, I don’t want to work for peanuts and wait forever to make this happen. I want the monitor now and I want to earn at least $20/hour for my efforts.

I posted a personal challenge on the 5 Bucks a Day members forum today. That, and this post, are my official proclamation to the world that his will happen - I will have a new Dell UltraSharp 2407FPW 24 inch LCD Widescreen Monitor!

Dennis Becker, the author of “5 Bucks a Day” and owner of the members’ forum for owners of the book, has recently been adding a number of free download resources for the forum members that are related to article writing and selling articles. (Membership to the forum is included with the purchase of the “5 Bucks a Day” e-book.) Two specific e-books added to the members download area are Content Speed Writing and Increase Your Associated Content Profits. I plan to apply what I learned from these books to getting the money for my new monitor.

As a member of the forum I have learned a number of ways to earn money online. One of them is writing content articles and selling them to sites that pay authors for original new content. Usually, forum members focus on building projects that will earn them $5/day continually. But, one of the discussion threads introduced a way to sell articles for a quick profit.

Since I want my new monitor now!!!! I decided to use this short term article writing/selling strategy to earn the cash for my new monitor. I outlined the details of the plan in the original forum post. Basically, I think that I can write 30-40 articles in 20 hours which will earn me between $600 and $800 (enough to buy the monitor on eBay.) My target hourly income rate is $40 per hour. I would also like to have the work completed and the money in my back account within 4-6 weeks.

Bookmark this thread, or sign up to the RSS feed, to keep an eye on my progress. I will be posting updates of my progress.

The Go-To Guy

P.S. Of course, I will have plenty of pictures and video of my new monitor when it arrives!!!