Earning Money from Articles — Part 2 Article Revenue Share Sites

Introduction:

Welcome to my second article on making money from articles. This article deals with Revenue Share article sites. Those sites where you post your content and you take a share (typically 50% of the advertising revenue that your article generates).

This will never make you rich, but writing a number of articles will bring you a residual income every month. How much you earn depends on how many articles you submit and the precise topics of those articles. The ones to target first are the ones where you can add your own URLs either to the article body or to an author signature associated with the article.

This way you get a residual income from pageviews to your article, you get referral traffic and you get link juice to your own site or to the affiliate products you are marketing. Even if you are purely an author, this is a great way of getting more links to your author blog, twitter feed or Amazon author page.

Here are some of my favourite article revenue share sites:


1. Yahoo! Contributor Network (formerly AssociatedContent). Here you are paid on a performance basis and they give you tools to help drive traffic to your articles. My overall experience is that the site’s potential for freelance on-line writers is there. But they do not buy your articles (at least for non US contributors). Still, this is a Yahoo! company, so exposure and link juice to any URLs you add to your articles is excellent.


2. Helium. The problem with Helium is that articles are listed in categories according to the rating they receive by other members of the site. As a result only a couple of the 15 articles I submitted came up in the first five in their lists of articles with the same topic. This effectively means that unless your are part of the 'clique' of the site your articles are never seen and they can never be sold. There are article topics that you get paid for, but they only give $1 and most of these articles you have to research. I have given up on helium.


3. Hubpages. This is one of the classics and I have had hubs for a long time. The site has great spontaneous response to your input. It shows you other hubbers’ activities which enrich your experience with the site. It shows your statistics clearly and allows you edit your work instantaneously. You may add pictures or advertising capsules (segments) anytime you like. For those who are keen to make a passive income here, they make it easy for you to become affiliates to Google Adsense, Kontera context link, Amazon.com and eBay.com. It can be hard to get some hubs noticed and I tend to submit spun content there. However, hubs can be profitable for diligent and money-conscious writers who put effort into search engine optimization (SEO) and write hubs around the more profitable Google Adsense Keywords.



4. Lifetips. Only for US authors at present. They sign-up writers as 'Gurus' in their particular fields of expertise (from accounting, acupuncture…, to writing and yoga). You can share your 'lifetips' and be paid up to $10 per tip, or allow them to compile your tips into an ebook or a printed book. They will market the book and award you your royalty at an agreed percentage.


5. Sqidoo. This is very similar to hubpages, except that articles are called 'lenses'. Unfortunately, for the beginner, the competition is really hot. Unless you do something nice and get recommended by one of the editors, your writing gets lost in the ocean of lenses created every day. Still, there are many other lens producers who will share with you how interesting and addictive publishing at squidoo.com is. I am sure it will turn out great for many of you who try it hard and long enough. One of the issues is driving traffic to your lens so you need to be proactive about that. Also writing seasonal content seems to be a good way of getting noticed. A few of my recipes for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Hogmanay have been picked up.


6. Triond. I have just joined Triond and had my first couple of articles published. They have an interesting model, whereby the site acts as a portal that distributes your writing to various sites and blogs that cover a whole range of topics. Triond accepts articles on all topics and sorts them out to distribute through the appropriately themed article sites. You can even write in a language of your choice (other than English) and they’ll find the right place to publish it. They also try to find an image to match your content and attach this to it. It should be noted, though, that they are very strict about duplicate content. You are likely to have your article declined even if it has been partly duplicated somewhere on the internet (or possibly, in print). Still, their reputation is that they are very efficient at paying authors. I am getting to like Triond and this is one site I will be sticking with.



7. Seeking Alpha. They require articles about stocks, investment and stock tips. If your article is unique and you submit to them only then you get $10 per article per 1,000 page views. They also have other work from home jobs that you can check out, if interested.


Summary:

I have tried to present sites that actually pay you here, and where possible I have presented sites that I use myself in my on-line campaigns. Where I was not able to use the site (because it's for US authors only, I have indicated this and tried to speak with someone who really uses the site).

None of these sites will directly make you rich (no site will do that) but they will help you get your name known and they will help bring traffic to your own site. You can also use them to provide a cascade of links (squidoo and hubpages to triond, triond to your main site, for example) that can help in your link-building campaigns.

This is based on personal experience, and sites I do not like may be ideal for you. So give them a try and see what happens.