AC Success Stories: How Phillygirl Got Her Groove Back!

I haven't yet made enough on Associated Content to pay for one off-season week in a State Park Cabin, but writing for AC has helped me succeed in a way much more significant than raking in performance payments.

It snapped me out of an 11-year writer's block.

I never wrote for a living, I did it as a hobby, hoping to be "discovered." In my early years, I wrote poems and letters to the editor, human interest stories and memoirs, and somewhere there are several copybooks with the draft of an angst-ridden adolescent's version of Gone With The Wind, and another draft of a family saga titled "And Grandmother Wore Black." In my 20s, I got a job as a secretary in the Public Relations Department of a local community college, while I attended classes at night for journalism and PR. This job afforded me the opportunity to learn to write press releases, produce newsletters, assemble college catalogues and design flyers, and I was given interview assignments for the alumni newsletter. I became so adept at formal correspondence, my bosses just told me to write to so-and-so and tell them such-and-such. I was also, as a student, a prodigious contributor to the student paper. On my own time, I sent articles to local newspapers and had a few human interest stories published. An op-ed on the AIDS quilt netted me $100, and in 1989 the Philadelphia Inquirer published a "third story" in their now-defunct Sunday Magazine, where I raked in $500, the most I've ever earned writing.

By then, however, circumstances had led me away from the PR job and I ended up a legal secretary for the following 22 years. The political climate had changed in the mid-80s, and where previously my editorials had always been published, I now couldn't get one printed to save my life. All of the stories I sent out to magazines and newspapers were returned with polite letters, and at some point I just stopped writing, until 1996, when an article I sent to my neighborhood paper got me a six-month stint as a stringer. Given this opportunity, my writing juices started to stir and I made another attempt at freelancing, to no avail. I sunk into a deep writer's block.

Early this year, I got an e-mail from Joe ("Spider) Warner, an AC content producer and administrator of Talk About Bradford (TAB), a forum serving a small town in upstate Pennsylvania. He knew I wanted to write but was in a slump and, after reading my mostly political tirades for four years, suggested I join Associated Content.

The rest is history.

The first two months, I was a ghost on this site, didn't know anyone, and had virtually no comments save for the ones my BFF Linda posted. I had over 20 personal subscribers, but I was beginning to think they all said "yes" when I asked if I could add them just to be polite. Still in the writer's block mode, I found it difficult to produce new material, so I dug out all my rejected stories and old Toastmaster speeches, edited and spruced them up to publish on AC. But my page views (PVs) were still minuscule and my comments non-existent but for Linda's.

One day, I decided to click on stories on topics similar to mine, comment, send the writer a PM and suggest they read MY article. That worked pretty well, got me more subscribers and PVs, but it took a lot of time. In one of my forays into the forum, I discovered a subscriber thread and within a week I had more than doubled my subscribers. Not only did these people read and comment on my work, but they referred me to others, sent my links to people they knew would be interested in a particular piece, offered advice, and were helpful with any questions I had about AC. My PVs slowly started to grow. I started cruising the forum, posting in the ones that interested me. The more I participated in the forum, the more people noticed me and checked me out. Many of them liked my work and subscribed. I learned that making pithy comments on other writer's work was another way to draw subscribers. And I finally realized what that "Share" button at the bottom of my articles was for.

One day, I got tired of recycled material, and also realized that my humor, memoirs and human interest stories didn't really make me much money because they weren't the kind of thing for which AC puts out Calls for Content or pays upfront. So, I had to make a decision. Did I give up the kind of writing I loved for awhile in order to make money and get noticed?

Hell, yeah, why not.

I started taking Calls for Content, posting articles on movie quotes, holiday recipes and pancake houses in Boston. Once, I accidentally took a call on how to clean washing machine filters. Reading the call description too quickly, I thought they were talking about dryers. Who even KNEW washers had filters and how to clean them?! Well, after a week of research, I do now, and so does everyone subscribed to me! I posted a couple of local news pieces. One piece on a Lifetime movie documenting a true story in my hometown has garnered me 9,817 views and counting as of this writing! I went on a mission last month and managed to cover just about every Olympic gymnastic event, just to see if I could. I got very little sleep that week, but it was worth it. Finding myself hitting "Publish" at 3:00 a.m. gave me a manic sense of accomplishment. (Or maybe it was just a lack of sleep.)

I eventually learned what topics are googled and how to get them googled. I learned how to promote my content on other sites. While sharing my content, I found sites that hosted writing contests where I could enter my humor pieces. And last week I woke up a "Planet 7" out of 10, with almost 33,000 views and 82 pieces of published content.

I have gotten e-mails and phone calls from people from my past who have stumbled onto my AC articles, many asking "What took you so long to get your butt in gear?" Others who had never read anything I wrote, were shocked to discover that I had this talent. I am re-educating myself in issues and topics I had long abandoned in my ennui, and posted my first political piece in years this summer. I have made many wonderful cyber friends on AC, unfortunately at the expense of my TAB friends, but I do my best to make a regular appearance there.

I've only been a member of AC since March of this year, still have a lot to learn about Internet writing, but slowly and surely I am making my way. I have ventured into areas I would have never thought about before. I am forcing myself to learn new writing and editing techniques, new processes and methods my Luddite-skewed biases had kept me from approaching. I am gleaning knowledge from my fellow content producers in areas that include fashion, cosmetics, gardening , child care, relationships, politics, medical discoveries, economics, philosophy and religion. I read the fiction writers' submissions always with an eye for a new idea or style, and I am, of course, particularly partial to the humor, memoirs and human interest stories. I even began browsing photography sites after I posted my first slideshow on AC. Soon I will begin writing just to please myself again, but will always keep an eye on the news stories and the calls. And the true-life stories made into movies!

It's been a thrill for me this summer to jump four planets in two months as I watched my PVs soar. My payments are always a bit higher each month, but I am a long way from rich. My success story centers on breaking through my writer's block and regaining my self-confidence, no longer fearful that I no longer "have it."

Riches and fame are not always the best measure of success. Sometimes, it's just -- getting your groove back.

(Hey, yo! Thanks, Spider! Phillygirl owes ya one!)