Associated Content for Beginners

At the time of this writing, I've been a content producer for Associated Content for exactly two weeks. In that two weeks time, I have gotten three articles published. I've spent more time writing than I have in the last two months put together. I have also spent a good amount of time searching the AC forums for answers to some basic questions. My questions weren't about anything writing related, though I am working very hard at improving my technique, but about the nuts and bolts of AC. I hope what I have found out will save my fellow newbie content producers time - time that can be spent writing more articles for AC, of course!

Getting Paid

AC pays its content producers on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In order to make the cut off for pay day, you need to have a few things in place. First, make sure that you have an e-mail address that is linked to a current Paypal account. If you don't have a Paypal account, you will need to sign up for one before you can get paid. This is a simple process and can be accomplished quickly by going to www.paypal.com. Once you have your account, make sure that you update your Paypal e-mail address with AC.

After you are all squared away with Paypal, you need to visit your content page on AC. Click on the "Payment Information and Confirmation" link on the top of the page. Find and click on the "Turn Auto-Confirm Payments On" button. Content producers have to confirm payments before AC sends the payment to Paypal. Once payments are confirmed, your payment should show up by the end of the next payday, though AC states that payments can take up to two weeks. Content producers also need to take bank holidays into consideration. For example, no payments were sent out on Presidents Day, even though it was a Monday.

Subscribing to Friends and Other Content Producers

Subscribing to other content producers is a way to quickly find your favorite authors and a way to get your articles more exposure. The more comments you leave on other CPs' articles, the more CPs will click on your link, visit your profile, and hopefully read your articles. To subscribe to a content producer, you first have to click on their name to find their profile. Once on their profile page, you will see, next to their name, the buttons "Contact this CP", "Subscribe" and "Add to Favorites". Click on "Subscribe". You will then get another "Subscribe" button above the content producer's name. You need to click on this second "Subscribe" button in order to actually be subscribed to this CP. Subscribing to a CP also puts this CP in your favorites.

Page Views

The page view tool is a great tool. It lets you know how many people are visiting your articles. It can be discouraging to see the page views stuck at zero, even when you know your mom read your article. To learn more about the page view feature, click on the words "page view". AC explains that this feature is a beta version. Beta versions are pre-release software. That means that there are still a lot of bugs to be worked out. AC is updating content producers' page views roughly once a week. Your page views will show up sooner or later to let you know how your articles are doing. Then, the numbers will remain stationary until the next update.

Finding my way around the AC website is getting easier the longer I am here. I have learned that the key thing needed at AC is patience. Those of us in the internet world are used to things moving fast. It is easy to forget that AC does, in fact, move fast. It is much faster than the non-internet writing world. Where else can you find out in five business days whether or not your article was accepted for publication? Where else can you actually see it published on-line soon after that? That's as close to instant gratification as you can get for paid writing.