How Bible Study and Sunday School Teachers Can Make Money on Associated Content

On July 4th, 2008 I joined Associated Content and began tentatively to submit articles for publications. At first I worked hard at working up new, original content from what I had written before, submitting articles on math and history and content I learned from interviewing family members. But as I became more familiar with Associated Content (AC) I realized I had an entire repertoire of writing which I had never even considered putting out for publication: my lecture notes for the two Bible study classes I had taught on Isaiah and the Book of Acts. These had never been published, were completely my own work, and I had them all nicely typed up in MS Word.

At first I was somewhat nervous about even considering being that publicly open about my beliefs. After all, I had written some pretty opinionated, hard stuff in my Bible study notes. Non-Christians might find some of the things I had written quite offensive, even though that was not at all my intent. Were religious writings welcome at AC? Would I be opening myself to being attacked for proposing what might be controversial views? Would AC even publish any of it?

I decided I would go ahead and risk it. I started by going through my Isaiah notes, picking and choosing which chapters I wanted to post, then breaking them down into 2 to 4 page articles. With much trepidation I posted them to Associated Content for exclusive upfront offers and amazingly, a few days later, I began to get offers! My first upfront for an Isaiah article was for $3.59. I was hooked!

From there I began to regularly post new Isaiah articles as time allowed. My actual time investment was fairly minimal as the Bible study lessons were already written; I just needed to break them down into manageable articles and add my sources, as needed. To my surprise and relief, I also found that even if a rare person posted an ugly or vulgar comment to one of my articles, AC has graciously given sources (writers) the option of deleting such comments.

As time passed, as I should have expected, my upfront offers for my Bible study articles began to go down, declining to only $0.99 each, then finally being rejected for upfronts altogether. I had saturated my own market, as the titles were almost all identical (For example, Bible Study Lesson for Isaiah 43:1-7, Bible Study Lesson for Isaiah 55:8-13, etc.) I was also not generating a large number of page views for most of these. This didn't actually surprise me. I would expect there would be some people searching for Bible study notes online, but I don't expect that it is a large number. (My Algebra related articles actually do much better in regards to PVs.) I also had not done anything to "tweak" the articles to make the more searchable, as that would have taken extra writing time.

I decided to continue to publish my Isaiah articles (adding in my Acts Bible Study articles later) as Display only, as a way to generate more PVs. What I also found was that by publishing so many articles I was also accelerating my climb up the Clout ladder, which meant I was accelerating my pay scale at AC. I expect that soon after this particular article is published (I writing it April 19, 2009) I will have reached Clout 8. This is not because I have a huge number of PVs (I'm currently at about 33,698) but because I have 197 articles published, with provides almost the max bonus toward calculating Clout. By relying heavily on simply reworking my Bible Study lessons (which were already written) I will have managed to reach Clout 8 in about 9 months.

So, my encouragement for those Bible Study and Sunday School Teachers out there is, share your notes and lessons through Associated Content! If you have put in the time and energy to write up your notes already for your classes, putting in that little extra effort to get them published on Associated Content can actually make you some money. I won't promise you will make a lot of money (I'm only currently averaging $10 a month in my PV bonus) but then you were probably teaching for free anyway right? Why not share your faith and what you've learned with others outside your immediate church circle and make a little coffee and pizza money in the process. When I originally wrote up my own lecture notes I would periodically search online to see what other people had written on the same passages of scripture, so you may also end up providing a service for other believers in the process.

Blessings!