How to Make a Hundred Dollars a Day with Associated Content

Can you make a hundred dollars a day with associated content? Some one told me I could, I'll take a look at that claim. It would be really nice if I could. I could use a hundred dollars a day. Heck, I could use as little as a hundred dollars per week, or even a hundred dollars per month from Associated Content. The question is, is it possible? Has any one ever actually done it?

The Theory

The theory is, that if you get enough page views per day, to enough articles, you should in fact be able to earn $100 per day or more. I read one claim that stated you could in theory make well over a thousand dollars per day off AC, but I seriously doubt it is possible to have enough articles, each getting enough traffic, each day to be able to succeed in that claim. Of course, it is a good practice to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast, so maybe it is possible, if you worked hard at it, to make $1,000 per day here. Who am I to say you shouldn't at least try?

When you first join AC you earn $1.50 per thousand page views. As you work your way up, you can eventually earn as much as $2 per thousand page views. Once you have $2 per thousand page views coming in, than you must also have 50,000 page views per day in order to earn $100 per day, which equals to $3,000 per month. The theory is, that this should be pretty easy to do.

The Reality of Getting Paid on Associated Content

I did some searching around the site, to see if I could find any one who actually was making a hundred dollars a day here. Nope. I did not find any members making that claim. I did find one member who says she submits 10 to 20 articles per day and makes $500 per month here at AC as a result. And I found a handful of others making similar claims.

This means that while the theory is sound, when put to practice the most people are actually able to make is $16.67 per day, and this is including up front pay, something the theory itself did not calculate into it's figures, bringing their PPM pay down to $340 per month, thus meaning that even the top highest paid members of AC are only getting 170,000 page views per month or 5,667 page views per day across all of their articles. Keeping in mind here, the people making these $500 per month claims, also have between 1,000 to 3,000 published articles listed on their profiles, which means that they are getting less than 2 page views per day, per article, and they are relying heavily on the up front pay to bring in nearly half of their month's pay.

I have yet to find anyone here on AC claiming they earn more than $500 per month from their AC writing. That is not to say that they are not out there, that simply says I have not found them yet.

I would be interested in seeing a chart published by Associated Content, which tells us the current top ten pay out figures. It doesn't have to say who the pay outs went to. But it would be nice to have AC actually confirm how much it was that the biggest monthly performance pay outs are, to give other members something to strive for.

But let's take a look at the theory of making one hundred dollars per day on Associated Content.

First off this would imply that you, the author, was getting paid twice for each article. Once upfront when the article is published, and than monthly as the article brings in page view royalties.

So the question now stands, at how much do you make per upfront pay per article? The minimum and maximum amounts are not listed anywhere, however, there are several complaints from members saying that AC often pays them only .99c for their upfront pay per article. This is a somewhat disheartening figure.

Of course not every one gets paid for every article either. Only about 1 in every 10 articles gets accepted for upfront pay at all. Most are rejected and published with out up front pay. The reason usually being "topic too controversial", "topic too over done", "article contains unbiased opinions of the author", "topic is news related and thus short lived", or "article is an editorial".

AC also does not pay upfront for fiction, short stories, poetry, first person accounts, memoirs, religious topics, or product reviews.

So what does AC pay upfront for? For the most part: history, information, education, how tos, and tutorials, and not much else.

And how much does AC pay upfront for these? The most I've ever seen an AC writer say they got paid was $25, but they were paid by an outside vendor and not directly from AC themselves. It seems outside vendors usually pay between $10 to $25 per article. However, I've yet to find a writer who says they were paid more than $15 upfront from AC themselves, and this is an extremely rare event. Most writers say that AC pays them between $2 to $4 per article, if they pay anything up front at all, which they often don't.

And How Much Am I Making on AC?

Okay, I think I can agree with the folks who are making these $2 per article claims. Why? Well, because, including the articles still unpublished and in queue I have 122 articles here on AC. This one I'm writing right now, will be 123. Currently 97 are already published and 26 are waiting to be accepted or denied up front pay.

Of those 123 articles, only 22 of them, have received upfront pay at a grand total of $73.30. All of the rest were denied upfront pay, for the reasons stated above. My current clout level is 7, meaning my pay per thousand page views is currently $1.55, and my dashboard says that this month's estimated pay day will be - hold your breath - a grand total of $6.18. I estimate it will be around $8 by the end of the month, if for some reason one of my articles were to get a boost in traffic it could break a record and reach $10 for the first time.

As you can see, with my expected $8 pay day this month, I have a long way to go before I reach $100 per month, let alone $100 per day. In my 4 years here on AC (I joined March 2006), my grand total of performance pay outs comes to: $30.52. In 4 years, is a long ways away from $100 per year, let alone $100 per month. However, I have never done one single thing to promote or otherwise market my articles, relying 100% on Google traffic alone.

So, the theory than would be that I must be doing something wrong, or at least not doing something very right, because there are members with less articles than me, who claim they are earning over $100 per month here. Of course, there is no way I could tell if they were telling the truth about how much they earned either. Maybe they are not actually earning $100 per month and thus causing me to look at my own account unrealistically. It's possible.

What am I not doing right?

Okay, first off, I realize that I am not promoting my articles, a fact I am in the process of correcting. I believe that more promotion will equal more traffic. I am in the process of figuring out how one should go about promoting my articles and at the moment, only Twitter and FaceBook have come to mind. I'm sure other ideas will follow.

In 4 years my average page views per month have hovered at around 15, with most of them (17,701 of them) going to one single article. This one. Also my only article to have gotten comments to date. My other articles have only seen a few hits per month, if at all. My favorite article has seen only 864 page views total, in the last 4 years! Now granted in 4 years, I also only ever submitted 14 articles. All of the rest of the 123 articles were submitted in the last 7 days, and of those, 2 have seen over 100 page views each, this one and this one, and both were published just 4 days ago. My fastest growing article, page view wise, was published less than an hour ago, has already received 303 visits, and is my personal thoughts on the Health Care Bill, which was passed this morning.

Well this tells me something. It tells me, that certain topics get traffic and others get ignored. It seems there are a lot of people interested in "Health Care", "Starting a Publishing House", "Self Publishing", "Avoiding Scams", and "Living with Autism", but there are only a few people who are interested in things such as "Phookas", "Reincarnation", "Raising Goldfish", "Alien Abduction", or "The Dangers of Getting Chicken Pox Twice". My traffic to each of these articles tells me as much.

How does know this help me to better aim at the $100 a day goal? Simple. It tells me what sort of topics people are going to be Googleing for, and thus what sort of articles are going to get the most page views per month, which in turn tells me which articles are going to bring in the highest pay, thus telling me what sort of articles I should be putting more focus on in my future writing.

I shall continue writing my "niche topics" in the folklore, religion, theology, cryptozoology, and ufology fields, but I will not look to those articles expecting huge amounts of traffic. Instead I will focus on also writing one or two "mainstream hot topic" articles per day, in addiction to my "niche topic" articles. I will also strive to publish no less than 10 new articles per week, and aiming at working up to no less than publishing 5 articles per day. I want to see how close I come to having 1,000 articles published before my fifth anniversary here on AC, which means publishing some 877 articles in the next 12 months, which is only 2 articles per day, so it should be a reachable goal providing I can find that many things to talk about.

In Conclusion

I do believe that it is possible, to make a $100 per day on page views alone, here at AC. I also believe that it is not an easy goal to achieve and that it requires a balanced combination of many things, including to write articles about topics which will get high Google traffic consistantly for many years to come.

So, I intend to put this theory to the test, from now on I will make it my goal to make as close to $100 per day here on Associated Content as I possibly can and in a year or so's time I will write another article to report back to see how well I did or how close I came.

This is the sister article to my other article: K is for Key Word Density is Crap: Myths About Freelance Writing Debunked or How I Reached Clout Level 7 in Less Than a Week

What's your take on this? I'd love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

This article was first published on Associated Content, under the title How to Make a Hundred Dollars a Day with Associated Content on March 24, 2010 and is copyright to Wendy C. Allen and The Twighlight Manor Press.