How to Make Money by Writing for Associated Content

It isn't difficult to make money writing for Associated Content. When you submit an article, whether for up-front pay or not, you will earn a performance bonus based on your traffic. The trick to making money on Associated Content is knowing which topics generate the most page views.

You can make a great deal of money over time on Associated Content, since as a Content Producer you receive a share of the site's ad revenue. Unlike ordinary affiliate income this revenue is truly passive; you don't have to promote your site continually to keep the money flowing in.

Associated Content is looking to pay for a wide range of articles. There is a small up-front payment which is usually around $4 or $5. They generally pay up-front for product reviews, how-to articles, holiday articles, news, buying guides, writing guides, travel guides, business advice and much more. They do not pay up-front for website reviews, Associated Content tutorials, television and movie reviews, book reviews, most album and video game reviews, opinion or editorial articles (op-ed), or material that is already available on the Associated Content site or the Internet in abundance. It is important submit material that is free from grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors to receive up-front pay. You may also need to cite your sources.

My first major page views success was with The Best Fourth of July Fireworks in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, which gained over 6,000 page views in only a few days. This clued me in that people on the Internet wanted to read holiday guides, and that local content was also a winner.

Many articles will pay far more than the typical up-front pay by generating massive amounts of page views. My best article, Hot Adult Halloween Costumes You Can Make Yourself, presently has 15,169 page views. At a performance bonus rate of $1.50 per 1,000 page views, this performance bonus payment for this article dramatically exceeded the up-front pay I received. Since this is a holiday article, I will receive similar traffic and pay for that article every single year.

When I realized this article was such a success, I began to write more Halloween costume articles. My next best article, Sexy Halloween Costumes You Can Make Yourself, so far has garnered 12,325 page views. Other Halloween costume articles also did very well in terms of page views. But running with my Halloween theme was what really revved up my page views. Most Unusual Pumpkin Carving Designs and Decorations weighs in today at 12,868 page views. I wrote another article on the same topic, More Unusual Pumpkin Carving Ideas with Free Stencils, which then gained 8,459 page views. My Halloween craft articles did very well also. Halloween Crafts: Poseable Skeleton was a collaborative project between me and my husband. David created the stencil for the skeleton in Adobe Illustrator, and I wrote the article on how to do the craft. This article so far has gained 6,858 page views.

Even when you do not get paid up front for an article, you can still make a lot of money on it. Thanksgiving Crafts for Kids: How to Draw a Turkey Picture was rejected for up-front pay for being "too common," yet drew in a shocking 6,095 page views. This translated into $9.14, which is considerably more than my average $4.00 up-front pay. It was also a very easy article to create, since my husband had given me permission to use a picture he had drawn together with our son. The article was quite simple; it just detailed how to make a turkey drawing out of a hand tracing.

While promoting your Associated Content articles is a good idea, promoting a dud article probably won't help you much. The trick to Associated Content is to optimize your articles for search engines, and write on topics which drive traffic to your site. It also helps to link your articles together, but this will only work if you write quality articles which are optimized for traffic. In order to optimize your articles effectively, it's important to use a text analysis tool which can calculate the percentage of your targeted keywords in proportion to the rest of your articles. Textalyser.net is a good resource. The best percentage to aim for is around 5%. You can optimize more efficiently by optimizing your title and the first 100 words of your article. Also, it's important to use a tool such as the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find out how well your keywords are performing online and to obtain synonyms.

Also, another trick to traffic generation is to check the Yahoo! Buzz Index frequently for potential keywords. Keep in mind that AC often does not pay up-front for all articles that are written to the Buzz. However, they generate so many page views that in the long run, you will make more money than if you had simply worked for the up-front pay.

In order to make Associated Content work for you as a source of income, you will have to make it part of your online money making strategy. You usually must make your articles work for you multiple times in order to really make money from them. For that reason, it's best to submit as non-exclusive. One author I know of places his articles on Constant Content first, then only submits the ones which didn't sell on that site to Associated Content. Other online writers use this strategy of posting otherwise unsaleable material on the site. Also, many authors use Associated Content articles as writing samples to get higher paying writing jobs. Writing only for Associated Content can be very frustrating, however. I'm only able to produce about two or three quality articles per day. Best case scenario, this translates to only $12 per day in up-front pay. So it just isn't worth it to be AC exclusive. Instead, use AC as a site to help you improve your writing and search engine optimization skills, then start looking for higher paying writing jobs. I recently began posting articles to the Helium Marketplace, and made some very good sales.

On Associated Content, quality is more important than quantity. Many writers fail on the site because they attempt to produce five or more articles per day, none of which generate any traffic. After a time, Associated Content will cut Content Producers off from up-front pay if they fail to generate traffic. The strategy of burning up the keyboard in order to get the up-front pay on Associated Content does not pay off in the long run. They key to success is learning how to generate page views in massive quantity. As the number of your articles increases and your traffic flows in, you will begin to receive healthy bonus payments each month.

An intelligent promotion strategy will do you a world of good. For example, you can try using a service like Yahoo! Answers to promote your articles. Also, look into RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites.

If you follow these simple guidelines you should begin to experience success on Associated Content. Be sure to check the forums and the Associated Content tutorials under the Community tab on the front page.