Is Residual Income for Writers Really Less Work?

One of the most popular passive income gigs in the writing world is creating residual income. This can be anything from writing on sites that pay per thousand page views, those that pay via adsense revenue and those that allow for the sale of custom products (like e-books). Wanting to see if this would really save me time and allow my efforts to be concentrated in other areas, I decided to work both writing paid content and residual articles at the same time.

Let me first say I have been working as a writer since 2001. I have also taught English, and between the two, can usually write and edit a 400 word article in 15 minutes. With that said, I decided to write 80 articles in a week. This was a 50/50 mixture between paid content with no rights and residual articles with rights. After the all-week project, I was promptly paid for my ordered content and was finished. The residual income articles I posted on a popular residual income site and let those sit for three months.

Out of the 40 residual income articles, I earned $50 the first month, $42 the second, and $30 the third. After three days in the next month; I did not have a penny for the month. I knew something was very strange. Looking back, when the income for the second and third month started to really do down; I should have acted earlier.

To make a long story short, I highlighted a sentence from each one of my articles, and magically I was treated to the answer as to why my residual income had gone downhill: out of 40 articles, 17 were posted on other sites; many using other people's names. Basically, some sites too cheap to contact me for reprint rights; and some people too lazy to do their own work, stole my content. Now, I had to go and email these people to take down my stolen content.

All of this extra work is taking away from my bottom line. I had no choice but to set up Google Alerts on my content. One site refused to take down 10 of my articles, claiming they were a search engine that only publishes "article snippets". Umm... throughout the site; entire, un-monetized, print-screen versions of my articles were there. They claim if my content was stolen, to contact the site it was taken from. Once again, umm... they were the ones that took it, not another author!

Another site refused to answer me and my article is still posted, along with recent posts; so I know the site is still active. A third site was the best. It was for a fortune telling site that took one of my related articles. It took three emails to get the article pulled, and let me say; the last one did have some choice words, as I predicted their fortune would involve me contacting their hosting company.

So, after a good four hours invested in multiple emails and setting up alerts, I still had a total of 11 of my article being used without my permission. What did I do? Madder than anything I now had to pull the articles and paste them in Word (another two hours). Do you see where I am going with this? Residual income basically means you have to be the "writing police", as you never know who is going to steal your stuff. The articles I have used still appear on the web which means I can not sell them; especially since someone else is using my articles under their name.

Looking back, I wish I had just concentrated on writing 40 extra articles to sell on a content site; at a price set by me. In total I made $122 for those three months. I lost six hours having to clean-up this mess. If I had put 40 articles on a content site, and only sold half of them, I would have earned $200. They also could have been re-written and made unique for another sale. Unfortunately, I have to rewrite them all now and proceed from there.

While it can happen, I want to say this did not occur with any of my AC content. I have positive experiences here and fortunately, after almost three years here, have not had any problems. I did, however, have to set up Google Alerts on this content (another 4 hours), as I am very concerned now. Residual income is great, but it is not passive income. Rather that actively writing, a writer looking to earn residual income must be actively patrolling the Internet for his or her content. I learned my financial lesson and hope, regardless of passive income site; you are always vigilant with Google Alerts or other plagiarism detection means.