My Experiment: Making a Living Writing for Associated Content

I've been reading several articles off and on all geared toward writing enough to make a living writing for Associated Content. I've done the math with my own numbers (factoring in how much money I typically make per article, and the generalized time it typically takes for me to write an article) and my interest is piqued enough to give it a try.

At this point I believe it is safe to say that I am still relatively new to Associated Content with just fifty published articles under my belt. I only average 3.21 per article, so unlike many others I will have to do twice the work than others may have to do. I averaged that in order to make $500 a week I would have to write 155 articles per week. This is broken down to 31 articles per day for five days.

I made myself a long list of things that I could write about that I know about without having to do any research on, and managed to fill up a page in a notebook (front and back) with ideas, and the list keeps growing. I was actually surprised at the information I've managed to store in this noodle of mine. At any rate, I sat down with my list and decided to time myself to see how long it would take me to write a couple of articles. The first article "How to Get Your Dog Used to Riding in Your Car" took me 15 minutes. The second article, " Review of Purina Tidy Cats Scoop for Multiple Cats Cat Litter," only took me 10 minutes. I had two articles written in less than thirty minutes, and they are both articles I feel are well written and do not make me look poor as a writer.

If I average two articles every thirty minutes, then that means, roughly, that I need to write for a little under 8 hours a day; the same amount of time I would spend working a full time traditional job. This brings about pros and cons though. The major pro in this is that I don't have to spend any extra money in gas. Other pros are that I can work in my pajamas, I am in charge of when I work, I can take off any time I like or need to run errands. Of course the biggest con is having to write at a break neck pace at a consistent level and keep a flow of ideas for articles going. It would be easy to get burned out. So, the question for me isn't if its doable, but for how long is it doable.

I've decided to try this for a month and see how far I get. It is during the summer time, so I am at home with my two children who are out of school for the summer, so I have to see to their needs and write too. My aim in doing this experiment is to prove once and for all if this is simply an idea that looks good on paper or if it is something that is possible in real life. We'll see.