No, I Can't Make a Living Writing Articles for Associated Content

I enjoy writing on AC. I like the community, and the site design, and the wacky contests, and the opportunity to write about almost anything and get paid for it. I've been satisfied with the modest goals I set for myself here. But then I wondered if I might be setting my sights too low. Should I be aiming higher, trying to write enough to make a living from my AC articles alone?

I thought about it for a while, and concluded that it wasn't possible.

Looking at it from an economics perspective, making money writing articles on AC is like doing piecework in a factory. Just as people who do piecework get paid for each widget they complete, we get paid according to the quantity of items we produce - in our case, the number of publishable articles we submit.

In order to make a living off of AC, one would have to be able to produce a certain minimum number of articles in a particular period of time.

To figure out how long it takes to produce an article, you have to take into account more than just the writing itself. There are also various necessary tasks that come before one can begin to write, and various tasks that come after.

Also critical is the ability to be consistent. It's one thing to be able to go through a single article-writing cycle - doing the before-writing tasks, the writing itself, and the after-writing tasks - in breakneck speed. What counts, if one wants to reach a goal of making a real living from AC, is being able to repeat the whole cycle the required number of times.

For example, to use one of the scenarios in Amy's article, consider someone who wanted to make $500 a week by writing articles that paid $10 each.

That writer would need to repeat each article-writing cycle 50 times a week, week in and week out. Making a living is a marathon, not a sprint.

How much time is needed to write each individual article?

Amy talks about how it may be possible to write an article in 20-30 minutes, as long as you pick topics that you already know about so you don't have to spend much, or any, time doing research.

I think for some people, that may be possible. But for myself, no. I'm a slow writer, and I tend to work in fits and starts.

How much time is needed to do the before-writing and after-writing tasks?

Even if I could write an article in 20 or 30 minutes, there are still a lot of other time-consuming tasks that need to be done.

Before starting to write, you have to come up with a topic. To do 50 articles a week, you need 50 different topics. Even if my brain were a churning cauldron of creative sparks, which it isn't, it would still take some time to come up with all of those ideas.

Then I have to think about what I want to say on the selected topic and how I want to say it. Some people may be much faster than I am with this part of the process, and they may be able to write and think and organize their articles all at the same time, and get all of that done within the allotted 20-30 minute period, but not me.

After the article is written, some writers will be ready to submit it right away, but I'm not a good first draft writer, and I need time to go over what I have written and do some editing.

Then it takes time to go through the AC screens, and pull up a template, and fill in all the boxes. If you want to add a picture, that takes time too.

After the article has been submitted, I have trouble resisting the temptation to look at it in the view screen, and to keep on tinkering with it in the editing screen. That takes a lot of time.

I haven't yet attempted to publicize my articles on the social networking sites, but many people do, and that too takes time.

And then I like to check in on the forums. That's more time being spent on AC.

So that's how a 20-minute article can end up taking hours of my time.

Looking at it that way, there is no way that I could do the fifty articles a week I would need to submit in order to reach a $500/week goal. It wouldn't be possible. There simply aren't enough hours in the day.

What is possible is that I can write more than I have been writing, by using Amy's advice to write on topics that I already know about, rather than ones that require a lot of internet research. In fact, I've already started trying out her advice with the last few articles that I've written (including this one!), and it worked. I was able to finish those aritcles more quickly than I usually do. So from now on, maybe I will try to rely more on the knowledge in my head (such as it is!).