Twiiter Challenge My Results

I became a content producer of associated content in April of 2008. Oh I love the idea to be finally a published writer and get paid for it. I had many ideas and papers that I had written in college. I figured that if I wrote three articles a day that I would get paid $50-100 a week depending on what I was offered for an upfront fee. Then I found out that some articles are declined for an upfront payment. There are many reasons for it such as an article being published on another website (I had also published several things on the now discontinued web site http://thisbyus.com) or a subject topic that is too broad in nature. I have no problem with being declined an upfront payment; at least I still get paid on performance. That is what I like about AC; they are very flexible. AC allows us to publish anything as long as it is our own work.

Now while my goal at Associated Content is to make some extra money; my long term goal is to pay off my bills, have money saved up for my girls for college and enough money until I get my retirement check; that is still over fifteen years away.

Overall, I figure I would need to make approximately $190,000 to quit my job. Let say I did start writing high quality articles and got an average upfront payment of $3.00 for each, it normally takes me an hour to write one article. That is provided that I do not have any distractions from my husband and daughters. Therefore, in reality it takes me longer. Well, I would have to write 63,000 articles to meet my long term goal. Too me, that is just impossible. One a typical day, I can get three articles written, sometimes four. However, I start to get burnt out. At this rate, it would take me more than the rest of my life to quit my job.

The idea of being paid for performance helps me out. When I started writing articles for AC, I was paid $1.00 for every 1,000 page view. At my current clout level, if I did not write any more articles, I would have to get something like 150,000,000 page views. Right now, I am at 18,000. That too will take forever; even if I sat at a computer and kept clicking on my articles. Not only would this bore me to tears, it is also a violation of AC's policies. So the question is how do I get more page views?

Performance 1.77
Performance 1.29
Performance 1.40
Performance 1.18
Performance 0.68
Performance 0.85
Performance 0.84
Performance 0.92
Performance 0.69
Performance 0.91

The above is an example of my payments prior to when I improved my networking. There are noticeable gaps in the payment history. Six of the months I made less than $1.00 and I more or less gave up. Plus I ran out of ideas and had other things going on in my life during that time.

I realized that if I wanted to make any type of money with AC, I could not rely on the upfront payments alone. Plus I could not just sit and wait for somebody to find my articles. I realized that I had to build a network of individuals. Therefore, I found out about Twitter through the AC website.

I joined and I currently have approximately 800 followers. When I publish an article, AC automatically sends a Tweet to Twitter. Here are my payments since I joined Twitter:

Performance 1.13
Performance 1.30
Performance 1.40
Performance 1.53
Performance 1.33
Performance 3.09

There is a noticeable difference. All of the payments are over $1.00. Even though it only shows through August, the September and October payments are considerably higher.

This shows that networking works. For me to make my goal of $190,000 I would have to write more articles and build my network. I did figure it out that with the current amount of articles that I have published, I would have to have 754,000 people in my network. Provided that each person in my network reads each article, then I would reach my goal. I think I better write more articles.