Earnings for December 2009
I love December. There is something about the coming of Christmas that puts me in a good mood for most, if not all of the month. Despite my holiday spirit, this was a hard month for me. I spent December doing the same thing I have been doing for the past 3 months: trying to find a day job and writing as much as I can. My plan was to apply for three jobs a day before writing anything. This would would have meant that I would have applied for 93 jobs by the end of the month. I realized, after making this plan, that it was already the eighth. This meant I was already 24 applications behind for the month. Also, obviously, no one was posting jobs over the holidays. I was unable to find anything to apply for, from Christmas Eve on. Regardless I still applied for almost 50 jobs in December and had multiple job interviews. Still, no one has yet to offer me a position.
After applying for my three jobs I set to writing each day. I was still able to add five blog posts here and six articles on Bright Hub. The Online Paycheck has seen a great increase in traffic thanks to my meagre efforts, where my Bright Hub portfolio on the other hand, saw no increase in views even though I added six new articles.
Here is my word count for the month of December:
| Location | Number of Articles | Word Count |
| blog | 5 | 1891 |
| Xomba | 7 | 508 |
| Bright Hub | 6 | 4083 |
| Total: | 6482 |
Earnings from my writing have been fair this month. Red Gage has been really good to me this month. I had two pieces featured, giving me a small bonus for each, and I was a featured member. Being a featured member gave my profile, along with nine others, some face-time on Red Gage’s main page which drove up our traffic. Both Bukisa and the Online Paycheck brought in extremely low amounts this month but Bright Hub did rather well. I have changed the way I am keeping track of my Bright Hub earnings. Bright Hub used to have a 60 day hold on revenue share earnings. They have changed this starting this year. To do this, they paid two months of revenue share and articles written in November on the December paycheck. They are now paying at the beginning of the month following publication. This means, for example, I would get paid for my June revenue share earnings in early July rather then in August as was previously the case. I am going to start using my pay stub amount from Bright Hub in each months stats. The amount shown in this stat is my November earnings, but I was only paid on December 10th. This is the most accurate way to do things for Bright Hub since you never know how much the revenue share will be with them because it fluctuates from month to month.
Earnings from writing online for December
| Location | Total Amount of Articles | Monthly Income |
| Triond | 14 | $0.33 |
| Bukisa | 11 | $0.09 |
| Red Gage | 68 (writing and photography) | $4.32 |
| Adsense (Blog,Xomba, etc) | $0.06 | |
| Bright Hub | 19 | $52.26 |
| Schvoong | 1 | $0.00 |
| Total: | $57.80 |
As I expected, photography sales we abysmal. For some people December is their best month but for most the first half is ok and the rest of the month just plain sucks. For me, most of the month sucked. Hopefully January will make up for it, it usually does for me.
Photography earnings for December
| Agency | Number of Photos | New photos added | In Queue | Earnings |
| Shutterstock | 146 | 0 | 0 | $2.25 |
| Dreamstime | 222 | 0 | 0 | $3.02 |
| iStock | 53 | 0 | 0 | $8.29 |
| StockXpert | 144 | 0 | 0 | $1.50 |
| fotolia | 207 | 0 | 0 | $5.54 |
| BigStockPhoto | 202 | 0 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Feature Pics | 251 | 0 | 0 | $0.00 |
| StockPhotoMedia | 258 | 0 | 0 | $0.00 |
| The Photo Storage | 187 | 0 | 0 | $0.00 |
| 123rf | 193 | 0 | 0 | $0.36 |
| Canstock Photo | 232 | 0 | 0 | $0.50 |
| YaY Micro | 160 | 0 | 0 | €0.00 |
| CutCaster | 136 | 0 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Scandinavian Stock | 110 | 0 | 0 | €1.00 |
| Total: | $21.46
€1.00 |
There have been a lot of changes, over the past few months, to many of the writing markets I have covered on the Online Paycheck. I will be revisiting many of them in January to give you all the details. I have a lot of work I want to do over the next year.
Let’s see what we can make of 2010. I look forward to giving a full annual report next New Years Day.