Earnings for August 2010

In some ways August was an awesome month, and in other ways it was the exact opposite. The month began with a great plan. I marked out a list of articles I wanted to complete for the month, then I started breaking down each article into paragraphs. This was the first month I started with such a detailed plan and things looked good. Unfortunately my plan was never completed, in fact I was barely able to start it, before my laptop died. On August 3^rd, with about twelve hours of work complete, my laptop just stopped working. At first, it looked like the logic board in my macbook had died. I spent a week trying to figure out what to do. I couldn’t afford a repair bill or a new laptop. I still had my old windows machine but the crack in the spine of that machine made it barely usable. Suddenly we got a huge stroke of luck. On the same day, my wife got paid for a website she had built for a local softball league and we sold the last of our tools from our now defunct construction company. It was almost enough to buy a new laptop outright. We scrapped together the remaining funds and went to our local Mac store. We also had the old machine looked at, the harddrive was dead as well, so I couldn’t even retrieve all the work I had completed. Even after getting the new Macbook home, I really had trouble getting back on task. I found I had moved through such an emotional roller-coaster over the past week that I just needed some time to get grounded again. Even writing that out feels pretty ridiculous, but I live on my computer. I work from it and play from it. It was like someone cut off my foot and said, “I know you walk for a living, but you can buy a new foot for $1300 as soon as you find a new way to earn money…again”. Anyway, you get the picture. I am just lucky that my wife is a generous enough person to let me use all her pay from that website towards a laptop for me.

All this means I was forced to take a third of the month off. I really only started writing again around mid-month. Despite this fact, I still added twelve articles and basically rewrote all the work I had lost on my old mac. There were some very weird developments this month as well. I had a short but very eye opening email conversation with one of my editors at Bright Hub. It was a discussion about the SEO benefits of using Wordtracker for keywords versus the Google Adword Keyword Tool. I have always used the Google tool but with a little encouragement I did some research into Wordtracker. Using Wordtracker, I changed some keywords for a bunch Bright Hub articles that were not performing as well as I would like. So far it has really seemed to make a difference. This has been the first month I have reached over ten thousand views on Bright Hub! There was also a glitch on Triond this month. This glitch miscalculated my earnings, meaning I made some extra money for views. To be fair, it still isn’t a lot of money, the majority of my earnings from Triond, again, have come from Adsense. I was also lucky enough to have another photo featured on Red Gage. This has helped me come just out of reach of my first Red Gage payout.

I mentioned last month that I had been accepted as a writer with Factoidz. I attempted one article this month. I had it rejected twice and I can’t seen to figure out why. At first I thought it was was because I offered up an opinion in two separate sentences and they request that articles are “mostly fact adn not opinion” but when my article was rejected a second time I couldn’t see any other rule that I was breaking. I instead uploaded the article to Triond and will try writing something new for Factoidz and see what happens.

Near the end of the month I also answered a Craigslist ad for a travel writer. I got the gig a few days later. Because this is a private contract, I am unsure how much they will allow me to publish here but I will post what I can next month!

Here is my word count for August:

Earnings from writing online:

My photography earnings have again performed exactly as expected. It’s summer, and sales are down. Although, sales are down, I have done exceptionally well with fotolia. I also mentioned last month that I had planned on uploading a photo every evening. Unfortunately that plan died with my old macbook. Hopefully my wife and I can start this up once again in the near future.

I also applied for a new agency this month. Freshstock was created by the makers of StockXpert. I sent in my application on August 22^nd but have yet to hear anything. We will just have to wait and see. If I am accepted I will write up a review as soon as I start uploading.

Photography earnings:

Hopefully my computer problems are over, because I have another plan for this month. I have three goals. On their own they are attainable but reaching all three is pretty unrealistic. The idea is to come as close as possible. The first is to double the amount of traffic to this site. Now that I am back, and in full swing, I want to get things rolling on the Online Paycheck again. Second, I would like to double the amount of article I have up on Triond. Between the small amount I make off of views and the relatively okay amount I make via Triond Adsense share, I actually do pretty good on a per article basis. I would like to make this revenue grow. Lastly, I want to double the amount of page views on Bright Hub for the month of September. This is going to be the hardest goal to accomplish but with some of the SEO strategies I learned this month, I expect that I might be attainable.