October went as expected. I kept up with posting the daily lists of writing job ads throughout the month but wrote little else. I finished a long overdue quest guide for Bright Hub’s MMO channel and wrote a book review for a delightful zombie book written by the husband of a friend/co-writers at Canadian Invader. If you like zombie books you should check it out, it was a great read. It’s called Lies at the End of the World by Phil Wolters.

Here is my word count:

In some respects I am pretty pleased with my earnings from writing this month, in other aspects not so much. I am pleased with the Triond earnings. Thirty-nine cents isn’t much, in fact it’s a piddly amount, but it is an improvement and that’s what I was aiming for. Bukisa is still averaging the same amount every month and I have yet to upload the additional pieces I wrote for Triond last month so this isn’t all bad. This tells me that the articles I have on Bukisa, although making very, very little every month, at least have staying power. I can count on the amount I make there to be constant, at least to a degree. My Red Gage earnings are up despite my lack of uploads and my Bright Hub earnings are also up even though the improvement is marginal. The one big disappointment is my Adsense earnings. A lot of effort was put into the Online Paycheck this month with very little monetary gain. At the same time it’s not overly surprising, it takes time to bring money into a blog. Earnings or no earnings I am happy with the Online Paycheck as I have almost doubled my readership again this month.

Earnings from writing online:

Tis the season for stock photography and it shows in my earnings. I must admit that it still surprises me that I still sell as many photos as I do considering the size and age of my portfolio. I am not getting rich off of photography, of that there is no doubt, but my portfolio is now three years old, I have barely added to it in that time, and I still make money from it every month without fail. Earnings are much lower in summer but I do always make something. This month is only a little less than the last but I didn’t get an EL this month. This means sales are up even though I have earned a little less. I am also glad to see that the earnings are spread out a little. Instead of making most of my earnings off of one or two agencies I made decent amounts with some and a little almost everwhere else. This bring each payout just a little closer and that is always good.

Photography earnings:

And that is pretty much it for this month. I plan on writing as much as I can over the next month but since I am preparing for a move into another province on December 1^st I have idea idea how much that will actually be. Only time will tell. I am looking forward to getting settled in a new home so I can get back to writing more often and setting up a photography space. These two changes in my life will help me really start working on my online paycheck.

Here is my word count:

My whole reasoning for wanted to double my Triond contributions is to try and keep my Triond earnings up. The majority of my Triond earnings come from a travel article which really only gets traffic through the summer months. I would like to see these earnings continue through fall and winter. I am happy to say that one of my new Triond articles reached onto the Hot Content list for a couple of days. One thing I am happy to see in regard to Bright Hub is that even though I didn’t add any new articles, I still reached the 20 dollar payout.

Earnings from writing online:

With fall comes the microstock busy season. My photography earnings from August to September more than doubled. This was helped greatly thanks to an EL sale on Dreamstime for just over $12 and some great sales on fotolia. My iStock earnings have tanked ever since iStock announced their new pay scale. I suspect that buyers are rebelling against the company as much as contributors are.

Photography earnings:

At this point, with my day job as busy as it is, the only goal I have is to keep up with my Daily Markets for writers. I simply don’t know how busy I am going to be. In the meantime, I hope these reports have helped you in your journey towards your online paycheck.

When I first noticed the StockFresh ad in the right column of my facebook I was intrigued and when I read that StockFresh was from the creator of StockXpert I got excited! StockXpert was my favourite microstock agency for quite some time. Then iStock bought it and let it sit stagnant for what felt like forever, and then finally, StockXpert closed. With StockXpert closing, iStock opened ThinkStock which is basically the StockXpert and iStock libraries under a different name and so far, for me at least, it hasn’t been very impressive.

When I first checked out StockFresh I was pretty impressed. The site’s front end actually looks a lot like StockXpert. It’s sleek design gives the same professional feel to it. Signing up was easy and submitting my application to be a contributor was also pretty simple. Unfortunately, at least so for now, that’s where the praise ends. I sent in my application on August 22^nd, the site does not say how long the submission but I have now been waiting just over three weeks. This is the longest I have ever had to wait to find out if I could submit to a microstock. To be fair, StockFresh is a new company and just ran an ad campaign on facebook. They probably got bombarded with applications. Well, I am going to send them a message via their contact form and see what happens. My only real concern is if they take this long to approve me as a contributor, how long will it take for StockFresh to review submissions?

iStock currently uses a tier system to give their more successful contributors raises. A contributor starts at zero downloads. Each time a file is downloaded their number goes up and they get a raises at different set amounts. These tiers are represented by canisters next to the contributors name. Downloads are accumulated throughout the life the contributors portfolio. This system, as of next year, is going in the garbage.

If you are new to iStock then there are a few things you should know. The first, is that iStock is one of the lowest paying microstock agencies out there in terms of royalty percentages. Despite this, contributors make a lot of on iStock simply because they make a lot of sales. Some people make a living off of iStock alone due to the shear volume of sales. The last thing is that iStock has always pushed its contributors to submit their work exclusively to iStock instead of to multiple agencies. In doing so, iStock has also put some very harsh limitations on non-exclusive members, both in pay and the amount of files a contributor can upload to iStock in a week.

The new terms, in my opinion, are a farce. Istock has dropped it’s pay for all except it’s most elite exclusive contributors, who will get a small raise. Almost everyone else is getting demoted. Personally, as a non-exclusive contributor I will be going from 20% commission to 15%. From what I can tell, most contributors, exclusive and non-exclusive, will be taking a 5% pay cut on regular sales and even more so for those exclusive contributors who have photos in the Vetta collection.

Speaking of iStock collections, Getty has announced a new collection coming to iStock called the Agency Collection. This is basically a few select iStock photos mingled in with a bunch of Getty, Jupiter and Punchstock photos. This collection will most likely take up the main iStock page once it is launched, the way the Vetta Collection does now. If this happens iStock contributors will have even less exposure and less sales if clients start buying from the Agency Collection. The kicker, in my opinion, is that this is only available to exclusive contributors and yet pays 20% commission on sales! This is less then Getty pays it’s contributors and less than iStock pays its exclusive contributor at the lowest pay rate. Getty is simply taking advantage of its contributors more because the sales are for larger amounts of money.

I keep hoping that I have read something wrong in the new terms, but I don’t think so. I can only say that as soon as my next payout has been reached I will be closing my account as I see no reason to gouge my royalties by having my portfolio on iStock.

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.

As I mentioned earlier this month, I am updating many of the resources on the Online Paycheck. This has also been going well, with many of them already done. This is also not reflected in my word count as it was already published work. I will be adding new markets soon, including Factoidz. I have already been accepted as a writer for them but I haven’t had a chance to submit anything yet. I am a little hesitant because I have read many articles about Factoidz, some very complimentary and others the polar opposite. I just don’t want to get burned like I did with Today.com. Regardless I hopefully get something written for them this month and I will be posting my experiences afterwards.

On to business, here is my word count for the month of July:

July was an excellent month for article views! The addition to Adsense to Triond has really helped boost my income from them. So much so that I am going to start writing for them with much more frequency! As I mentioned in my updated review of Triond they now pay both in view (as they always have) and share 50 percent of Google Adsense if the writer has an Adsense account and places ads into the body of their articles. This month I made 75 cents from views and $3.23 from Triond in Adsense revenue. It may only be 26.5 cents per article for the month but it is a significant improvement and something I would like to build on. All in all my revenue total for writing has remained almost the same as it was in January which is encouraging after so much time away.

Earnings from writing online for July:

Considering it is the middle of summer, the deadest time for photo sales in the microstock world, I am pretty damned pleased with my photo sales. Really, it’s not much but it is enough to make me really happy. My wife and I have also started uploading a little too. We used to have access to a lot of cats to take photos of. We were doing the photography for an animal rescue organization. We would give them quality photos to help them adopt out their rescues and in exchange we would have the rights to sell the photos in whatever manner we chose. It was a really good experience for us both emotionally and financially, and it was a great cause. Of those pictures we set some aside for stock and others were saved to submit to magazines or book publishers once we had enough. We no longer have access to so many wonderful furry models but the photos we uploaded to stock have been doing really well so, a couple of days ago. we decided to start upload the rest. We’ve been uploading them one photo per day and will continue doing so until we have no more.

Photography earnings:

I have a great plan for August and I am really excited to get it going. I suspect my hours are going to get cut at my day job for the month of August since business has been really slow. I don’t mind at all since I know that things are going to really explode once September hits. In the meantime I get to do lots of writing and outdoor photography!

I worked during the day, and sometimes in the evenings and on weekends. Whenever I wasn’t working, I was writing. I haven’t made an update since mid January. In that time I added 35 articles to Bright Hub, bringing my total to 49. I am also now getting a healthy amount of reads per month on Bright Hub, the past two months have each been around 9000 pageviews. Almost every cent I made from my day job went to paying off the debt my wife and I had accumulated while we were both unemployed. Much of that debt still remains but the most pressing things have, or will soon be, paid off. To a degree, I can relax a little and refocus on writing for multiple publishers again and for myself, on this blog.

Three months ago my boss made me an offer which ensured that I would not have much time for writing until summer arrived. He offered to allow me to work from home, meaning I could eliminate the hour long commute I was doing every day to get to and from work. To do so I had to help him catch up on all his orders and email and learn how to run almost every aspect of the business.

Before hiring me, he had some employees that took advantage of him and in the end left him high and dry. He had decided that it might just be easier to run his businesses on his own but it turned out to be too much for one person to handle, so he hired me. My boss isn’t just my boss. He has been my friend for the past eight years, so when he told me all the troubles he had with past employees I wanted to make sure he knew that he wouldn’t have the same kind of troubles with me. I helped him rearrange his business and, to a degree, his life. Now I run the majority of his businesses and he has semi-retired, all done in six months. It’s only been three weeks working from home but things are running smoothly. He even hired my wife to work for 25 hours a week and cut my hours from 40 to 25 hours a week. This allows me to have more time to write and means my wife and I get to work together and get paid for 50 hours a week instead of 40. In my opinion it’s a win, all the way around.

Now that things have settled down, I am trying to decide where to focus my efforts. A lot has changed when it comes online writing and to microstock photography which, if you’ve been following my blog at all, you know are my two main focuses.

The first thing on my to-do list is to revamp this blog. I was able to start this process over the past few days. I created a new page with all the referral links to the publishing and stock agencies that I currently submit to. I have also revised many of the entries I have written and added links, where appropriate, to my other online work. I still need to rewrite some of the past entries. Many, many things have changed with each publisher I submit to. For example Triond still pays for views but they now also allow writers with a Google Adsense account to ad Google ads into their articles and make 50% of the ad revenue off those ads. They have also added a referral program. This is just one indication on how out of date the resource section is. I will be fixing this over the next few days, piece by piece, article by article.

I also plan to create another new page listing all my published articles in chronological order and another linking to my microstock portfolios. This is not only to advertise my work but to show the amount of effort that is put into my writing and photography. I have been showing people the amount of money I have been making but how can a reader gauge how much they will make off my stats if they can’t see the work that is producing those earnings. You might be a better photographer or writer than me, so you might earn way more than me with the same amount of work or you might realize that you are not at the level you need to be to make the same money I am making. It will also show readers the amount of time that it takes to create a photography portfolio or write an article. It won’t just be numbers and that is important. I also plan on making a list of places and things I want to photograph this summer and fall. This list will help me to grow my stock portfolios and start to create a portfolio that I will be using to contact publishers.

I hope you check back. I have the drive to create a lasting income source online and I am willing to show you how I did it. I may not be earning much now, but I will be in the future.

With no further ado, here are my mid-month numbers:

I also have a ton of plans for The Online Paycheck that may not happen this month. We’ll just have to see how things go. That’s it for now, I am off to go write more Bright Hub articles.

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 10^th. 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

As I expected, photography sales were 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.

Wow, it’s the middle of the month already! We’re ten days until Christmas. So far this month has been unique in a few ways. My articles are getting more exposure on many of the sites that I write for (thus making me more money) but theonlinepaycheck has suffered some serious losses due to my lack of activity last month. My photography is doing what it normally does during December, it stops selling. Although this is the prime season for microstock, December (and for many photographers January too) is a time of dismal sales. It’s the unfortunate lull in the micorstock season. I am no exception, this month is going to suck for photography profits. I guess I should count myself lucky that my writing is picking up.

My last post was on the 8^th and in the last 7 days I have worked very hard on applying to jobs and writing Bright Hub articles. I have three new articles published and another written that I still need to upload. I’m pretty happy so far, I have been keeping to my schedule for the most part but it is time to ramp it up a bit more.

I have a loose plan for the rest of the month. First off, I need to work theonlinepaycheck a lot more, I really want to get it back to where it was a couple of months ago. Second, I had a goal of reaching an average of 500 views per day on Bright Hub by the end of the year. Basically taking November off destroyed that goal, so I have revamped my plan to 350 views per day, hoping to hit 500/day by the end of February. I’m not even sure if I can reach my 350/day goal this month but I’m going to give it a go. Lastly I have also started a blog on blogspot.com. I have yet to post anything but that is another thing that will have to be fixed this month. Three hardcore goals in my opinion. Time to give you guys some numbers and get back to work!

See you guys at the end of the year! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season.