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.

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!

URL: www.canstockphoto.com

Industry: Microstock Agency

What are they looking for: Royalty Free Stock Photos, Royalty Free Illustrations, and Royalty Free Footage

Pay: Commission

Alexa rating: 33,919

CanStockPhoto, recently purchased by the tradition stock agency Fotosearch, was the first microstock website I ever submitted to. CanStockPhoto has a quick and easy upload process with ftp access. These guys tend to sell a little of everything, but if you really want to reach payouts quickly then business images are the way to go. Business images obviously do well with every microstock agency, but they seem to sell a little better then everything else on CanStockPhoto in particular. Canstock probably won’t be your best selling agency but with a large enough portfolio, you can cash out at least once a month.

Submitting to CanStockPhoto

Getting in to CanStockPhoto is relatively easy. You need only to sign up and then submit three photos for review. Once those three are accepted you can upload up to twenty more. You won’t be able to upload more until those twenty are reviewed. Review times with CanStockPhoto can vary greatly, I’ve seen them take a few hours to look at my work but I’ve also seen it take as long a couple of weeks.

Cool CanStockPhoto Features

• CanStock has a variety of uploading tools so you can choose whichever one you like best.

• There is a photo/illustration request area in the CanStockPhoto forums. It’s not always that active but it can give you some great ideas for subjects to shoot that you may never have thought of.

• They are now owned by Fotosearch, and in turn Fotosearch is marketing the CanStockPhoto library to their clients. Sales have gone up ever since.

• CanStock has some great sales statistics tools on each member page.

• You can create galleries of similar shots, including shots from other members, boosting your chance of selling those photos.