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.

And another month has come and gone. The first half of September was awesome, unfortunately the end of the month fizzled. Photo sales were not as high as I had expected, even with the new uploads. I also didn’t hit my word count goal either, although I did come close. Despite these setbacks I am happy with the improvement in writing revenue. I tripled my pay-per-click revenue and almost doubled my earnings at Bright Hub. I’m looking forward to next month’s Bright Hub check. It will have the regular $10 per article, but for the first time, it will have some of my earnings from the ad revenue share program too.

I spent a lot of time applying for both writing and regular day jobs this month. All the writing I do for cover letters are obviously not counted in my monthly word counts as they are not published anywhere. I wrote one proposal for Elance, but was declined. I will be writing more proposals for Elance in the coming months I am sure.

One challenge I have consistently run into is avoiding a website that I believe to be a scam called Freelance Home Writers. I keep applying for jobs found online, only to receive an email a day later stating that the specific position I applied for was filled, but please visit freelancehomewriters(dot)com to find other work. A quick Google search will show you that many many people have written about troubles they’ve had with this website. I have yet to find someone who has found work through Freelance Home Writers, so be wary. If you are going to try them despite my warnings, then please Google them and have a good understanding of what you are about to get into. If you have had actual paying work with Freelance Home Writers, please drop me a line.

Here are my final word counts for September, the total is 2650words short of my goal:

Location	Number of Articles	Word Count
blog	9	2955
Triond/Bukisa/Red Gage	2	507
Xomba	7	459
Bright Hub	7	7433
Short Stories	2	1877
Schvoong	1	136
	Total:	13367

And here are my earnings from writing this month:

Location	Total Amount of Articles	Monthly Income
Triond	13	$0.27
Bukisa	13	$0.72
Red Gage	13	$0.20
Adsense (Blog,Xomba, etc)		$3.80
Bright Hub	11	$70.00
Schvoong	1	$0.01
	Total:	$75.00

Last, and this month least, is photography. As I mentioned, I was hoping to have done a little better than this. Things did pick up near the end of the month, but over-all this is still a touch low for September, especially since I added a few new pictures to each site. The new shots helped a little, but I am still under my average. Besides submitting new photos, I also added CutCaster to my list of agencies and have already sold my first photo with them. I also sold my first photo ever at YaY Micro this month.

Agency	Number of Photos	New photos added	In Queue	Earnings
Shutterstock	146	3	0	$3.75
Dreamstime	222	9	0	$8.12
iStock	53	9	3	$3.79
StockXpert	144	10	0	$2.40
fotolia	207	7	0	$0.36
BigStockPhoto	202	8	0	$1.50
Image Catalog	180	0	10	$0.00
Feature Pics	251	10	0	$0.00
StockPhotoMedia	258	10	0	$0.00
The Photo Storage	187	10	0	$0.00
123rf	193	9	0	$5.08
Canstock Photo	232	10	0	$0.30
YaY Micro	160	6	0	€1.00
CutCaster	136	136	0	$0.50
			Total:	$25.80 & €1.00

I started getting photos ready for my first submission to Alamy as well. We’ll see how this goes over the next month. I’m not really setting many writing and photography goals for October as finding a day job has to be my main priority this month. All writing and photography will be set on the back burner until I find a something full-time.