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!

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.

Well, I am back. I’m sorry but I had to disappear for a while for personal reasons. I spent a lot of time job hunting for a day job and at one point thought I had obtained work in another city. My wife and I even packed most of our things to move. Then the job fell through so we were back at square one. There has also been an issue here affecting our entire condo complex which has been costing me an absurd amount of time. Regardless, I am back and hopefully won’t be going anywhere again anytime soon.

I am going to do a recap of the last two months for each category. I did spend the first half of October writing. I spent a lot of time writing for a blog I started on Today.com but as you will notice I have not added Today.com to my word count or earnings charts. You will find out why later this month when I do my write-up and add them to the list of writing markets.

Here are the word counts for October and November:

October

November

Since productivity was down, so are my earnings. My earnings from Triond and Bukisa saw no decline but I make so little from either company it made little difference to my bottom line. I had another photo featured on Red Gage in October which I am very happy with. I made an extra $5.05 bonus and being featured brought a lot more views, allowing me to make more money from them. October was also the first month I saw any profit from Bright Hub’s revenue share program. I admit I was a little disappointed in October when I got my pay stub from Bright Hub. The amount made from the Bright Hub revenue share program changes from month to month depending on how well Bright Hub is doing. October’s revenue share was rather low but November’s was much more uplifting. Even though I didn’t write any blog posts in November, I did write two Bright Hub articles. I wrote for Bright Hub only because one of my channels desperately needed articles so I tried to help out as much as I could.

Here are my earnings for the months of October and November:

October

November

When it comes to photography, October and November are the start of the good season for me. On a sad note though, one of my favourite microstock agencies has closed. Image Catalog is no more. Even worse, they didn’t payout any of the money they owed to contributors when they closed. I had accumulated $20.00. Granted 20 bucks is a not ton of money, but right now every penny counts and I could have used that cash. Apart from that gloomy bit of news, I am pretty happy with how the past two months have gone. I have added no new photos and probably won’t until I find a day job. This is just a little extra motivation for me to do so as quickly as possible.

Here are my earnings in photography for the months of October and November:

October

November – Micros

So it’s back to the grind for me but with a new plan. I have decided to apply for three jobs a day. After I have applied for those jobs, I can work on writing. So far this has worked out pretty good. In the past few months I have applied for nearly 170 jobs. If I apply for three a day I will add almost 90 more to that total by the end of December. On the writing side of things, I will be focusing most of my time on Bright Hub, this blog and a new blog I am going to start over at blogspot.com which will replace what I had hoped to create on Today.com.

That’s it for now, see you guys mid-month!

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.

Well, it’s time to give you guys some numbers. They will be pretty skewed this month for a number of reasons. I spent a lot of time designing and researching for this blog instead of writing. Since I still have bills to pay, I am still also desperately looking for a regular day job. Much of this month was also dedicated to learning and using social networking sites. Anyway, here are this months numbers.

I’m going to start with my word count for the month. This is as much for me as it is for you. I want to get faster each month, without compromising the quality of my writing, and this is one statistic I will use to track that.

All in all, I can’t say I’m impressed with my word count. I hope to double this in September and I think that is achievable, especially since I only really dedicated half of last month to article writing. There is also no new photography being added this month. My wife and I are looking for a space to set up our studio again and shoot. A studio setting is where I thrive. I can shoot outdoors but to really do this well, I need to be in an area that I find inspiring. This city, the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, just does not provide for me in that capacity. As soon as we have a space to shoot in, we will start adding photos to the monthly tally.

Now on to the dollar count.

Obviously I won’t be living off this months earnings, but it’s a start. Now let’s move to photography earnings.

Agency	Number of photos	Earnings
Shutterstock	143	$30.30
Dreamstime	213	$10.53
iStock	44	$3.85
StockXpert	134	$3.10
Fotolia	200	$3.19
BigStockPhoto	194	$1.50
StockPhotoMedia	248	€2.50
123rf	184	$0.36
Canstock Photo	222	$0.75
Scandinavian Stock Photo	187	€1.00
		Total: $53.58 & €3.50

This, I am more impressed with. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not near enough to live off of either, but considering this is the off-season for microstock sales and that I haven’t been uploading new photos, I am happy with this months results. I did sell an extended licence with Shutterstock this month for an extra 28 bucks, but even without the EL I would have been happy. I hope over the next month, if we are unable to gain a space to start shooting, to at least upload five more shots. If we can gain a shooting space, to upload more than five.

We’ll see what the coming month brings. That’s it from this front, it’s time for me to start my next Bright Hub article.

Details:

URL: http://submit.shutterstock.com

Industry: Microstock Agency

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

Pay: Commission

Alexa rating: 1,306

Shutterstock is one of the top microstock websites you can submit to. The majority of the money that you’ll make with Shutterstock is by selling your work through their subscription service. The commission for these sales is pretty low, but you will sell your content often enough to make up for it. Shutterstock has more recently started selling individual photos as well. This system is new for them, but is catching on quickly. The most profitable sale is their Extended Liscense (or EL) sale, worth 28 bucks a pop for photos. You won’t sell an EL often, but regardless, they’ll make you smile.

Submitting to Shutterstock

In my experience, Shutterstock has one of the most difficult initial review processes for new submitters, surpassed only by Istock. To get accepted to Shutterstock you must initially upload ten images for review. Seven or more images must pass the review process for you to be allowed to become a member of Shutterstock. If you do not pass the review process, none of your images will be accepted and you will be asked to wait 30 days before trying again. During this time you may still visit the Shutterstock submitters forums to seek assistance and advise. To help ensure that you pass on your first attempt, choose only your best works and make sure that they are all unique. Don’t use the same subject matter unless the photos is drastically different, also don’t use the same model if you can help it. Once you’ve passed the review stage, then you can upload sets of the same person or place. Shutterstock is also extremely picky when it comes to jpg noise. Make sure any noise is fixed in post production before submitting.

Cool Shutterstock Features

Here is a small list of things that make Shutterstock a money maker for submitters

• Once you’ve become a member, there is no upload limit. You can upload as man images or as much video footage as you like. My only suggestion is to submit them in small batches. The reviewers seems to get unhappy when they receive huge batches at once. If I have 20 photos to upload for a day, I will upload them in two batches of ten. I find I get a better approval rating doing this, as stupid as it sounds.

• Shutterstock submitter forums is the best photography community I have ever found. They are a wealth of information. It is worth becoming a member just to be able to read and be a part of these forums.

• Shutterstock is quick to review your material and start selling it. Some sites can take weeks just to look at your work. Shutterstock is normally quick to processes submitted works, unless hugely burdened.

Like most microstock agencies, Shutterstock has a referral program. If you have found this article helpul and plan on looking into Shutterstock, please consider using my referral link below:

Submit Photos to Shutterstock and make $$$!