Earn more from your LiteracyBase posts | Kyla Matton Osborne (@Ruby3881) | (Collage of public domain images by Pixabay users Fotownetrza, Wild0ne, Unsplash, and geralt)
There have been times in the past when I was paid $5 per article for scheduled featured contributor assignments, and could earn anywhere from $20 or $40, all the way up to $100 for an assignment targeted towards my writing niche. Sadly, these days are no more.
Most sites today have a very narrow definition of quality content, and it often hinges not only on the quality of the writing but on the writer being some sort of celebrity or high-profile expert – in other words, the writing they’re prepared to pay for is targeted at people who don’t need the money.
And for the rest of us who are simply not popular enough to earn the big bucks for our writing anymore, there are the penny sites.
Are Earnings Really Low on Literacy Base?
Things had gone downhill for web writers several years ago, but within the last couple years there was still hope for many of us to earn a decent amount of money on the penny sites. Many social writers had been earning $100, $150, or more a month just on one social writing site, when it was at its peak. But after that site faced the reality that it wasn’t earning enough revenues to pay as promised, it was next to impossible to earn a single dollar on that site in a month.
Some people have said that earns are too low on Literacy Base (or other paid to write and paid social media sites, for that matter.) The minimum cash-out here is $10, and many users wonder whether they can earn enough in a month to be paid. It’s a real concern these days, and it can be tough to migrate from site to site as older sites stop paying and new ones become popular. In some ways, we do have to learn all over again every time we start over on a new site.
So now many of us are starting over on Literacy Base, and some are finding the pay too low – especially the amount paid upfront when a post is published. Is this an accurate perception? And regardless of whether or not it is, what can we the writers do in order to earn more money on Literacy Base?
How Literacy Base Compensates Users for Posts
Literacy Base compensates users for their posts in several ways:
1. When a post is approved for publication, a small upfront payment is awarded. This can be up to maybe a nickel for posts that just meet the 300-word post length requirement, but three times more for posts of 1,000 words;
2. Approved comments that publish on our blog posts also help us to earn a few pennies each. As with the posts, length does seem to play a part in determining how much the comment will earn;
3. When we share a post across our social networks and ensure that our referral code is included in the URL, there is a bonus payment for each unique visitor we bring to the site to read our posts;
4. Some users have received up to 40 or 50 cents from the Literacy Base staff as a performance bonus. Some received the bonus simply for “hard work,” but others were awarded the bonus specifically for their published posts.
Earning More from Literacy Base Posts
Of course everyone would like to earn as much as possible for each post published. But how to increase the earnings per post? Writers can target three specific areas when writing a post: 1) the length of the post; 2) visual appeal, including images for the post; 3) the focus and organization of the post, and the ease with which it will be found by readers using a search engine.
Post Length
As stated above, longer posts pay better. Right now, the popular post length on many social writing sites is just 300 words – up from about 100 words on similar sites a year or two ago. But content sites had been recommending a target of 450-600 words for years, so the 100-word or even 300-word articles couldn’t compete with longer articles that offer more depth and breadth of information on the same topics.
In 2016, the recommended post length is considerably larger. One article I read advises writers to aim for no less than 700 words in a post, and ideally much higher. The good folks at Buffer say the ideal post length is whatever can be read in 7 minutes. That translates to a word count of 1,600 for the ideal post length.
If you have just been doing the bare minimum to get your posts published on Literacy Base, now you have two reasons to write a longer post! First because it will pay you twice or three times what you earn for a shorter post, and then because it’s more likely to get noticed by search engines.
Want an idea how long these more substantial posts are? This article is more than 1,200 words long. You’ve just read a little more than 800 words. Remember that when you’re publishing anything this long, whitespace is important to break up the text. Also use visual formatting cues like lists, headings and subheads, and boldface in your text to make it easier both to scan and to read. And don’t forget the images!
Images for Literacy Base
Support here at Literacy Base recommends an image 1,200 px x 600 px for your featured image. For other images in your posts, keep it to 750 px x 750 px.
Focus and Discoverability
When you write a longer post it’s really easy to ramble on, and to meander from one topic to another. Doing that will make your post harder for the reader to follow, and it will naturally result in having too few occurrences of the keywords you are wanting to target. Search engines won’t know how to classify the content, and will therefore downgrade it in search results.
Take the time to plan and outline your posts before you start writing. This will help you to stay focused, and will increase the chances that your targeted keywords and keyword phrases will come up naturally in your writing – and that’s what search engines want to see!
I’ve written more about how to narrow your topic and compose a tightly focused post. If you need help writing a post around a single, well narrowed topic, please check out the linked advice.
Ready to Join Literacy Base?
I hope that reading the information above will convince you that it’s easy to earn a little extra money posting and interacting on Literacy Base. If you’re already a member, get out there and get active! Leave comments, reply to mentions and comments on your posts. Start forum discussions, share links across your social media. Do anything that will increase your visibility and draw more people to your content.
If you are not already a member of Literacy Base, I’d love you to join! Please sign up and then look for me on the site. If you drop me a quick message to say you’ve arrived, I’ll be thrilled to friend you so I can keep up with all your news. I can’t wait to chat with you on Literacy Base!
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View Comments
This is a really helpful post and you have clearly shown the readers how a lengthy post should be - neat, organized, with proper sub-titles, to the mark and not straying away from the topic.
Thanks so much, @swalia. I actually pasted this post in without formatting, and I think I may have forgotten to add one of the links when I was seeing to that. I've been pasting with formatting for a little while, but like some others I found that the result didn't look as attractive. As always, I am hoping for the higher ranks to open up more editing options!
Great post Kyla!
Everyone should read this and understand better about Litearcybase.
I had referred to my Facebook friends about this site but they said thsi site pays really low.
They couldn't accept the cents, they wanted more.
I said that as long as you leave longer comments, you earn more.
Initially, I couldn't accept either. But gradually, I understand the concept. \
Now, I am totally hooked to this site
@peachpurple It does seem as if the earnings are very low, but most sites pay nothing upfront at all! If you earn a nickel, a dime, or even up to 20 cents for a longer post, this is just the upfront bonus. you will also earn for comments and for the visitors and signups that result from you sharing your link. This is why it's so important to add the referral code to the links!
I think when our friends start to see us cashing out on LiteracyBase, they will begin to think twice about joining :)
This is a great article. I agree, everyone should read this. Even if, you are a writer for other sites. I have notice that in general long articles do much better.
Yes, long write-ups may sound better if they are written well. If the writer is a good one, there is no question about what he has written. But in writing a lengthy post is more likely to be copied from other sources. The write is safe when his works are not discovered that it is a plagiarized one.
@brendamarieakaladynightwave I think we're going to see a trend towards much longer posts on all kinds of sites. People accessing the web on mobile devices tend to prefer scrolling to clicking through to another page, so longer is the in thing now.
A decade or more ago, it was all about eliminating scrolling, LOL! When people were new to the web we were even being told many didn't know they COULD scroll. So if we had information that went beyond one screen length, they might miss it!
Personally, I am very suspicious of those lengthy post which a member is submitting. The way the paragraph is developed. The coherence of the thought or subject to the entire post. He is too clever to come up with such a long article by resorting to a copy-paste to the point of copying it from others.
This would be, I think, a factor of making this site join with those sites who have suffered the fraudulent and scamming job of those members.
@nakitakona13 I'm not sure why you would think that post length has anything to do with plagiarism. I have seen very long posts on other sites that were plagiarized, but it was even more common to see shorter and medium length posts that were copied - including copied from other members on the very same site!
Plagiarism has never been a question of post length. It is a matter of people wanting to be paid for work they didn't do. Some of the very worst perpetrators, unfortunately, have been non-English speakers from developing countries where $1 USD is a good bit of money. When people are desperate, they will cheat in order to earn. But that is stopped in its tracks here, because each post is checked for plagiarism before it publishes.
No matter how smart you are, as soon as you get pregnant without marriage and at such tender age, you have sold your personality. You will be the talk of the town and people will look at you with scorn. Some funny boys and girls will give you names, which will keep you uncomfortable. Have you ever seen a girl who had a baby while in school? What do people say about her? What about her parents and other family members? Do they feel happy or ashamed of her? It is usually the girls who face the challenges of unwanted pregnancy. The boys will lure and decieve you into it, and you will drop from school, face various trauma and the child will be called names before he grows up and request an explanation from the mother to him/her who her father is. The boy with whom you performed the act will disown you and swear that he was not responsible for that. If you mention the name of some boys, they will give you severe beaten, call you prostitude and remind you of other boys who partook in the sexual act before pregnancy occurred. To avoid these unhealthy experince, you should abtain from any act that will lead to sexual act and consequent unwanted pregnancy. Abstinence is 100% effective if fully practiced. It does not allow the introduction of chemicals in your womb as contraceptive. It costs nothing. It prevents one from contracting HIV/AIDS/STI. It prevents abortion and the consequences. It prevent one from having a baby at a time it is not necessary. Learn to wait until marriage.
I have been thinking of making all my blog posts longer like this. Thank you for such an insightful article.
Longer posts seem to be the trend for the coming years. Each year, the top posts on Google are apparently getting even longer! If we want to compete, we need to produce longer texts too.
But, what I personally feel is that it is not the length but the content with minimum basics that makes a post more impressive.
I have seen some sites where the posts will be of 500 words in length with all the paraphernalia maintained in exact proportions. The images and videos will be of good standard and most of them found to be of the writers' own. There are some sites that insist on 500 words along with photos in a slideshow. They pay about $50-$100 depending upon the length and the content.
Already the writers are losing their interest in writing for the sites. If the length is insisted I think the number may still go down. Anyhow let us hope for the best and expect a good content in a decent length.
I think that for now the sharing and commenting will do for me. I am quite satisfied with that.
@rapidblue That's certainly the beauty of a site that combines both blogging an social interaction! I figure I'll be doing that on another site, at least until they restore their reward system.
It has been hard for writers to earn huge but of course anything that can help add up a little something on our bank accounts is a blessing. Hope that there were more opportunities, though
@Jentleheart I think like anything, there is an issue of supply and demand to be considered with web writing. Sites, and more specifically, advertisers, want our content in order for them to be commercially successful. So the more of us who are willing to pump out that content for pennies, the lower the pay will get.
If we as a community chose to focus on quality of content, SEO, etc. we could conceivably set the stage for a change that would result in better profits for the businesses, and better pay for us too. It just takes people focusing on the right things, but that's a challenge in and of itself.
I did not know the professional writers are hardly to earn per article now. Though it is a sad news for the professional writers, glad that there are other sites that help to compensate the losses, at least a bit.
Besides the reasons you mentioned above, another reason that can actually help us to earn faster is there is no daily limit here! You can earn as much as you like. You can submit 10 posts if you want, you can write as many forum comments as you wish too. Of course, while sharing to the social media sites, there are no limits for us to gain from the referring visitors and signups as well. Without all these limits, one can easily earn up to a dollar or more a day. Well, this is not a big amount, but this is actually not that low too.
I used to think reading lengthy post might make the reader lose interest, but I think it really depends on the topic and how we present our post. Like yours, I didn't find it boring at all and I wanted to keep reading.
Thank you for sharing all the useful information. By the way, I think you can also add your referral link to LiteracyBase in your post, so when the readers find it useful, they will happily be your referrals. :)
@kaka135 The internet and content syndication have both contributed to the decline of quality content in the media. I know of many writers who used to earn a decent living writing for the newspapers, and who now are either out of work or having to adapt to getting paid far less for the same work.
Some have even given up on freelancing for the publications they used to write for, because the publications were insisting on contracts demanded conditions that were outrageous. It is very sad.
Yes, my article was meat to have a referral link in it. I pasted my content into the submit form as plain text in order to avoid formatting issues. Not sure whether I forgot to re-add the link, or whether it somehow got swallowed up.
I just wrote a long comment, but it disappeared now! The captcha thingy always gives me such a hard time.
In any case, this is a great analysis of the site, great tips and very encouraging. I am starting from the bottom again after making a good living with freelancing, and I can you, it is heart-wrenching to see pennies barely moving anywhere near the mark.
I also remember reading somewhere, some time ago that an article should be around 300-400 words max, to keep the readers's attention. Lengthy and long articles they will loose interest unless it is a how-to in steps!
@icybc It's interesting how much the advice changes over time. The content we wrote even a few years ago would now be considered too short!
I am glad I found this post. I am a total newbie here and I was very curious as to how much can be earned and how long blogs should be. While I do other freelance writing that is my main stream of income, I think this will be a great place to break up the monotony of writing what other people want so that I can write what I am feeling or interested in myself instead. Hopefully, I can also earn some extra money in the process. Thanks for answering many of my questions! :)
@s-stephens I think social writing is a great way for newbies to learn about web writing, for veteran writers to take a break and connect with other writers, and even sometimes to increase a writer's exposure to boost a project like setting up a blog or launching a book.
It can be fun to relax with a community. It breaks up the isolation of freelance writing. I'm glad to have connected with you here :)