July 12, 2016 at 1:43 am

@bestwriter Nothing here yet, either. It’s 1:38 pm on the 11th here in BC, which makes it 1:38 am on the 12th for the site admin. I can understand not processing payments on the 10th because it was a Sunday. But it’s late now, and not looking good for the site.

This is why I turned down the offer to write a guest post about LiteracyBase for a very popular blogging advice website. The site is too young and it remains unproven. There have been too many small red flags, which begin to add up over time. And certainly, without any ads on the site, there are bound to be financial concerns if the owners don’t have some source of funding to carry the site until it becomes self-sustaining.

I am beginning to have some more serious doubts, and I must say that I’m glad I didn’t invest too much time here so far in July. I will give the site time to come through for us, but for now I choose to put my efforts into my own blogs.

July 6, 2016 at 3:01 pm

@bestwriter I don’t much care for the way iWriter is set up. I did a couple of assignments there, but it takes forever to get ranked unless you’re a sucker and pay them to be fast-tracked. The setup is much better at both TextBroker UK and HireWriters. So is the pay.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by  Kyla Matton Osborne (Ruby3881).

July 6, 2016 at 11:32 am

@bestwriter Sadly, those sites no longer exist and the competition is much steeper for the sites where good pay is still offered. One of the reasons I blog elsewhere is to practise and to apply new skills as I learn them. Consider it a bit of a classroom for me. The other reason is companionship 🙂

July 6, 2016 at 11:16 am

@lovern and @bestwriter I do agree that it seems sometimes posts earn the same, regardless of how much attention we pay to SEO. Then again, we also are seeing some posts that have SEO that needs fine-tuning, and that are getting very low pay. This reminds me that even if we are paid the same, the site will not be once the ads are placed.

Regardless of our individual earnings, for LB to be sustainable there must be a lot of what Google considers quality content. Because Google determines search ranking and because that determines how much external traffic the site will get. And of course, that will determine the site earnings.

Even if it doesn’t make a difference in our banks today, good SEO means LB can be more viable tomorrow. For that reason alone, we should all be considering how much effort we are willing to put into producing content Google will like.

July 6, 2016 at 10:51 am

@lovern I think we have the camaraderie here at LiteracyBase. But it’s true that the days of better pay are sadly missed!

July 6, 2016 at 10:31 am

@cessy08 I think you have a great strategy in choosing to write a lot of product reviews. These are very SEO-friendly, and should help both you and the site.

@bestwriter It’s really difficult for me to say what is a good amount of compensation here. I can earn anywhere from 22-50 cents upfront per post here, which seems good when I look at what others are earning. Of course, similar articles can earn me $5-$10 elsewhere – and I’ve earned up to $100 for some of about similar length and style.

While I do appreciate all the money, big and small, I write here more for the sense of community and the opportunity to hone my writing skills. The blogs I post here are all very quickly written, compared to anything I’d be writing for my personal blogs or for clients. I write them when I want to write something easy, or when I need to clear my head 🙂

July 5, 2016 at 1:59 pm

@bestwriter I decided to give a more personal post a try and see how mine fared. I wrote about my daughter leaving yesterday for a summer job several provinces away, but I did it with a focus on what other parents can learn from our experience. Here is the post:

http://172.104.9.193/childs-summer-camp-cool-government-job/?mref=Ruby3881

The post itself is 637 words (doesn’t include my copyright notice or the video link that didn’t embed properly when the post published.) I earned 22 cents for it, which is on par with same-length informational posts I’ve written.

What did I do that I think helped my post earn despite being based on personal experience?

1. I optimized my title and researched low-competition keywords that I used in the title, subheadings, image captions, and the body text;
2. I wrote from experience, but I wrote to a very specific audience (parents whose children are leaving for cadet camp, for the first time) and used the 2nd person when addressing that audience;
3. I wrote a longer post – in the 500-700 word range;
4. My post contained outbound links to respected websites;
5. I made sure to break up larger blocks of text with subheadings and images to improve readability. (I had also included a video, but it didn’t embed.)

I think you can write from personal experience and still earn. But it’s a question of how you do it. In my case, the post will seem a lot less personal because I wrote it as information for other parents. But it was very fast to write and I didn’t research anything beyond the keywords.

July 5, 2016 at 12:26 pm

I use LibreOffice, which is a free office suite that replaces MS Office. I’ve been saving my posts offline since I started earning for my writing. More recently, I’ve been synching my saved content on the cloud as well in case anything should happen to my computer.

July 5, 2016 at 12:24 pm

I am closest to my oldest daughter. I enjoy a very good relationship with all my kids but she and I are really kindred spirits. I think I will eventually feel the same way about my youngest daughter too. She is still growing but I do see a lot of myself in her 😀

My middle daughter is rather aloof most of the time – again, a trait I can identify with! I was like that n my teens. So we have our moments of being closer, but she needs a lot of personal space. She is my son’s absolute favourite person in the family and after her, he is closest to Daddy.

July 5, 2016 at 12:20 pm

I think my first amount was also from PayPerPost – probably something like $3-$5 for writing a post that really didn’t fit my niche (I was writing about homeschooling then, and there weren’t many ads for things like school supplies!)

I didn’t stay long with PPP because the rules made it difficult for me to carry on my regular blogging, and as I had a WP blog it was technically against the rules to post sponsored content. My girlfriend referred me to Associated Content in 2009, and that was when I really started to earn money for writing online.

July 5, 2016 at 5:05 am

@sunil Do you know if there has been any news about the rewards?

It seems that Sheridan has been completely silent for over a month. The only thing that was ever said was that the site experienced a drop in traffic after the migration to the new server. This was addressed by changing, and then very shortly thereafter eliminating, the rewards program. The only hope that was ever given was that maybe if the traffic came back up, the program would be reinstated.

Notice that there was never any discussion of the possible causes for loss of traffic, which should have included all of the downtime the site experienced and the fact that members reacted to the many outages by both publishing and promoting less. There was never any transparency at all about how much traffic was lost, or how much is needed to keep the site sustainable. And there was never any statement of what the traffic looked like when the rewards were stopped – or whether this decision has improved or worsened the situation (I suspect it’s the latter.)

The only thing that I know has been said in response to the many, many requests for information is that Sheridan understands if people want to stop blogging for a while or if they want to delete their accounts. Meanwhile, Rex keeps telling people the site will never come back if people stop blogging and that they’ll damage their brand with Google if they stop adding to blogs on the site.

To be honest, I’m not even sure that’s true. And it does seem a bit heavy-handed, especially when he implies it’s greedy for people to put earning money first. That’s all well and fine for someone who doesn’t need the income – not so much for a person who relies on writing to pay the bills.

The atmosphere at BlogJob used to be very positive, but I don’t even enjoy going there anymore. Most of my blogging friends aren’t publishing there, and forum activity is less than scintillant, to say the least. I think Sheridan made a bad business decision and continues to compound it by remaining silent and refusing to reveal any sort of concrete plan for getting the site back up on its feet. This makes it look like he’s just flying by the seat of his pants. And worse still, it gives the impression that he holds the contributors to be separate from the site and not worthy of being informed, and that he can’t or won’t bring his problems to the users in order to ask for help.

I think he could learn a lot from Will, over at PersonaPaper…..

July 5, 2016 at 2:53 am

@peachpurple Linking to your sources or to respected sites that illustrate your points is always a good idea. I try to link to 2 sites per post (for posts about 500-700 words.) The backlinks are created when you share your links on social media, publish on other sites and link back to the posts here, or have the good fortune to have a respected site link to your content.

@oksummer I think most writing sites want to avoid personal/social posts like memes. They’re generally very poor performers and tend to make the site look less professional.

July 4, 2016 at 8:10 pm

@cessy08 Linking to a respected site helps to improve SEO. You get even better results if a respected site links to your posts. It can help to add links in the posts for references, and also to bring your post to the attention of any respected web sites that might link back to your content.

July 4, 2016 at 8:06 pm

I just went to look, and it’s working fine for me right now.

July 4, 2016 at 1:10 pm

@bestwriter There are a lot of factors that go into SEO. Quality of content (grammar, focus, depth and breadth of topic covered, length of the page, etc.) absolutely factors into search engine placement. Keywords do matter, but less so today than a few years ago.

You should also know that bounce rate and dwell time on a page or site are measured by the search engines. They will penalize pages that mislead the reader with “false advertising” in the headline, preview, or meta tags. They will also lower the ranking for pages that get a lot of clicks that result in a bounce (the reader spent little time on the page and left the site after looking at the first page) or in “pogo sticking” (the reader clicked in, and almost immediately left the site.)

So it’s not just about mental gymnastics and tricks. It’s about how the writer uses language, about the authority of the writer, and about the quality of the content and how it relates to what was promised in the headline and tags. There are over 200 different points that Google examines when determining how a particular page will rank in search results. It’s very complex, and someone like me can get a few things right without having a very very complete understanding or the ability to influence the results in certain areas.

My feeling is that we have to start somewhere. So I work on headlines and images, on writing focused content that uses keywords appropriately, and on trying to provide texts that readers will both be able to find and think useful. I am just a baby when it comes to SEO. But I am happy to share what I know so far 🙂