Associated Content

My second stop on the way to the PS3 was Associated Content. (Full disclosure: That's a referral link. After extensive searching on the AC web site, it appears their referral program has been discontinued, but I'll leave the link in case they decide to bring it back.)

Associated Content is a large community of writers that pays for articles. The articles can be on any topic of your choice, but it has to be at least 400 words long. However, just because you submitted an article doesn't necessarily mean they're going to pay you for it. They do require proper spelling and grammar. The pay ranges from $3-20 per article, though I've heard they also have a special $50 bonus for certain Content Producers (what AC calls their writers) if the article is especially good.

My first (and so far only) published article on Associated Content got a whopping $4.03. Obviously this isn't an outstanding offer, but I was pleased for my first attempt. After reading the forums, I found that the offers tend to go up if you get a lot of page views and/or subscribers.

That leads me to the Associated Content Performance Bonus. You get $0.0015 cents per page view, payable once the total reaches $1.50. That's 1000 page views for those of you suffering from arithmophobia.

Everyone and their mother has ideas for increasing page views over at Associated Content, but the most common topic is keywords. Basically, when you're planning your article you want to try and think about what someone would search on Google to get to your article. Then, you need to word the headline to include that phrase as well as include as often as possible in the article. Actually, as often as possible is a bit too much. What you want, is a keyword density of between 2%-5%.

This means that you want that word or phrase to show up about 20 times per 400 words article at most. It seems to me that can lead to some awkwardly written articles, but I suppose practice makes perfect.

The other key is to write about both things that get searched for a lot and things that there aren't a lot of articles on Associated Content about. I would also suggest articles that aren't either too narrow or too broad in scope. Something about insects of the world would be too general, while an article on the Mexican Staring Frog of southern Sri Lanka probably wouldn't get a lot of searches, either. Also you should aim for articles that won't get dated too quickly. For example, an article on this week's Senate debate will be interested for about a week (if you're lucky), an article on immigration will be relevant for quite a while.

I also need to mention that I've read exclusive stories get higher offers than non-exclusive. The difference is that with exclusive you're giving the copyright to Associated Content. My story was submitted as exclusive because I have no plan to ever do anything with it ever again.

But enough of that, I know you didn't come here looking for a course on how to write for Associated Content. You want to know about making money. Obviously the first step is writing and submitting the story. Approval can take up to two weeks, though for the one story I've submitted thus far, I got an offer the next day. Once that's done, they send you the money via PayPal. The payments are sent on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So, I'm expecting my payment tomorrow, hopefully. Once it goes up, I'll post a picture of it here.

Finally, if anyone just can't get enough of my writing here, you can check out my Content Producer page.