Friday, April 10, 2009

Writing for peanuts with ContentQuake

If you're hoping to get rich writing online, well ... I don't know what to tell you. If you want to make at least a little bit of a guaranteed money, then a blog network might be for you.

I haven't always had the best luck with blog networks. I've had some bad experiences with Today.com and b5 Media, two networks that suddenly changed the way they paid their writers. The changes, of course, would have left me with a monthly income that was drastically reduced. A drastic reduction from peanut-level money didn't sit well with me.

I still write for one blogging network, ContentQuake. You might not have heard of it, as it doesn't seem to be nearly as well known as b5 Media, Today.com or Examiner.com.

It's a simple setup here: You get paid for each post you write. You also get money for page views. (Don't rely on the page views, though. I've struggled mightily to get more than 200 or so page views a month on my ContentQuake blog.)

The pay is low, of course. For the first three months you write for ContentQuake, you get 50 cents for your posts. The next three months you get $1. Three months later it jumps to $1.50. Three months later it goes up one more time, to $2. And don't think you can simply write 100 posts a month. ContentQuake will only pay you for 20 posts a month. You can write as many as you want, of course. But anything over 20 is payment-free.

I'm currently in the making $1-a-post stage at ContentQuake. That means I'm making peanuts. For instance, I made a little bit over $18 for February.

Now, I'm writing for the network's business channel. If I was writing about celebrities or a popular TV show, maybe I'd be making more money per month because of increased page views.

There are positives, though: For one thing, it takes me about 15 minutes, tops, to write a ContentQuake post. And I'm hoping that the longer I write, the more monthly page views I'll attract. We'll see.

On the whole, I find blogging networks to be a bit of a waste of time. I can't explain, then, why I'm sticking with ContentQuake when it certainly qualifies as an extremely low-payer. Maybe it's the laid-back nature of the place, or the fact that it gives me something to do when I'm waiting for return phone calls or e-mail messages.

1 comment:

  1. Don't count on it going up even if you do have a high traffic blog on a network, not even a nice one like CQ. The stat tracker on there is so bad that blogs that get traffic that most bloggers would covet still only get the $2 rate--blogging 50 posts a month and only making just over $100. Nope, doesn't get better with traffic.

    Blogging for a network like that is great for a beginner--they take care of all of the technical end, give you some training and help you get setup in the world. They also provide some decent cross traffic. But once you move to the place where you actually want to get paid for the work? The its time to move on and out on your own. You will never make good money blogging for a network unless its a very large one and you are large profile on it.

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