CK Blog

Sitting at home in your pajamas with a nice cup of coffee at your side typing away at your keyboard sounds like a pretty good living for a lot of people. There is no boss staring at you, no traffic to fight in the morning, just you and a broadband connection as a way to make a living. While this is a goal for many people, achieving that goal can be harder in reality than the theory suggests.

I came across Associated Content recently as one way of making a few extra bucks online. The basic idea is that you write an article, submit it to them and they make a payment offer to you for the rights to publish that article. If you choose to offer to them as an exclusive, there is a higher potential payment, but you also cannot republish the article anywhere else nor remove it from their site in the future. If your article gets popular, you can also make money from Performance Payments, where they pay you based on the number of views that your article gets.

How much can you make from Associated Content though? Chris Bibey shared his results from publishing articles on Associated Content and showed an average payment of $6.46 per article during a month of writing. Depending on how fast you can write a quality article, that may be worthwhile or not. If you can write 5 articles an hour like Chris, it can add up to a decent hourly wage, but if its taking you a long time to finish even one or two articles, you average wage starts making working at McDonald’s look better in comparison.

What if you wanted to make writing your full time income source though? Let us say you had a goal of making $2100 a month, which would equate to $25,200 a year. That is not a huge number by most standards in the United States, but some places that would sound good.

Therefore, $2100 goal / $6.46 per article equal 325 articles in a month. Yikes, that is a lot of writing!
Assuming 30 days in a month on average, 325 articles divided by 30 days is roughly 11 articles per day with no days off. If you wanted weekends off, such as July, you would have 24 days or 13.5 articles per day. If you wanted to work a 8 hour day, you would need to average 1.35 articles in the 30 day example or 1.7 articles per hour in the 24 day month example. Going back to Chris’s example, if you could write 5 articles an hour you could easily surpass these goals in less time than the examples.

The trouble with this idea though would be burnout. Could you really develop ideas for 325 articles that Associated Content is willing to pay for? Could you make yourself sit down and write all that material? Then the question would become what about next month? Could you do it all over again? This example would equate to around 3900 article per year, which is a lot of writing for $25,200 per year if you followed the example rates here. This example also did not take into account any taxes, which could easily take 25 to 30% of your pay since would be self-employed, so you would have to earn that much more to cover your taxes if the $25,200 were your income goal. Of course, if you were good enough to write that many articles, chances are you would have found better paying sources or alternative income methods along the way. If nothing else, you might have developed a blog instead where you can fully benefit from the advertising revenue that the traffic for your articles would generate along with other monetizing possibilities such as affiliate marketing.

Consequently, this idea might not work as a full time income source, but it could help lead you to other clients in the future. It could also serve as a nice way of making a few extra bucks to add to your income. If you wrote for 1 hour, a week even or 20 articles a month, which could be an extra $130 in your pocket. I did sign up for Associated Content to check them out and will give it a shot to see what happens. I’ll be the first to admit that seeing the latest income reportfrom Chris made me a little wishful for that type of success that he has reached, but I know it is a matter of doing the hard work and marketing that can eventually lead to those types of numbers.

Hey, I got good news! Check this out…=)

18,850,707
How much money will you be worth?

Try it for yourself..maybe there are millions in your future! (I still have a little ways to go to hit this goal…)

I had been planning to write a little blurb about Twitter and some problems with it that related to bigger problems in general with Web 2.0 life. I may still write that post later, but in the course of composing the basics of the post in my head, I started thinking about why I tried twitter in the first place and was probably going to say something like “well if people like Seth Godin and Penelope Trunk use it, I probably should at least check it out.”

One problem though, I decided I wanted to check Seth’s twitter feed so I went to his website and searched for Twitter figuring I would find the address for the feed there. Instead I found a post that mentions he does not even use twitter. I did some more research and found out according to this article that someone else, probably a Seth fan registered the twitter account and had basically being posing as Seth. Reading the comments in the article, you can see that people were making inferences, good and bad, about Seth based on his twitter usage and he actually had nothing to do with it. Remember the old saying, on the Internet noone knows you are a dog. For better or worse, it is really easy for anyone to sign up with any name they want, including yours. So next time, you see something like this on ther net, remember things are not always as they seem.

P.S., I just read a post from Penelope Trunk that points out that her name is really a pen name, so Penelope really isn’t Penelope either! Somethings aren’t as they seem.

Later this week, I get to go on a road trip to help setup a new site for work. It is my first one with this company and probably the last one as well. They are getting new (to them at least) equipment, so myself and another person will be going to train them on the equipment and keep the work flow going so our processing deadlines will be maintained.

A good part is the company is advancing the money for the trip since employees in general pay for the hotel, meals and car rental and then get reimbursed later. The trick will be finding meals within our budget since the other people who have made this type of trip before have said the costs are a lot higher than my quaint midwestern city is.

Do you ever feel like you have reached this page? The Internet for its vast amount of information and data can seem overwhelming in its ability to suck up time and yet sometimes feels so small. Think about it for a second, I am willing to bet if you looked at your Internet usage over time, you mostly tend to stick to a really small group of regular sites and subject areas.

I know there have been times I have checked my RSS feeds, hit a few other favorite sites, and hit the what now point. On the one hand, you feel like surely there must be something else to read or check, its the Internet after all, but it also feels like okay I’m bored there is nothing else here to do why am I even trying.

I try listening to that little voice as much as possible and just shut the computer down at that point and do something else. I usually have a nice stack of books from the library I am working through and projects that needs a little time on even if they never seems quite finished. It comes down to priorities in life and I am trying to get better at how I make use of my time. I do not always select the right option, but I am working on it!

In an unpacked box somewhere in my apartment, sits two little pieces of paper that confers onto me degrees from an institution of higher education. I took a bunch of classes in subjects related to the degree’s subject and got a lot of student loan debt to prove I was there. Thanks to my current workplace making a few “changes”, I now get to spent plenty of time deciding the Quo Vadimus (where are we going) question about my life and career.

My current job is not related to either of my degrees, I could easily do this job without ever stepping foot at college. In fact, I did the job during the last part of getting my masters degree. It paid decent thanks to lots of overtime and gave my some breathing room to pay my student loan bills while I applied for areas in my degree field. It was a little bit of a curse though career wise, it was easy to get a little comfortable and not rush as much about looking for a “better” job thanks to the pay and mindless ease of the job.

I guess my biggest problem (I know I am rationalizing so hang with me) is facing the question of meaning vs. pay. In my degree field, the jobs are not known for being exactly high paying until you really start getting up the organizational ladder and even that is no guarantee. The upside though would be having a lot less trouble telling people what I do for a living. One classmate of mine is doing fundraising at Yale, another got a little write-up in the local newspaper and so on, and I know several have gone onto nice jobs or promotions since we graduated. In my case though, I get the “…you have those degrees, so what are you still doing in that job” question. I rationalize the pay aspect, but it only holds so much water.

I can think of so many things I wish I had done differently career wise so far, maybe I will learn from a few going forward.

What are you doing? Seems like a simple enough question? Think about it for a minute though. Get a bit deeper. How are you spending your time? Where are your priorities in general? Its not a trick question nor is there any one right answer.

Looking around the Internet and eBay, you will find lots of ads and systems for getting rich quick or making a zillion dollars selling stuff online. Of course most of these are scams or common sense information repackaged as the newest greatest plan for the low price of a couple hundred bucks. Lets assume though for a moment, you strike lighting in a bottle and stumble on a way of making lots of money. Then what would you do?

Would you spend more time volunteering helping at a soup kitchen or have more family time with your kids? The possiblities are endless but your time isn’t so you would probably lean towards things that are a priority to you and have lots of meaning. Why are you not doing more of that now though?

I can hear you saying “I don’t have enough time now…” or “If I just had a little more money and a little less debt…”, then things would just be perfect and I could do whatever. The problem is things are never perfect, there will always be a distraction for you. Go back to the original question, what are you doing right now? I am willing to bet if you took a real critical look at how you spent your time, you could start slashing and burning unimportant things from your life and free up a bunch of time. How much time do you spend watching tv or goofing around on the computer? Maybe your life is tied up with little projects that weigh you down but you cannot seem to say no to them because of a sense of guilt or obligation.

Take a good look at things, are you really spending your time like you should be? Is your life’s priority to play Xbox all day? I’m not saying whichever way you chose is right or wrong, but is it one of your choosing or one of default?

Most people would consider themselves as pretty generous individuals when it comes towards giving to others, but are they just as generous when it comes to being on the receiving side?

That might seem a little weird since you would assume people would say sure, I’ll take money if someone wants to give it to me, but when it comes time to put hand to cash, can you just accept it with no problems? I would guess a lot of people are like me and have a bit of trouble accepting it. Maybe its a pride issue? Don’t want to be thought of as needy person or indebted to someone or whatnot? Maybe it goes deeper and you want to be thought of as the big helper and savior as others and accepting stuff from someone else changes that balance.

Regardless of the reason though, perhaps it would help if you flipped it around and thought about the joy that you get from helping someone and that you are taking that same feeling away from someone else. Think of how it might help someone else to think that they are repaying you a little kindness for everything you do for them instead of a one way street of you helping them. Its not a easy question for me to answer that I still search for the reasons inside me, perhaps you might find an answer or two in your own situation.