Made $30 on two articles today

Hey Red,

I've been working on ways to monetize with bum marketing and affiliate sales, and then I remembered this thread from a couple of months ago. The way I figure it, this would be a great way to make money doing the same exact thing (dealing with content), only this is more of a direct way to do it without really having to sell anything.

I tried reading this thread front to back, but two things kind of made it kind of a challenging read:

• I don't own the book, and there's a lot of stuff in there people talk about that I don't know about.

• This thread started almost a year ago, and it seems that a lot of the stuff that is talked about is irrelevant to AC today.

So I'm planning on buying the book, the only thing is that I have a limited budget to work with (unemployed at the moment). Here is what I understand about the book:

• You are taught how to hire article writers from various places on the cheap to write articles, you fix them up a little, and then submit them to AC for upfront payment and hopefully make a profit (or at least break even on upfronts and profit through revshare)
• You have to make multiple accounts in case one gets banned and so AC doesn't see that your submitting like 50 articles a day, which would probably make you look like a hack. (I'm an American so the tax verification issue isn't a problem of mine).

Given that info, and the fact that your book is generously priced considering the size of this little community you've built for yourself (I swear I thought it was like $50 the last time I almost bought it), I would like to know this:

• What kind of budget should be set aside for hiring a small team of writers? I know it takes a lot of filtering through, but would, say, $100.00 be a reasonable expectation?

I just don't want to to blow $30 on information that I won't be able to use. What better way to research a book than to talk to the author himself?

BTW #1: I'm sure this has been discussed a million times before but sorting though this thread is kind of a challenge

BTW #2: I don't mean to steal the conversation, but I figured you already had 3 million PM's in your inbox and I didn't want to add to the chaos.

Thanks in advance!

@ moronic kaos - Hey man, actually we definitely don't want to "just break even" with the upfront offers. It's about earning what we can from monthly residual page view payments, but the main thing is the fast money through the upfronts.

AC are still paying as high as $9+ for upfront offers (depending on many factors that are covered in the book and touched on in the thread), and up to $25 for special assignments and Partner Calls. This is the money we're after.

Realistically, most people start off at between $2.50-$4.00 for their upfronts, and then people have posted up in the thread who are getting $5.00-$7.00 upfronts after gaining more experience. I'm currently averaging $6.75-$7.75 for mine.

So in a nutshell, you pay someone $1.00 ($1.50 is the most I recommend paying) to rewrite articles, and then profit the balance. Submitting 50 articles a day is quite a bit to take on, but submitting 30-40 a day is do-able. It's all a building process.

As far as what the book covers, there's dozens of reviews posted throughout the thread where people describe what it covers, and then the landing page that's in my signature describes it in detail as well. I priced it at $27 to keep it within reach with this crappy economy we live in but like a number of people have posted up about, you pay off the cost of it really quickly.

With regards to initial investment for the outsourcing, you can specify in your ad to your bidders that you pay at the END of each article batch. What you can do is make the batch size any number you want which pushes out the date that you'll have to pay them.

So.. if you have a writer doing 10 articles a day and made it clear in your ad that you pay at the end of each 100 article batch for instance, you wouldn't need much in the way of upfront capital because you're getting the articles submitted and getting paid by AC before the writer is due to be paid. With that said, I do go ahead and pay my writers $10 at the completion of the first 10 articles just to let them know that I'm trustworthy and do pay. Like I've said a bunch of times earlier in the thread, you will have to weed through some crappy samples from bidders before you get the good ones hired.

So the bottom line is, you'll need $5 deposit to place your trial ad if you decide to use GAF to hire your rewriters, another $10 each (depending on how many writers you plan to hire) if you want to pay them after completion of the first 10 articles to help build trust, and then if you use the system above that would be it.

Keep in mind that if you do have some upfront capital to spend it's better because then you can guarentee you've got the cost of the writers covered and not have to rely on the AC earnings to get them paid. I would start out by only hiring 1 writer at a time to get your feet wet and then build up what you're doing.

Hope this made sense. Either way, you'll definitely benefit from the book man. It goes into way more detail about all of this and everything else about monetizing AC.

Cheers

Damn 5 of my articles got declined. I think I got some problem with niche and keywords. I will have to figure this out.

Thanks Red. Just one more question that I forgot to ask (got a little carried away before).

If you have to create PVAs with AC in order to set up multiple accounts (meaning they really really really don't want you to have multiple accounts), couldn't they trace who you are by the payment method as well?

I mean, am I gonna have to set up like 15 different fake IDs in order to receive payment, or are they just dumb enough to throw it all in my PayPal account or send me a check?

Promise its the last question, I don't want to defeat the purpose of buying the book.

you should use an unique gaypal email address for each account. using the same gaypal email for 15 accounts will raise a red flag sooner or later. you can add up to 16 different email addresses to your gaypal acc, and if you submit quality content they will never become suspicious and notice that there is just one person behind those 16 different email addresses.

@ pasdoy - What excuse did they give you? If it was the "not unique enough" reason then it means the keywords that the articles were based off of were too broad and not specific enough. Remember also to have the basics covered, like an attention grabbing title with your keywords used as close to the beginning as possible, proper spelling, punctuation, grammar etc.

@ moronic_kaos - Also, to add to what John said..

You're allowed two Pay*pal accounts legitimitaly, one personal and one business. Each Pa*pal account can have 8 different email addresses attached to it (for the total of 16 that John was speaking of). Each AC account will be attached to a seperate Pa*pal email address. Keep in mind that you only want to create AC accounts as you need them also.

Btw, they pay direct to Pa*pal every Mon, Wed, and Friday, so there's no checks to deal with for AC.

Regards,

Red

Is it just me or did AC get really Scrooge-like? Just got a measly 2,14 offer for another one of my new accounts. When looking for that specific keyword there are 3 results within AC with one of them not really related and the other two are also a bit different from mine + the keyword doesnt appear in any of the headlines. The article is also written pretty good (by one of my writers of course, not me). the keyword has a monthly search volume of about 20,000 according to the g00gle keyw0rd t00l.
Similar happened to another new account of mine - they refused to take an article that got 2 results within AC because "it isn't something new and has been featured a lot at AC" (they even send the link that leads to the keyword and it got me stunning 2 results!). Also one of the 2 results wasn't directly connected with my keyword. This keyword has a monthly search volume of about 27,000... so basically a perfect keyword. I have absolutely no idea what else they want. I submitted the latter article again yesterday, just changed the title a bit. I just hope that it is not always the same reviewer that checks my articles. :chairshot

Well my content wasnt enough specific. I have so much trouble to target good content.

update: now i got a measly 2usd offer for that latter article i mentioned in my post above and that was refused for upfront before. well thats better already but i still think its worth more than 2usd :/

@ padhukr - What's with the spam posts? We expect that kind of crap from noobs but you've been a member since Nov 08'?

@ pasdoy - Are you checking your competition levels for the keyword phrases you're targeting? Of course that's an important part of it, but there's so many different factors that come into play that it's hard for me to pinpoint the problem without consulting with you to read over your articles.

@ johnconner - I'm sure it probably is too. Even though competition levels and search volume were good, it could be the niche itself that they weren't into. Also, the same AC editors review certain categories so it could be an extra picky editor? It's hard to say.

i feel hated today ;_; they even refused to take a how to article that was very specific and other articles just got those stupid 2usd offers. (@red: would you have a look at one of the articles, maybe i'm missing something). anyway, i will try to push some heavy traffic to the articles before i submit new ones, maybe then the upfronts will get higher again.

Redtide, I have a question, approx how many views a day do you get a day on your w9 account?

Im just wondering if AC can be also good for longterm.

johnconnor said:

update: now i got a measly 2usd offer for that latter article i mentioned in my post above and that was refused for upfront before. well thats better already but i still think its worth more than 2usd :/

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I was getting those responses when I wasn't generating enough pageviews.

Im having the same problems. Taking things slow on my new account after getting my first account closed after only one submission. So far, only submitted 10 articles- 7 now reviewed- 1 offer of $2.44 the rest rejected for up front payments for not being different enough.
Have they become more difficult recently or is this always the way for noobs?
Gonna stick at this for the time being. Would be nice to hear some confirmations that people are making decent cash out of this method still.

Well the niche ist targeted enough. I got a good rewritter, but I am not giving good content to him. If you still do some coaching red, I would buy an hour just to tell me how to find dam good content lol

@mariopits: thanks for the information. i wonder why they also do it with new accounts that can't have any pageviews though. but i guess that's where the problem is; will give it a try and post my updates here.

@boondoggle: i usually had 3+ upfronts and very few rejections, now a tad bit more rejections and a lot more of those 2+ upfronts. probably its the amount of traffic like mariopits also confirmed.

@ johnconner - Sure, go ahead and copy n paste one in a PM and I'll take a look. I can't promise when I'll have time to write out a review of it because I've got a ton on my plate right now man, but I'll do what I can.

With that said, @ everyone - Please don't blast my PM box with articles to review, it's typically part of my consultation service. This thread gets 400+ views everyday, so I obviously can't work with everyone 1 on 1 without setting aside the time and having my time compensated. I would either 1) Never get my own work done, or 2) have to let dozens of PM's go unanswered, which I hate to do and isn't my style.

Like we've talked so much in the past, if an account starts getting lower offers than usual, or more rejections, it's an indication that your page view average is too low. AC's upper management wouldn't admit it, but page views are their bottom line to where your actual content becomes secondary.

Again, you'll want to start another account to submit upfronts to while you build the page views of the initial account.

@ Gupnup - I've put quite a bit of work into building the W9 account over the last year, so a big part of it is the sheer number of articles it has published to it. I'd guesstimate it's getting 2.5K views a day spread out over all of the articles. Not just with AC but with all of the pay-per-view writing sites, it's about building on the work you've put it in when you initially submitted the content.

It's kind of like when you're building niche blogs monetized with Adsense, the things you're doing today are gonna pay off at a point down the road. I won't name numbers as far as what all of my accounts collectively bring in for perf. pay each month, but I will say I'm pretty pleased with where I'm at.

@ boondoggle - Going back through the history of the thread you'll see it's totally normal for people to start out with some rejected articles, or to start off in the $2-$2.5 range. Like I've talked about so many times, it's all a building process. I was refering to niche blogs with Adsense above, you can put in months of work and much of the time only have pennies to show for the efforts, but the bottom line is that you're "building on something". When I start a new account even now, I don't start right off at $5+ per article. They're usually around $3 and I have to build on each account from there. Working AC isn't a get rich quick type deal.

@ pasdoy - I'm pretty swamped but will do what I can to sit down with you for a session in the next few days. I'll send you a PM about it.

Regards,

Red

If any one is interested in scraping content PM me your rate. and we can get started monday. (must be experienced of course)

and to those that are just starting out, hang in there - A few months ago when I first started I almost quit after a couple weeks - Most of my articles werent getting accepted and if they did - they only offered 2-250 for each. I thought it was a waste of time promoting, finding specifically what they are looking for - proofreading - you name it - but before I quit I went over Red's Book one more time and everything started making sense... give yourself time to understand it - especially if you're new to seo - Also, clout level is one of the biggest factors in upfront offers.. they look at that the most - so instead of hopping right into the game with 5-6 different accounts and 4-5 writers..stick with 1-2 accounts and 1-2 writers... try different niches and you'll notice a trend in the upfronts - you'll notice that the more specific the article is the most you will get .. one of my accounts is at clout level six and I'm offered about 4.00 - 4.95 per article.. so the profit is there ... it's the building process that you want to focus on.. Goodluck to everyone starting out.




-TJ

AnThRaXx said:

If any one is interested in scraping content PM me your rate. and we can get started monday. (must be experienced of course)

and to those that are just starting out, hang in there - A few months ago when I first started I almost quit after a couple weeks - Most of my articles werent getting accepted and if they did - they only offered 2-250 for each. I thought it was a waste of time promoting, finding specifically what they are looking for - proofreading - you name it - but before I quit I went over Red's Book one more time and everything started making sense... give yourself time to understand it - especially if you're new to seo - Also, clout level is one of the biggest factors in upfront offers.. they look at that the most - so instead of hopping right into the game with 5-6 different accounts and 4-5 writers..stick with 1-2 accounts and 1-2 writers... try different niches and you'll notice a trend in the upfronts - you'll notice that the more specific the article is the most you will get .. one of my accounts is at clout level six and I'm offered about 4.00 - 4.95 per article.. so the profit is there ... it's the building process that you want to focus on.. Goodluck to everyone starting out.




-TJ

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by scraping, you mean having people send articles to you, then you just send it to your rewriters? that really makes it a lot more automated and easier for you, despite the cost of doing so.
p.s. If you find someone to do it for you, let me know, I need some people to do that for me.

im sure somebody is offering this type of service.. it's easy money for them

takes someone with experience about an hour (if that) to scrap 50 articles. I'd imagine I'd pay $10-$15 per 50 articles... anyone with experience get ahold of me