Great Gifts for "Go Gators" dads

I got my very first article writing assignment for Yahoo! Sports - YAY!!!

I got it just because I just happened to be awake in the middle of the night when the assignment desk released around a 100 or so open assignments for Father's Day gifts from the Yahoo! Sports shop.

It was an upfront paid assignment, not for much, but the page views were pretty decent. My Dad just happens to be a Florida Gators fan and alumni, so it worked out perfect that I got to pick "Top 10 Gifts for Florida Gators Football Dads" from the numerous sports and teams available. Most of the assignments were for professional sports, but this college team one was mine!

Good thing I was up when the assignments were released, and paying attention to the assignment desk(I was hoping to snag a "Wild Card News" assignment), because those assignments went fast. They were almost all gone by 7 am or so.

And great fun it was to window shop, write about it, and get paid a little bit ($4) for doing it! The blue Hawaiian-ish Florida Gator shirt above (an Amazon affiliate link-thanks in advance if ya get one!) is my fave pick from the ten items featured in the article.

It took half a day to write it, but I've mentioned before that I tend to be a slow writer anyway. Not only am I a slow writer, it took this long to connect the "G" blog post topic with this Gator Gifts article - like duh!!!

Gee, what if I'd a thunk of it last week... like when folks would actually be searching for Father's Day gifts??? Yep, slow are me

Although it might not seem like the paltry pay was worth the time, just getting some experience of working through the unique format requirements for sports shopping articles should be worth it -- eventually -- and the next time I pick up a similar assignment it should (hopefully) go faster.

Compared to my 1st article on gift shopping, a Mother's Day piece for gardening Mom gifts, the Florida Gator gifts article got triple the page views. My understanding is that Yahoo! Sports actively promotes the articles on their team sports pages, which are apparently popular!

So what did you get your Dad for Father's Day this year?

If you're a writer too, did ya write anything special for Father's Day? If so, feel free to post a link in comments!

Have a great Father's Day!!

Freelancing Frustrations: 1st Wed IWSG

It's the 1st Wed. of the month so time for the Insecure Writers Support Group (ISWG) blog hop monthly post. Good thing I'm on "F" because I'm feeling soooooo frustrated with freelancing lately. Although I've made some significant accomplishments with getting paid for writing articles, working through the frustrations seems to be where most of my energy goes.

Frustrations:

• Not Earning Enough Dough (NEED): As of today, I'm like $15 away from earning $600 from my Yahoo! Contributor Network (YCN) articles. Most of that sum is from upfront payments and $20 or so is from page view earnings. For 6 months on the gig with 61 published articles, that's almost $100 per month for 10 articles per month and almost $10 per article average earnings.
  
  It's a decent start, but I've gotta do a whole lot better! Like 10x per month better. Do I pick up my article output to 100 per month and if so, should that be with YCN only or should I try to find an additional paid article writing outlet?
  
  
• Topics that Work and Earn Enough Takehome $wag (TWEET$): Thinking up topics to write about, that  YCN will approve and pay upfront for is my biggest challenge. And, the content has to be something original. Then it has to be "searchable" enough - and that's still a thorn in my side with the Finance editors (see previous post). 

So NEED and TWEET$ are my 2 main Freelancing Frustrations. I'll be pondering my options to pick up the pace this month. I'm sure I won't do 100 articles this month, but I'll try to pick it up to like 2x more each month. So the plan is to get 20 articles published in June, whether all at YCN or not is tbd. I'm also looking for popular search engine topics. 

As always, comments and suggestions would be most wonderful!
(btw: if you're a fiction writer from IWSG, or elsewhere for that matter, YCN does have a "Creative Writing" section if ya didn't know that already. I don't think they pay upfronts, but it's a way to get published and earn page view performance payments too. One of the poets and short story writers just got over 100K page views and earned a "Top 100" badge). I've seen open assignments for poetry, flash fiction, short stories and the like in the assignment desk, so there's opportunities there if you're interested)

Envy, Editors, and Efforts

I'm Envious of:

At Yahoo! Voices on Friday, the editors announced a brand new "Contributor Spotlight" award and the first winner (not I). The award recognition is certainly nice to receive I'm sure, but the $500 bonus has gotta be the bestest part of it! Though envious I am, it's inspirational too -- like... it's something that I could actually aspire to win someday. The first winner doesn't have a journalism or English degree, hasn't previously worked at or been published in newspapers or magazines. Just a regular person with an expertise in real estate, but without a professional writing background - YaY, an achievable award to GOal for!

Editors can be great, or not:

• YaY: I finished the 2nd of 2 test assignments for the Yahoo! Politics Featured Contributor (FC) program and was accepted! On my Yahoo! Contributor profile, there's now a snazzy "YFC Politics" badge - woohoo!! It means I'll get at least one guaranteed assignment each month that pays more upfront ($15) than regular assignments ($5-$10).
• Boo: Not long after I got the FC, I got a Finance article submission rejected as "topic not searchable enough". It was about getting a better discount for an online  subscription after cancelling a free trial. Well, at least it wasn't rejected for being badly written or something like that, I suppose. I may try resubmitting it to Yahoo! Voices instead of Yahoo! Finance, or I might use it as a blog post.

Efforts Effortless:

• My Very 1st paid Sponsored Tweet was tweeted!
  Made a whole 49 cents, but hey -- it's a start!! And a really easy, breezy tweet it was:

Need help choosing a home care agency? Watch this helpful video from @CareCornerAZ #homecare sponsored spnsr.tw/t1wWTG
— Marla Mayes (@MarlaMayes) May 15, 2012

        What I really, really, really like about this whole sponsored tweet thing:

1. Clicks on the link don't matter, ya get paid a flat rate just for the tweet!
2. The tweet content is provided, just tweek it a bit to suit your voice.
3. I don't actually tweet the tweet, it's auto-tweeted via their app.
4. I'm not pestering people with ad tweets all day, it's just tweeted once.
5. The flat rate price is "suggested", but you can set it at whatever rate ya want. Suggested rate seems to be sorta based on how many followers ya have -- mine just went up to 52 cents. 

• a Forbes editor actually replied to my tweet!

@MarlaMayes Sorry! bidding is closed. but thanks for the RT — Bruce Upbin (@bupbin) May 18, 2012

Thanks much for visiting & have a great Memorial Day long weekend! 
(F is gonna be for "Format" -- there's gotta be an easier way to get this blog post formatted better)

Dogs, my Dad, and a Ditzy chick

So last week, I had some nice surprises with my articles on Yahoo! Voices, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! News!

Dogs
My article about how I manage to keep my dog from the shelter despite being broke got featured on the Yahoo! Voices front page for a day and a half. That's a frickin big deal in Yahoo! Contributor land!! It increased my page views too, from less than 50 to an additional 3.8K page views - YAY!

Dad
Ok, so this next one is a stretch - but I'm in the Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) for a reason! I got a very nice compliment on twitter from another Yahoo! Contributor for my Yahoo! Finance article about my Dad's seemingly odd refinance of their house for another 30 years.

btw: if you've stopped by from the Bloggers Comment Club and/or the IWSG and follow me on twitter, if I haven't followed back and/or added you to my lists - please give me a shout out on twitter. Thankfully, my twitter followers are growing, but I can't remember who's who - so sorting followers by lists helps. I try to make sure that I retweet everybody, so lists helps me that way too. Thanks!   

Ditzy chick
Then, I got a special assignment to write a political article for Yahoo! News that was a test assignment to potentially become a "Featured Contributor" and it was accepted - YAY again!! I call it the Ditzy chick of the week in politics article - LoL! 

It did reasonably well for page views, 3.8K worth. That's not as many page views as the other one I blogged about, but it's pretty respectable. I've had a few that were much much lower. I've read that some Yahoo! News articles can get into 6 figure page views, but that seems to be when they're featured on the Yahoo! front page slides. I can wish!

So last week was a pretty darn good week with my writing for Yahoo! I didn't get as many articles published as I wanted - I'm going for 5 a week, but I did get 5 submitted so I'll just have to catch up this week by submitting more articles earlier in the week.  

And this is my 4th blog post this month, so I've already exceeded last month's one whole post - LoL! So hopefully I can stick to my goal for transitioning between blogging and article writing. So far, so good. 

On to E for the next post... hmmm, that's gonna be a tuffy...

Comments for Cash (or Coins)? Yep!

A few years ago, I used to post comments a lot on websites like HuffPo, local newspaper articles, and such. I had no idea that people could get paid to post until I noticed other posters bashing the forums "paid trolls". I even asked a few times how a person could get that job. Got no answers. 

I thought they must be joking... like, get paid for posting comments, really??? Ever since then, I've sometimes noticed comments that seem a little too... oh I dunno, either a little too polished or too enthusiastic or too something... 

So I became more convinced that there really was some paid commenting going on out there in cyberland. But when I searched for how-to, all I found at the time was things like "oh, sponsors will notice you in the forums and they'll contact you" type of advice. 

Then lo and behold, I recently came across a blog post about that very thing. Sure enough, there's places to go that will hire you to post comments in forums and wherever commenting goes I suppose.

Doesn't seem like they pay a whole lot, but it's something that seems easy enough to do for quick and easy extra cash. 

I haven't tried it yet, mainly because I'm focusing on articles and blogging for now. But I'll do a few paid surveys when I need a break now and then. I tend to get tired of surveys after awhile, so I might signup for the paid posting thing next time.  

Anna of the RealWaystoEarnMoneyOnline blog recently posted about her own experience with Postloop and has a list of Paid Forum Posting sites in her directory too. 

Have you ever tried commenting for cash, a.k.a. paid posting in forums? If so, any tips are most welcome! 

Ok, so YAY, I've got A B C down on the alphabet post trail, next up -- D is for... maybe Dollars or Doubts or...

Be a Better Blogger to make more Bucks

Along with my article writing successes mentioned in the previous post, had some fails too that included:

Blogging, or lack thereof 
and since I've seen so many April A-Z Blogging Challenge posts (that I didn't signup for because I just wasn't ready to pressure myself that much just yet), I'm going with the Alphabet Soup style for an unofficial blogging topic/prompt for this month. We'll see if I can stick with it. 

I'd signed up last month with a "paid to blog" site called Social Spark. I'd received an invite from another Yahoo! Contributor, so what the heck. I'm not exactly a proficient blogger just yet, but thought I'd have a looksee. Turns out ya have to have a minimum of 20 blog posts within a 3-month period to be eligible.

So time for me to get busy with the blogging. I've just got to get a routine, or semi-flexible schedule going between blogging and article writing.  

Paid Tweets
I got one whole offer in April from Sponsored Tweets, but it was declined as "not needed". Bummer!! 

Sponsored Tweets is free to register, but also has a monthly pay for self-promo subscription thing that I'm certainly not going to sign up for. But, just this week I got approved for another offer that should be tweeting June 8th at 10:00 AMish. 

It's apparently for just one tweet on that day, but there was a note that it could be up to 3 tweets. Not sure how the auto-tweet an ad thing'll work - so it'll be interesting to see what happens.

So, I'm off to improve my blogging post frequency, get more sponsored tweets, and improve the article writing during May. Ok, so C is for...

A is for April Article Successes - IWSG

So, I'm a day late and a dollar short with my Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) blog post that's a 1st Wednesday of the month thing. Blog posts took a back seat last month while I cranked up my Yahoo! Contributor article submissions. Have had a few unexpected successes, so I feel much better now!

Not that I've mastered article writing yet or anything, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. There's several things that I struggle with when writing articles:

• I'm a slow writer: 2 - 4 hours to complete an article, sometimes longer
• Boring Beat Topic: for Yahoo! Finance beat, upfront pay is better, but not fun to write  
• AP vs. Chicago Manual style: Switching between article types, News vs. Voices vs. Finance gets confusing

Article Page View Successes:

• A First: political news commentary received 6.5K page views in 24 hrs. YAY! (7.7K total)
• 2nd Place: An older article from March received almost 1K page views in April (2.3K total)
• 3rd Place: Another older article from March got 340 page views (4.4K total)

Accomplishments:

• Earned the Top 500 badge (again) for April
• Got  my Pinterest page going

So April was a pretty great month! There were some fails too, I'll blog about those tomorrow...