The Year Of Living Virtually

A freelancing first anniversary!

November 2008. After six months of pain, struggling to stand and learning to walk normally again, I finally accept that – since this is the second time I’ve been wiped out trying to do “normal” work – I’m unable to be the office IT geek any more.

Instead of getting depressed about having no income, no future and a collection of other problems the size of a small continent, I decide to look online for work. “There has to be something out there,” says I.

Here’s the story of that first year.

At the start, I almost drowned in the number of web pages and emails offering instant multi-million-dollar businesses for two hours’ work a day. At the most desperate of times, I even signed up for a couple of their “free” sites – all of which, of course, were simply ways to add my address to a massive spam-list, to send a crappy “report” on making money and to offer me their amazing system at the reduced price of only $279.

Thankfully, I’m not an idiot. I already knew the first rule of earning online: never give anyone any money – they should be paying you. You’re the one working.

I began looking into the strange new terms: PTC, PTP and other PTs that I can’t remember. I registered with a few. I clicked ads, I filled in surveys and I had discussions for a couple of weeks. I got scammed (for which PTC is notorious) and soon discovered that the returns were just too low to make a difference in the short term.

Of the sites I tried, I am still a member of three¹:

MyLot: low-paid discussion forums, where the biggest advantage is the community’s knowledge and willingness to share information. It’s overrun by “make money online” conversations, but there’s plenty of other discussions going on.

DonkeyMails: tiny amounts of money for visiting sites (for 15 or 30 seconds). I still haven’t hit the $5 mark after almost a year, but the ads keep me in touch with current trends and remind me to watch out for scams.

Valued Opinions: I only fill in surveys worth around £1, as a rule. There aren’t hundreds of them, but in a year I’ve hit the £10 mark three or four times and traded in for vouchers I can use to buy sushi for my lady!

Next, I moved into blogging for money. I’d blogged before, so the milieu was familiar, and the networks were helpful and interesting. It didn’t take long to see that this was another long-term proposition – and one which was frequently weighted in the network’s favour rather than mine. Shared ad revenue is great, but only works when you’re using a network that has decent processes in place to pass traffic around. Otherwise you might as well blog for yourself.

The best I’ve found is Orble. They may not have the highest revenue-share ratio, but the network’s layout very much encourages visitors to click between pages and read a lot of different articles. The admins can be slow and I personally ran into terrible trouble with the resident psycho troll, but otherwise it’s a pretty safe option.

Finally, I began to change focus to writing and editing, putting together the Beginner’s Guide that’s available in the Free Stuff here at ScrawlBug. Surprisingly, nine months later, the vast majority of what I learned in my first two or three months of research is still applicable. So much for innovation, eh?

Thankfully, I’d had some experience in both producing and correcting content for a web magazine in one of my previous incarnations, so I didn’t feel too much like a fish out of water. I started writing for content directories, seeing a very small but steady income each month. This made more sense: putting content out there, building a reputation by having my name on articles and learning the idiosyncrasies of the trade as I went along.

Associated Content was the first I tried. It’s low income per article, based on the number of page views, but your content is always there and brings in money every single month. They’ll take almost any subject and don’t have strict editorial rules, making them one of the simplest to use.

Helium is a tougher forum: again based on hits, but article ranking is mandatory for payouts and the higher-ranked writing generally get more visits (and thus more money). Quality counts here, but (free) membership gives access to their Marketplace and several other income-generating options that can be quite lucrative.

HubPages works on revenue share, but has grown massively over the last year or so. It’s a much prettier place, with each article being a webpage in its own right – with graphics, video, links, affiliate options and so on. There’s a great crowd to help with critiques, too.

The big change came when I sold an article through one of those sites. Bizarrely, it was about Internet pornography, but suddenly making $40 in one hit made me sit up and pay attention. It was more than I’d made on all the previous attempts – in one go.

From there, it was a small step to move into proper freelancing: writing directly on demand for clients, putting content into an article marketplace and setting up on the bidding sites. Slowly – oh, so slowly – work began to trickle in. Other obligations still kept me from working full time (and still do), but the return on time spent in front of the keyboard was finally paying off.

You can read about the various bidding sites in a previous blog entry – but please go through the comments as well. There’s some very interesting extra input there which offers different opinions and even a response from one of the sites covered.

Now, twelve months on, I can say with more than a little satisfaction that I’m getting established. It’s still small-time. It’s still odds and ends, with no regular, well-paid work – but it’s a bit of extra income from doing what I love.

There have been some lows: getting turned down for interesting work, having clients disappear without warning, working at a client’s blog that dies and, of course, being underpaid – or not being paid at all.

But there have also been some real highs: the first time a client approached me (rather than the other way around), publishing an ebook, editing a successful ebook for a client (£1,000 in sales on the first day it was available and probably headed into paper-print!), researching and learning about new subjects like online gambling and stretching my fledgling skills into previously-untried content formats.

What more could I ask?

¹ In the interests of disclosure, yes – some of these are referral links. And no, I can’t guarantee the sites will pay out and I don’t endorse them. I’m just passing on a bit of info. You’re a sentient being, use your noggin and make your own choices.