Associated Content - One Month Later
After playing with Associated Content for a month now, I can’t say I’m as enthused about it as I was from the beginning. Granted my original plans were just to add non-exclusive articles and see how it went, but I got over excited and started posting paid articles too.
Total earnings from just paid views was pretty pathetic. At a glance I can see Idea Queen’s blog made more in Adsense than I made in AC page views. Not a big surprise there though - I know I can get much better than $1.50 per 1,000 views with Adsense. (My averages are usually around $4-5 per 1,000 page views). Well not only that, but IQ’s blog has a whole lot more posts (over 300 blog posts verses only 40-some articles posted on AC). Of course it’s going to perform better.
As far as the exclusive paid articles go, I’ve done14 in all and made around $50 (upfront, does not include page view totals). Not bad I guess, if you figure some of those articles would have never been used for anything. Just something I wanted to write about and threw it to them. Probably better than I’d do in Adsense too.
Now the thing that really irks me is their “right” to change titles. The reason they give is they think they are making it more “search engine friendly”. As someone who is good at both copywriting and SEO, I have to say they REALLY need a lesson in both. I know what makes for an eye catching headline, and they love to rip it apart to make it sound awful. Not only that but the new title is hardly ever “optimized”. For some reason they think they’ll get more exposure in search engines, yet they forget we have other ways of promotion so those eye catching titles ARE needed.
The last article I thought I would let them give me up front payment for they even changed the body AND the title. I mean completely changed the theme of the article to something that it shouldn’t have been. The original article was “5 gifts for girls” which they changed to “gifts for 5 year old girls” and changed my content to toss in “5 year old” here and there………um, NOT what the article was about! That term was not even searched for (yes I check WordTracker). So what was the point of that?
Needless to say I’ve had enough of them tearing up my titles and changing them to something stupid for absolutely no reason. Yes it’s “their site” but it’s MY name attached to those articles. While I enjoyed the extra pocket change the last month, I think I can find more productive ways to earn better money long term. I do plan to toss them some non-exclusive articles (they can’t change those) for page view payment only, but I think that’s it. Guess I’m not ready to sell out just yet.  :razz:
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