Web Cash

I’ve been writing at Associated Content for a few months now. I certainly think it’s a great place for budding freelance writers or ambitious college students to find some extra work.

Is it for everyone? Perhaps not. It’s got some great features, but it certainly has it’s drawbacks.

Start With the Pros - Great Things about AC

Up Front Payment. This is probably the greatest thing about Associated Content. I can write an article that I know will not garnish thousands of page views - and still get $4 for it. Even if your article is relatively popular and gets $0.50 a month in revenue sharing (~333 visitors), you’d have to wait 8 months to get the same payment.

History of Quick Payment. Easily the second best thing is that AC pays quickly and reliably. If you are paid up front for an article, you’ll receive payment via Paypal within two or three days. Performance payments come out on a monthly basis - all you need is $1.50 for the payment to be released. This is a far cry from other places that require you to earn a lot of money before they initiate payment, and then take 30-60 days to actually get the money to you. If I keep writing, I can expect to see my $20-40 show up in my Paypal account every week.

Accept a Range of Topics. At first, I thought AC would only accept articles that are proven to bring in the search engine traffic. Turns out they’ll publish just about anything. They’ve published a lot of my education articles and some musings on sports - none of which brought in a lot of traffic. But I still got paid for it. Sometimes I actually feel a little guilty.

What Are the Drawbacks?

No Categories. One of the keys to making some real dough on AC is to promote your content. While Associated Content makes an RSS feed that you can spread around, it includes all of your articles. Some days I may want to write about sports, others education, and others web design. It would make the RSS feed much more useful if I could organize my articles into categories and promote them that way.

Poor Forums, Community. I was pretty disappointed with the forum community at AC. It’s clearly inferior to Helium, in my opinion. The forum layout is poor, there’s little participation by the AC staff, and there’s isn’t that much productive discussion of writing and generating income. There are a few nice people out there, but I wouldn’t consider it a great overall community.

Inconsistent Page View Updates. Although AC is very consistent in getting payments out, they’re pretty crummy with updating your page view information. For a while, it was done about once a month. Now it seems to have moved up to once a week or so. Without constant updates, it can be difficult to measure how well your content is doing - and whether or not you’re going to meet your income goals. Daily (or immediate) page view updates are a key, missing feature.

Should You Join Associated Content?

There are certainly some drawbacks to the AC method, and there are just as many great features. Should you join? Definitely.

If you like to write and you’re looking to make a buck, there’s really no reason not to join. If you don’t like the process, you can find something else to do - but it’s worth your while to submit a few articles and see how it goes.

I submitted one article just to test out the water, and I was pleasantly surprised when they offered me payment for it. It’s a great feeling, and it never goes away - even those $4 offers make me all warm and fuzzy inside.

So join up, write an article, and see how it goes. You can always head somewhere else next week, but you’ll never know what you could have done on AC if you never try.