The Best

Ironic as it may be, I think the best and most time-effective methods of earning money online are through article-writing sites.

Helium, Triond, and Associated Content are all well and good, but they are pretty indiscriminate in terms of what content they take. The closer you get to freelance writing, the better off you'll be. Look at it this way, even if an article that pays $60 (which is low for quality freelance work) takes you three, four, or even five times longer to write than an article for those other sites, you're still making over 100x what you would make on that other article, even if it were posted at all three sites.

I think paid posting is a nice middle ground if you don't want to put in too much effort and you like the blogosphere. You can increase your earnings as your reputation increases by writing on specific subjects, but a little more casually than if you were writing articles. However, since I've begun "the real thing," i.e., a blog about things that interest me, I've discovered how much more difficult it is to promote a blog that's not in this "making money" niche. I hope, though, that it will be easier to get regular readers, and I know that with a topic I'm more passionate about, I will be able to produce higher quality content.

Expect further bulletins as warranted, but on a less frequent basis.

Progress and Standstills

I think the weekend strategy was a good one. It really brought into clarity what enterprises were making progress and what ones had stalled out.

Progress: My Triond earnings increased by $0.30 which puts me at $0.64 cents total. Because that exceeds their payment minimum of $0.50 I'll get paid through PayPal when they do their June payments (July 15th). Unfortunately I am no longer on the Hot Members page, even though I have a lot of recent views. Maybe that means the site is getting more popular overall. Whatever it is, I'll have to write more to stay in the game.

Helium had further earnings of $0.02 for me, which is really just negligible. I like the site and it's fun, but because of how they're set up you have to write to answer the specific question they have on the site. Given that and my lower earnings, it doesn't seem worth it to work at that.

Global Test Market sent me two surveys over the weekend. One I was ineligible for, and the other had filled up by the time I tried to fill it out. Even so, they gave me 15 Market Points for the attempt, which is equates to $0.75. Not bad. I don't feel terribly helpful, but I'm getting paid pretty well.

Standstills: Survey Spot sent me a lot of surveys, almost none of which I was eligible for. Their payout is much bigger at $2-$10 per survey, so I guess I'll keep trying.

Blogsvertise has yet to send me a single "task" (paid post). I am on probationary status, but their suggestion to get off of probationary status is to accept and complete the tasks they offer you! Well Blogsvertise, I've done every single (n)one!

Google AdSense has yet to approve me. They said they would get back to me within one week of my application. That was on June 24th, exactly one week ago. Am I a difficult case? Worse blogs than this have Google Ads on them! I can't give you a link because really, why would I save a link to a blog worse than this one?

Other: AGloCo, Constant Content, and Slash My Search are all dependent on my activity, and as such have not changed over the past few days.

Mitigated Success

I logged into Helium to check my earnings for the day, and they had skyrocketed to a whopping 17 cents! Why then don't my Stats reflect that, you ask? Because an "adjustment" was made which took 8 cents off my total! After much searching and digging, I eventually found a grain of factoid in their discussion forums which said that adjustments can be because articles which have earned money have been deleted. Problems with this system:

1) If an article has earned money (i.e., acheived financial success), why is it being deleted?

2) Any money earned is because of advertising. That money is earned by Helium, regardless of whether the article later becomes deleted. So when they delete your article and rescind your earnings, they're just keeping that money for themselves.

It gets better. The article that was deleted? The title I wrote under was "How long should Helium articles be?"

My article?

"Like a girl's skirt: long enough to cover the subject; short enough to keep it interesting."

The reason they deleted it?

"It was meaningless content."

Excuse me? I answered the question and the answer encapsulates its own message in its length, which is the subject proposed to be addressed in the first place! That's meaning on two distinct levels people!

Slight Progress

I'm making four cents a day between Helium and Triond, which isn't half bad, and will only increase if I keep writing and submitting content. Submitting pictures to Triond hasn't earned me a cent yet, it's all from the two articles I've done.

I signed up for MyBlogLog today under retrogradesonnet. I think it's the first thing I've signed up for in this experiment that doesn't directly purport to make me money. I'm still not quite sure how it works. It seems pretty obvious that it's a giant community of networking bloggers, but how it could possibly succeed I'm not sure of.

I also signed up this blog for Blogsvertise, a site which pays bloggers to talk about certain advertised products on their blogs. It's one of the only ones that might take me even though my blog isn't 30 days old, so I've given it a shot, but I've yet to be approved, even on a probationary status. We shall see.

In the meantime I think I'll be focusing my efforts on writing articles for Triond which I will then post on Helium. Triond is better, but you can do both with barely more work, so why not?