Am I being too optimistic? 2$ earning per article a month?

It really depends on where the article is placed, the content of the article and how well it was optimized.

I have one article that has made me $1000 on a content site, not including affiliate commissions from sending traffic to one of my sites. But I also have articles I wrote early on that earned pennies.

To earn good money from content sites you do have to know what you are doing.

Well the question is if you can produce five articles a day but I would concentrate on quality rather than quantity because if you write one good quality article chances are that your article will get syndicated and for me that is better than writing five low quality articles.

In addition to the revenue if your article gets picked up, you could also end up with a bevy of nice backlinks.

I think your aiming to low on the amount per article go for $10 per month but maybe too high in the quantity go for 2-3 well researched and written articles in a good niche with a few backlinks.

You will make more in the long run

OP, Are you into article writing - that's writing for cash? Or are you into article marketing - that's writing for backlinks, traffic, etc.?

I'm into article marketing

Well, here's what really happens if you stick to it and are smart and do it right.

You write 150 articles. One of them makes you $3 a day, for $90 a month. Two others make you $2 a day, for another $120 a month. And three more make you $1 a day, for another $90 a month. The rest don't make you anything.

You're still making $300 a month, but you've got 144 articles out there doing jack squat.

Now, if you're smart, and you pay attention... you figure out why some articles make more than others. So you end up writing a couple thousand articles over the course of a year, and only about fifty of them are making any money, but the ones that make money are making an average of $50 a month so you're bringing in $30k annually.

Then you start hiring other writers to write the kind of articles that you've learned make money, and you blast another ten thousand articles out there over the next two or three years, and now you've got three hundred articles out there making $50 a month... so you pull down $180k and you're not even doing the work anymore.

Except most people don't do that, because they're NOT smart. They start writing articles, and a week later - after 20 articles - they say "let's see how much money I'm making" because they figure they should have made $10 already. But instead, they discover they're not making anything. So they come in here whinging about it, tell everyone that article marketing is dead, and go get a job at Wal-Mart.

If you really do spend thirty days writing five articles a day, and you pay attention to which articles are making money and which ones are not, and you try to do more of what makes money while doing less of what doesn't... then yes, I think you'll probably be making $300 a month in ninety days. But you are not going to see each and every article add to your bottom line.

In marketing, most of what you try is going to fail. Copywriters talk all the time about how excited they are to see over 5% conversion. Even the top copywriters get excited about 10% conversion.

Which means even in the upper end of this industry, the biggest names with the best skills and the most experience and the greatest reputations expect to fail nine out of ten times. And the average full-timer expects to fail nineteen out of twenty.

So as a self-proclaimed "amateur," don't be surprised when you only get one success out of every thirty to fifty tries. You'll make your way into 5% and 10% range soon enough... but all of those people got there by fighting the two-to-three-percent category tooth and nail until they broke free.

It's not really a harder road than most people can handle. Just a longer one.