Making money at Constant Content - my (moderate) success story

Thank you. The post is indeed useful.

Thanks

Christina-
Congratulations on your success, and thanks for sharing your experience. I've seen many posts about hiring writers, and the benefits of using services from CC or others, but there has been little input from the writers themselves.

Anyone else being hired by CC or other sites?

Thank you!

I’m a new author. However, I read a blog post written by a CC’s author about making money with CC, and he explained that if you want to sell an article for $50 or more (which can be around 500 – 800 words) you have to wait for the right customer.

You’ll sell your articles faster if your prices are around $20-$25, but it’s also a good idea to write special articles and sell them for $50-$70 whenever the right customer may arrive.

Sorry to bring this old thread back to life but I was wanting to ask: How are your sales going? Anyone? I'm in a dry patch I think because I'm writing to a niche and the time of year. Is anyone else selling?

They always have around 20 articles on their recently sold list so it's impossible to gauge how well they're actually doing they actually sell more than that.

I'm lucky in that I've never had trouble with their editors so I'm hoping this dry patch is just me and not an indication of the health of the site.

Yeah, I should have.

You're saying what most people say, I think. I think I might write 10 a day for a week on the most popular topics and see what happens.

35%, I think.

I know that at least some of that goes into actively marketing the article database. The cut has never bothered me, personally. Articles sell for professional rates, so just price accordingly.

this is my first time hearing about CC. The highest price I got for article writing was $5. In CC, their value seems to be way greater than the usual freelancer rate. I hated article writing because of the pricing. Perhaps, I'll go check that out.

Writers there charge professional rates. .10 cents per word or more. It's not unusual for articles to go for $100 there.

The editors are very picky. Your grammar has to be perfect or they'll send it back for revision. If your first few articles aren't up to snuff, or if you don't maintain good quality, they'll ban your account. I'm not kidding. They'll send an article back for one stray comma. It's how they keep clients who are willing to pay that much.

It's good money when you're selling..frustrating when you aren't. They claim that every article an author gets accepted there has a 75% chance of eventually selling. They came out with that stat a few years ago, so who knows if it's still accurate.

Looking at my stats I see that I've made ~$280 with 15 sales, 3 of which were usage rights sales. That comes to a really low average, but it's pulled down by the fact that I was low balling like a noob when I first started. You DON'T have to do this. I learned the hard way that if you are good enough to get your work approved by the editors than you're good enough to charge professional rates. I now charge $40-$75 per article.

By no means do I write full-time for this site, though. I think I've only written 25 or so in 2 years. I'm really curious to see what would happen if I wrote several a day for a week or so.

Anyway, I've had good luck when I've written on the most popular topics and practically zero sales (so far) when I focused on a particular niche on article after article. Your mileage may vary. If you're writing for a niche you basically have to wait for some webmaster who wants your content to find the site and search for your keywords. Then your content has to be exactly what he/she needs.

Regarding public requests, I haven't bothered much. The competition is really high. I did one and the person advertised a budget of $200 for a single article but didn't buy anything from anyone, as far as I could tell. In hind-site I should have realized that they were probably just fishing for short summaries that they could scrape and paste together.

If you're inclined to answer public requests go for it but be aware that some of them are fake.

I've written maybe 3 articles for them and they haven't sold. I've thought about trying again many times, so maybe now it's time to start.

According to my math, if your stats match up close to their average and you list your articles for $50 each, each article you write is worth about $24.375 ($50 x commission of 0.65 x sell through rate of 0.75).

Those aren't actually professional rates, because real pros sell articles for $50 and up to a few hundred each. But those pros have to do some marketing to get in front of their clients. ~$24.375 is excellent for something that takes no marketing.

My sell-through rate on CC works out around 85% (most sell within 4 weeks). I've averaged out that I get about $30, after their cut, for a 500-700 word article.

That's quite good money to me, especially if I can just sit down for 45 minutes and basically earn myself an additional $30. Do that once a day and you're sitting on almost $1k a month.

That's a good idea. I had thought of publishing long articles before. I think I'll give it some thought.

As far as making good money on CC, I don't think anyone has ever tried to push significant volume there. It would be extremely difficult--but not impossible--to maintain the quality required. Their sales are doing better than ever though, and that's not likely to change with Google raising the bar on quality.

I've never sold higher than $49/500 words there, but I probably could if I tried.

Edit: Well, there are a few people there that have sold more than 1000k full rights articles. One guy has sold more than 6k.

I have fiction published on Kindle. The free promotion days really help.

I'm sure I can come up with a lot of non-fic to publish under a pen name.

I'm gonna try this service! thanks for the post!

I've tried CC, but I guess my writing isn't good enough for them. I managed to use up the three full revisions per post.

But this is inspiring. Maybe I'll give it another go!

Constant Content sounds like a legitimate way to earn money as a professional writer and maybe even easier than trying to find copywriting clients, especially for the beginner. The residual income would be a nice supplement to any internet marketing or blog career.