Article Writing - Struggling!

That's probably a big part of the problem, here.

It's terribly difficult to make a living writing $5/$10 articles, not because people won't pay more (huge numbers of people will, and do, every day) but because the $5/$10 clients tend to be people whose own businesses don't flourish (they often don't know how to use the articles because very often they think of "article marketing" only in SEO terms so they often don't survive for long at all), and therefore these writers need permanently to advertise for new clients, to allow for this.

The reason you don't see writers of $100/$200 articles advertising all the time isn't (as some wrongly imagine) that they don't exist because "people won't pay that": it's mostly the fact that their clients know how to use their work, with the result that their own businesses do well, and they keep returning for more.These are writers who are often as fully booked up as they want to be. Does that help?

In other words, it's about the markets in which you choose to compete.

Trying to compete on price and aiming only at the very bottom end of an evanescent, high-turnover market, as you're doing now, is making life terribly difficult for yourself.

I don't have an article-writing service any more: I've become my own full-time client, now. But when I started in 2008 I was, like you, a literate, educated person at a UK university (I wasn't a graduate, back then). I originally started writing articles at $25+ each, and quickly increased that to $50. Those are clients who come back for more. Of course, you have to have some marketing skills to attract them, but this is the point: if you're trying to make money from it, your marketing skills are actually more important than your writing skills, and you need to acknowledge that and market your services accordingly.

I think (and hope) you'll find the threads and external links above (posts #3 and #6) helpful, anyway.

As a UK graduate, on freelance marketplaces like oDesk or Elance you should get $2 per 100 words easily enough, after you've searched and learned how to write a compelling bid.

Could be a plus, for the "Haitian magical mystery tour" travel niche? For anything else, you may have rather a good point.