Capturing Chaos

I removed my last few remaining articles from Triond yesterday. It was the end of my second try at using Triond for a little extra writing income. I thought that I hadn’t given the site a fair trial the first time, so I would try harder. And I did try harder. I posted roughly twice as many articles as I had the first time. I stumbled a couple of the best ones. I read and commented on other members’ work, and I made “friends.”

To its credit, Triond has made a lot of upgrades to the site since my first residence there. Friending people means that their latest work will appear on your community page, making it easier to keep up with them. Most recently, Triond instituted a long-overdue feature — making your user name a live link to your profile and content when you leave a comment.

But when it came right down to it, I realized that I had made more money in less time the first time around, than I made in the last three months. And that had happened with fewer articles and no promotion. Since I also had many more page views this time, I’m left with the strong feeling that Triond is paying much less now.

I was beginning to think seriously about whether Triond was worth any more of my time, when two things happened. I discovered a blog by a woman who writes about her freelancing career and what she’s learned along the way. She’s very outspoken about her belief that no one who’s serious about being a professional writer should waste their time on revenue-sharing sites. Mostly, I agree with her, although not all income sharing sites pay as abysmally as Triond. And even Triond is a good place to dip your toes in the water.

But well buried under the hype about Triond, Helium and several other sites is the stark fact that to earn any reasonable amount of money, you will have to churn out hundreds of articles and see very little real reward while the residual income builds up. It was past time for me to accept that I write well enough to make dollars for my articles instead of pennies.

The other thing that happened on the same day I read that blog post is for tomorrow.

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