New Chapters Begin, Old Chapters End

In mid-2008, my friend Robert talked me into signing up at eHow to write articles. He was making some serious pocket money and thought I could too.

Two years, ten months, and 44 articles later, I have $478.57 more than I did before. Some articles made a lot - one of them over $130. Others made diddly squat. In the process, I learned all sorts of things about freelance writing for content sites. Most importantly:

A whole lot of people make living-level wages doing it, for example this guy. Over at Demand Studios, the people who qualify to write the $30 medical/health articles, and who can crank out 10 of them per day, 6 days per week, from home while watching their toddlers, and without having to do any of the pitching/rejection of traditional freelancing, those people have it pretty good.

I'm never going to be one of them. In the end, I'm just not that fast.

So, what's next? Who knows. I sure know lots more about SEO than I did before. But not enough about any actual topic to write a good-sized website of my own. My friend Robert keeps trying to talk me into making one about something marine biology related, but I've long since passed into the "I know enough to know I don't know anything" phase about that.

In the meantime, Bright Hub is reeling but still standing after the Google Panda smackdown, most of my extant articles are now there (including several of the eHow refugees I had to move in the past ten days), so maybe I'll just watch what happens for a while...