A Waste of Time or a Winning Article?

This great pic of Elena Dementieva, winning a Master Series at Los Angeles, is by Rafael Amado Deras at Wikimedia Commons.

I have something to celebrate too. My two-month hiatus in sales at Constant Content has ended. This particular sale was not anticipated, although I am expecting more at CC this month. But as they have recently changed their payment threshold policy, I can now expect a payout even if I don’t sell any more before the end of January.

What sold was the third and final article I submitted to the site last week. The other two were for public requests, and at least one of them should sell. This one was rather different. The idea for it came from something I did on Amazon Mechanical Turk, where you can get paid for different types of work that they call ‘hits’.

I came across Mech Turk via another blog, and thought I’d give it a go. I accepted a few hits and earnt a few cents, but I soon realised that it wasn’t a good use of my time because of the pathetic level of recompense. However, I might as well continue until I could get to the payout threshold (there’s that dreaded phrase again. The words ‘payment threshold’ must be the bane of many a person’s life).

Anyway, a week or so ago I found a hit that appeared to pay $4 for a short article rewrite. I accepted it and did the rewrite, but when I went to submit it, I found that it required a second rewrite of the same piece. I’d been so excited at the thought of earning $4 for half an hour’s work that I’d misread the instructions. It would take much longer to rework the same article to the precise spec, in which each paragraph had to mean exactly the same as the original, but using different words. I decided it wasn’t worth spending another hour or so to put that much cash in my account.

So I’d been wasting my time. Or had I? I had one original article in my own words. Surely I could do something with that. And I did.

A few days later I did a little research and then spent less than an hour turning that basic piece into a longer and much more comprehensive article. It was called Who Benefits from Affiliate Marketing?, and you can no longer read it at Constant Content because it sold for full rights over the weekend, netting me $30, less commission. A lot better than $4, as I’m sure you’ll agree.