My earnings for February 2011 were $1,238.40, which are a little less than December’s income. But I attribute that to February being a shorter month than the other eleven months out of the year. I average between $40 and $45 a day in residual income.
Adapting to Change in the Residual Income World
Change happens no matter where people work and earn a living. It’s inevitable. Google has been stating that they were going to change their algorithm for a while. Even though many sites were aware of this, they did very little to prepare for the Google changes. On February 24th, Google stated that they made an algorithmic change that affected 11.8 percent of their search queries. This has had quite a significant effect on search queries and residual income.
Moreover, Google is still going to make more changes that will be rolled out during the next few weeks. Google stated that the initial changes were done in the United States, so people should expect that there will more algorithmic changes internationally over the next few weeks. Here’s a list of the sites that were affected the most by Google.
Where do We Go from Here?
My plan is to keep doing what I’ve always been doing: writing quality content with credible documented research; however, I’m avoiding sites that are considered “content farms” by Google like Suite101, ezinearticles, hubpages, etc. Except for Suite101, I’ve written very few articles for the sites that are on the list of sites that were affected the most by Google, mostly because several of them are user-generated sites with very little quality control, but I had recently been putting a lot of effort into Suite101.
I liked Suite101 because they have editors who are supposed to control the quality of the content published on their site, so I was really surprised when they got hit so hard. It turns out evidently that Suite has been letting a lot of garbage get published on their site. Now they’re scrambling to fix things that should have been addressed a long time ago.
In addition, there have been quite a few Suite101 writers complaining on the forums about the sudden drop in views and income.
My income at Suite since February 24th has gone down about 30 to 40 percent. I wasn’t making that much there to begin with anyway–especially in February–even though I’ve written 94 articles.
My plan was to write 300 articles at Suite101 because at 300 articles there’s another 10 percent bonus. The first bonus I received was at 50 articles. After writing 300 articles, I was going to make a decision about continuing to write there. However, the low residual income even before Google’s changes was a sign that I was going to quit after 300 articles anyway.
So right now I’ve quit writing for Suite101, at least for a while. All the drama on the Suite101 forums, bad management decisions and low residual income are a sign that it’s time to move on. I hope things improve in the future, but right now it’s too soon to tell if Suite is going to get back their “Google Juice.”
I’ve started another niche blog that I’m going to be working on in the near future. I’ve also been researching other sites to write for. I think there’s still a lot of opportunity for residual income. It’s just important to investigate things thoroughly before putting a lot of effort into any other writing sites. I jumped into Suite thinking because people had to apply to write for them and they had editors, their site was credible. Now I’m making sure to review the content of sites before I sign-up to write any articles.
eHow Residual Income
My eHow earnings are up. I don’t know how long it will last, and it’s lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. So far eHow and Demand Studios seem to know what they’re doing, unlike Suite101. DS made a lot of changes last spring that many people didn’t like, but at least they’ve been moving in a profitable direction. They’re obviously serious about quality control and obviously knew the direction Google was going to take and took responsibility and action accordingly.
Diversifying Residual Income
I still believe it’s important to have several different streams of residual income. Right now most of my income is from eHow and DS, and I’ve been working on developing other streams of income. I believe it’s only a matter of time before eHow phases out a lot of its user-generated articles. But it’s important not to give up on residual income. There will be losses and even drops in income from successful residual income streams, but it’s important to learn and move on. It takes a lot of patience and a lot of work to earn residual income. It’s also a lot like sales; it’s a numbers thing. Only a small percentage of my articles payoff, even at eHow.
How are your residual earnings doing since the Google change? What are your feelings about the future of writing for residual income?
Best,
CM
