Review: Suite101-Not Worth Your Time

Suite101.com is another revenue sharing, paid-to-write site (PTW), similar to Gather and Helium. However, the terms of agreement at Suite101 so favor the company and deprive writers of revenue I’m giving it a big thumbs down.

These PTW sites work by placing ads on the pages and sharing whatever revenue is generated with the authors. The exact percentage is often hard to determine, but it definitely favors the website owners. The real advantage to a blogger is that by posting material on multiple sites you can drive traffic to your own site.

And that is where the fault in Suite101 lies. Other sites allow duplicate posting. You can post a article about Tom Cruise’s latest movie on your website, Gather, Helium, Xomba, Hub Pages and Thisisby. Suite101 demands exclusive writes to all your content and does not except previously published material.

For exclusive rights to original material, they pay $1.50 per thousand page views. One writer posting on the sites forum said he had 100 articles that received 34,000 page views in a month. Fifty-dollars a month for all that work. Ridiculous! Had he sold those articles to Associated Content, he would have received anywhere from $4 to $50 a piece. AC also pays a performance bonus of $1.50 per thousand page views in addition to the upfront pay.

I recommended selling non-exclusive rights to AC, then posting the same article to to Hub Pages and Xomba. Both those sites alternate showing Google Adsense ads with their account code and yours. The fairest revenue sharing model for making money writing online. I wrote this article on Associated Content for Hub Pages. It has received 193 page views with my Adsense account code, making $2.50. That's about $10 a thousand views for comparison.

Associated Content -- Paid to Write

There are no shortages of websites offering to pay you to write. The bulk of these involve some sort of revenue sharing agreement. They host your articles on their site and split any advertising revenue--usually AdSense –the article generates with the author. Depending on how much traffic your article draws, you could wait years to make any significant amount of money. Associated Content (AC) pays cash upfront for your writing.

The best thing about AC is that if you only sell them nonexclusive rights to your material you are then free to post it on a revenue sharing site such as Xomba or even your website or blog. You can get some money upfront while you’re waiting for those AdSense bucks to start rolling in.

I’ve sold six articles to AC and made ok money off of them considering all but one were originally written for a college newspaper.

1. $15 Nonexclusive opinion piece “Who Put the Hate in Christianity For God’s Sake?”

2. $6 Exclusive article about job opportunities fighting forest fires for college students.

3. $6 Nonexclusive article on environmental campaign jobs for students.

4. $10 Nonexclusive article on Oregon health insurance plan for the poor.

5. $7.50 Exclusive article on Crabbing on the Oregon Coast.

6. $16 Exclusive article on starting a pet sitting business.

Although AC will buy most well written articles they maintain a list of subjects that are of particular interest to them. Local attractions and events seem to pay well. Article like “The 10 Most Romantic Things to do in Abilene” are always in demand.

When writing for AC, keep in mind that they are making their money off Google AdSense as well. What they pay is based on what type of traffic your article will draw. If you have a keyword heavy article about a popular search term like, oh say, making money online, you will probably make more than an article on why the red tail lizard rat of South America is facing extinction.

In addition to the written word AC recently began purchasing videos and audio clips, so now wanna be documentary filmmakers have a market.

Signing up to use AC is easy and straightforward. Go to www. Associatedcontent.com and click the “Get Started” icon and fill in the form. When you’re article is ready to be published, use the “Publish” icon, which walks you through the process. Pictures can be uploaded with AC and help draw traffic. You’ll be asked for additional resources meaning websites, so you can link to any relevant sites as well as your own.

There is a minimal editorial period before AC pays you. Usually within a couple of business days you’ll receive a notice that your content is under review. I’ve found that I usually know how much AC is going to offer for my article ten days after submitting it. If you don’t like the offer you always have the option of declining it.

Under the “My Content” page you can check the status of all material you’ve submitted to AC at anytime.

After an author accepts an offer AC makes payment exclusively through PayPal. They don’t send out checks, so you will need to open a PayPal account if you don’t already have one.

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