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There have been times in the past when I was paid $5 per article for scheduled featured contributor assignments, and could earn anywhere from $20 or $40, all the way up to $100 for an assignment targeted towards my writing niche. Sadly, these days are no more.
Most sites today have a very narrow definition of quality content, and it often hinges not only on the quality of the writing but on the writer being some sort of celebrity or high-profile expert – in other words, the writing they’re prepared to pay for is targeted at people who don’t need the money.
And for the rest of us who are simply not popular enough to earn the big bucks for our writing anymore, there are the penny sites.
Are Earnings Really Low on Literacy Base?
Things had gone downhill for web writers several years ago, but within the last couple years there was still hope for many of us to earn a decent amount of money on the penny sites. Many social writers had been earning $100, $150, or more a month just on one social writing site, when it was at its peak. But after that site faced the reality that it wasn’t earning enough revenues to pay as promised, it was next to impossible to earn a single dollar on that site in a month.
Some people have said that earns are too low on Literacy Base (or other paid to write and paid social media sites, for that matter.) The minimum cash-out here is $10, and many users wonder whether they can earn enough in a month to be paid. It’s a real concern these days, and it can be tough to migrate from site to site as older sites stop paying and new ones become popular. In some ways, we do have to learn all over again every time we start over on a new site.
So now many of us are starting over on Literacy Base, and some are finding the pay too low – especially the amount paid upfront when a post is published. Is this an accurate perception? And regardless of whether or not it is, what can we the writers do in order to earn more money on Literacy Base?
How Literacy Base Compensates Users for Posts
Literacy Base compensates users for their posts in several ways:
1. When a post is approved for publication, a small upfront payment is awarded. This can be up to maybe a nickel for posts that just meet the 300-word post length requirement, but three times more for posts of 1,000 words;
2. Approved comments that publish on our blog posts also help us to earn a few pennies each. As with the posts, length does seem to play a part in determining how much the comment will earn;
3. When we share a post across our social networks and ensure that our referral code is included in the URL, there is a bonus payment for each unique visitor we bring to the site to read our posts;
4. Some users have received up to 40 or 50 cents from the Literacy Base staff as a performance bonus. Some received the bonus simply for “hard work,” but others were awarded the bonus specifically for their published posts.
Earning More from Literacy Base Posts
Of course everyone would like to earn as much as possible for each post published. But how to increase the earnings per post? Writers can target three specific areas when writing a post: 1) the length of the post; 2) visual appeal, including images for the post; 3) the focus and organization of the post, and the ease with which it will be found by readers using a search engine.
Post Length
As stated above, longer posts pay better. Right now, the popular post length on many social writing sites is just 300 words – up from about 100 words on similar sites a year or two ago. But content sites had been recommending a target of 450-600 words for years, so the 100-word or even 300-word articles couldn’t compete with longer articles that offer more depth and breadth of information on the same topics.
In 2016, the recommended post length is considerably larger. One article I read advises writers to aim for no less than 700 words in a post, and ideally much higher. The good folks at Buffer say the ideal post length is whatever can be read in 7 minutes. That translates to a word count of 1,600 for the ideal post length.
If you have just been doing the bare minimum to get your posts published on Literacy Base, now you have two reasons to write a longer post! First because it will pay you twice or three times what you earn for a shorter post, and then because it’s more likely to get noticed by search engines.
Want an idea how long these more substantial posts are? This article is more than 1,200 words long. You’ve just read a little more than 800 words. Remember that when you’re publishing anything this long, whitespace is important to break up the text. Also use visual formatting cues like lists, headings and subheads, and boldface in your text to make it easier both to scan and to read. And don’t forget the images!
Images for Literacy Base
Support here at Literacy Base recommends an image 1,200 px x 600 px for your featured image. For other images in your posts, keep it to 750 px x 750 px.
Focus and Discoverability
When you write a longer post it’s really easy to ramble on, and to meander from one topic to another. Doing that will make your post harder for the reader to follow, and it will naturally result in having too few occurrences of the keywords you are wanting to target. Search engines won’t know how to classify the content, and will therefore downgrade it in search results.
Take the time to plan and outline your posts before you start writing. This will help you to stay focused, and will increase the chances that your targeted keywords and keyword phrases will come up naturally in your writing – and that’s what search engines want to see!
I’ve written more about how to narrow your topic and compose a tightly focused post. If you need help writing a post around a single, well narrowed topic, please check out the linked advice.
Ready to Join Literacy Base?
I hope that reading the information above will convince you that it’s easy to earn a little extra money posting and interacting on Literacy Base. If you’re already a member, get out there and get active! Leave comments, reply to mentions and comments on your posts. Start forum discussions, share links across your social media. Do anything that will increase your visibility and draw more people to your content.
If you are not already a member of Literacy Base, I’d love you to join! Please sign up and then look for me on the site. If you drop me a quick message to say you’ve arrived, I’ll be thrilled to friend you so I can keep up with all your news. I can’t wait to chat with you on Literacy Base!
