How many of you out there have dozens of pages in your email completely devoted to registration confirmation for the plethora of writing sites you’ve applied to? How many of you have spent tireless hours on Google turning up every loose end for each nickel and dime you can salvage from a good site? A chronicle of writing follies, busts, and the ever continuing search for a legitimate revenue. Here is to every writer who has ever found themselves in the spot of earning their first penny in writing!
I will begin this article by telling the truth. I have only earned a penny on Triond thus far. Granted, I have only produced one article which has blessed me with one comment and of course that one sweet fraction of a dollar. And before we continue, I might add in a humbling note, that my first well earned penny on the web was enough to bring me out of my seat for a momentary celebration over the tiny, itty-bitty blossom of a writing career.
Maybe there are some of you out there laughing your little hinney off at the thought of an over ecstatic newbie throwing herself into the air, holding the metaphorical penny high in the air with the saddest pride the world has ever seen. However, I know that everyone who has ever made a dime writing online can remember the first time that their journey turned up some cash and can (hopefully) fondly relate to what may become a very humiliating story one day.
Moving on, I now hold the essence of hope on my computer in that beautiful signature of $0.01 and am ready to move on, churn up some good articles, and bring in the big ones. I now must struggle through the muck of persevering, picking up the sentences that are sure to be interrupted by my baby brothers questions and screams and pleas to play just one more round on a video game, and the doubtless failure of more than a couple well thought out pieces. Now, I am only eighteen years old and am aware that the two weeks I have spent researching and apply and clicking confirmation links is about as pathetic as my penny earning to the weathered writing soldiers reading this article. I am also aware the measily two weeks of searching that are so grand in my adolescant mind are more than laughable to more mature readers.
Regardless of my pennies and my few weeks, my one article, or my fifty emails, I am beginning to see how this online adventure works and can already laugh at the peek I am getting into my future. I can see two roads for this online career, two starkly different paths, and can only hope I found myself on the more favored one. Either I will publish writing that I have casually spent my entire life working on for free and find myself incredulous at the outpouring of money I earn… Or I will continue on with my pennies, maybe even a dollar, or if I’m lucky fifty dollars, and continue my dreaming in grandeur of what the future could hold. Either way, I could get lucky, and either way I am already loving this mind game of freelancing.
This is Lindsay, hoping to have future escapeds, duds, blunders, and maybe even vicories to reminise with the fellow plungering author about. Good day and a few snipets of advice in my comment box would be more than welcomed. (I am writing in hopes that I can mooch a couple invaluable lessons from the worn and the pros.)
Here is to another pretty penny!
Tue, May 19, 2009, by LindsayM
Money Making