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I guess everybody has seen ads for the “well-fed writer”, who makes $100,000 with just a couple of hours of work a day but since not everybody can do it, these offers are not what most writers are interested in. Sure, I am not saying that there are no writers, who are making even more than $100,000 with just a couple of hours work.

What I am saying is that the majority of writers are far from that figure and even further from working just a couple of hours a day. Well, in many cases you can live quite well even if you make much less than $100,000 a year and it is an exaggeration to say that writers as a whole are struggling but even if you do make enough from writing for clients, there are moments when there are no (worthy) clients, which means that your income suffers. Low paying gigs are not an answer.

At such times residual income is a life-saver. Royalties from works you have written might not be enough to live on and even if you decide to dump your clients and concentrate only on writing for revenue sharing sites, you might still be unable to achieve your financial goals. But when you don’t have any urgent projects or when you are offered mainly low-paying, boring projects, investing your time in writing articles for revenue sharing article sites is a great idea for a residual income.

Books or Articles Are a Better Idea for Residual Income?

Historically, residual income for writers is usually associated with books. Book publishing houses have been around for centuries and it is standard practice to pay royalties (in addition to or instead of upfront payment). However, writing a book is a serious task and usually it takes a lot of time – it could take years, in fact. Many writers can’t afford to devote so much time and effort, unless the publisher offers them advance payment, to write a book and then hope it will make them rich.

Of course, there are many cases when a book is the turning point in a writing career – not only in terms of recognition but also in terms of money. But there are even more cases when no matter how many great books you write and publish, money doesn’t pour in. It turns out that you have wasted a lot of time without any tangible financial result.

In this case it is much better if you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Instead of writing a book (or more precisely – a booklet), which will take you let say 2 weeks (or 100 hours), you can spend these 100 hours in a better way. If you are serious, for 100 hours you can write at least 150-200 articles of 500 words or so and submit them to article directories. There are some article directories that pay upfront but usually it is in the single digits.

Anyway, the idea is not to get some peanuts upfront but to create a source of residual income. You can never predict how much 150-200 articles will make you but even if it is $.10 a month, this translates to $15-20 a month. $.10 a month is very low and more often it is more like $.25-30 a month. Some articles might even make you $1-2 a month but this is unlikely to happen for all your 150-200 articles, so don’t count on this.

On average, depending on where you publish the articles and if you promote them on your own, you can expect that 150-200 articles will make you $50-100 a month at least. Even with 150-200 articles, you can make $500+ a month in royalties but this is more of an exception than a rule.

This money comes into your account every month without any additional efforts on your side. You will not get rich but the amount is not to be neglected. In the long run it could turn out that you have made more money by short articles than you could have made from a book.

I Do Have a Blog, Why Should I Submit to Article Sites?

One of the first ideas for places where to submit articles is your blog. Many writers have blogs and post regularly. Blogs can earn you money and for many writers they are a major source of income but in order to make a blog make money, lots of time and effort is necessary. I have seen statistics that almost 90% of all blogs make less than $10 a month. This is too low, even if you spend only 1 hour a month on your blog.

One of the major reasons why blogs don’t make a lot of money for their owners is poor promotion. Content is king but with the crowded content landscape today, even the greatest content can’t bring in crowds, if you don’t support it with promotion. Promotion takes time and soon you realize that you spend more time on promotion than on writing for your blog. That is why it is much more feasible to invest your time in writing for reliable article sites than for your blog. Money might not be everything but you can say this only when you have enough of it.

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