I have written on the subject of religion, science, well-being and so forth. So where can I publish these sorts of articles/essays online; to get royalty payments for each view or for an upfront payment?
In my experience, there are enough free blogs out there that are written by people with special interest in the topics they write about, high level professionals even, that these days it isn't easy getting paid for writing random non-fiction content on the internet, unless you get onto one of those services that generate content for web pages whose only reason for putting up content is to justify advertising through numbers of clicks, even if they are completely accidental and readers don't stay on the page for long. It's internet litter, in other words. I doubt it works on basis of royalties, you might get paid a few cents per word, that's all. Unless you are a journalist, or put time and yourself into managing your own online presence, the strength of the material on those sites won't be enough to attract fans. I had a massively successful blog, thousands of views per day, my opinion pieces were regularly picked up by media and newspapers, and I wrote a lot of very good non-fiction content, philosophy, medicine and health, political, feminist, satyrical, and I was only offered a job as a columnist and a book deal (one for my fiction and another for non-fiction content), but no other form of payment for my efforts. Since then I notice that to be a trend amongst bloggers, the really good ones end up publishing books or getting their own shows or columns or whatnot. Even with a hugely successful blogs, the content is written and read for free because nobody's willing to pay like that except maybe for erotica (although usually not even that due to freely available books as well as porn). In my experience, if your content is successful, and you build readership, then you can load your blog with adverts and get paid that way. Sometimes a donations button in the corner works, or a link to your Amazon wish list. If you have some other merchandise you create or sell, a blog is a nice place to advertise it, and of course, if you have sophisticated tutorials and courses on something, you can sell those. Sell ebooks for download as well. So it's all much more oblique that getting people to pay every time they want to read your content. Other options are publishing or self publishing essays, if they are good enough, you might get sales through that. Or just do internet journalism, I'm sure there are opportunities, not sure how easy it is to get paid well for writing things you are interested in, though. It seems more like write on order
That sounds like a nice idea: to create a blog specific to my writing. But, I'd have to include a lot of marketing also which I have had abundant experience. What do you think of sites such as "Ezine Articles" and so forth?
Your best bet is to look at magazines that publish essays. I'm sure some of them accept unsolicited submissions. I don't think any market offers royalties based on the number of views (because you can cheat the system).
My understanding is that "article marketing" as a way of getting website traffic is dead. I consider this good news, because I never liked the idea of one's writing being essentially treated as a commodity, each article not much more distinctive than a pound of onions. But whether you think of it as good or bad, I believe its day is over.
It might be worth looking at Squidoo and similar sites. They tend to be more geared towards informative or how-to articles, but it's possible that your writings could find a home there. The amount of money you stand to make is quite small, and to earn anything at all requires a lot of hard work.
I have considered doing the very same thing for the past couple of years, contacted a lot of people, and all that I have read and heard on the topic is very discouraging. Unless one is famous already or finds some special niche, the situation seems rather hopeless. I have written almost a hundred essays, 175,000 or so words in all, and plan on self publishing them soon. I am just going to keep a copy for myself and then gradually go out there and see if anyone is interested in reading my work. The odds of success are so low that I'm not going to get my hopes up. There really should be a way for us to make money by writing essays and maybe we can find a way to do so in the future. All we need is a few thousand (or even few hundred) loyal readers who are willing to pay a little bit of money. Good luck. Bill
