Does it seem like everyone is looking and not buying?

[weagle87]

It seems to me that sales have disappeared while views are up. Is anyone else experiencing this? Is this a phenomenon or just something that is happening to me? Does anyone know how to increase sales?

[Judith]

The best way to increase sales is by increasing your inventory. Write! Write! Write!

[weagle87]

Thanks, Judith. I was just thinking the same thing.

[jkcki]

Does Constant Content release sales numbers or statistics? For instance, Writer Access lets us know how many items sell every month and their exact revenue and the amount that authors are paid.

I ask because I've noticed the exact same thing. When I first started with Constant Content over two years ago, sales were relatively fast. I would get perhaps 5-8 views on an article and then a sale. Today, I am getting dozens of views but no sales. So Weagle is pointing out something that is a legitimate change in the website and I'm not sure just throwing more articles at it is something that would be helpful.

[weagle87]

Thanks for keeping me from feeling crazy.

I wonder what is going on. I also used to have 5 or 6 views and then a sale. Then I got articles with 40 and 50 views but no sale. Now I have one with upwards of 250 and one with more than 300 and no sale. It's weird. I was thinking that perhaps I have improved my titles or something. I'm still selling - but it's slower and usually after only 5 or 6 views.

[jkcki]

Since there's no real data to go around, I've decided to keep some data of my own.

Since 9/22 I have uploaded 38 new articles. Of those articles, I've sold only 7. My total revenue for these sales was $272 before CC's cut, for $176.80 in actual profit. That is an average of $25.25 for each article I sold and an average of about $8 for every article I actually uploaded.

When I first started with CC roughly 50% of my articles would sell within the first month and then another 10-20% of them would sell months afterwards. Right now I'm hovering around 20% immediate sales. Otherwise, on the other writing sites I'm on I make about $25 - $75 for each article I write.

With the current conversion rating, I would need to write and upload about 7 articles every hour to make the same amount of money I usually average on other sites.

However, there's one important caveat. The articles I sell are about 400 words long. $8 for 400 words is still more than you will get on many sites such as TextBroker and even Zerys, and here you are writing about what you want to write about.

[weagle87]

That's interesting. I wonder where all the buyers have gone. I'm so tired of making peanuts at textbroker.

[Lysis]

I usually figure about 50% of my stuff will sell too. I'm a little below 50% overall in my profile. (I don't count usage since those were ages ago) It really does make a difference what you write about and how much of a pool of articles you have.

I've slowed down a lot, but I sold 6 one day a couple weeks ago that were sitting in my pool of articles.

It takes some time to get going on CC and understand what buyers are looking for.

[jkcki]

I've been on CC for about 3 years now. I come back every once in a while to add some articles to my pool, so I'm not a new writer. Here are my additional observations.

When I first started on CC the emphasis was towards evergreen content that could be used to populate websites for random projects. Dogs and gardening were still popular at that time, though energy and mobile phones were not as popular.

The emphasis now seems to be less on evergreen content and more on timely news. I think I could make more money selling $30 usage on mobile phone articles about iOS 7 than selling $60 full rights on a gardening or dog article. My iOS 7 articles sold IMMEDIATELY, whereas my dog article took about a month to sell.

I think CC is a valuable platform but I definitely feel a difference in terms of sales.

Weagle87--if you're tired of doing peanuts on TB, I strongly advise you to sign up for WriterAccess.com. I make over $5k/month on this platform, which has extremely supportive writers and fantastic administrators. It is NOT in competition with Constant-Content--it is a direct order site, not a spec site. It's like TB but so much better.

[Lysis]

The key to CC is knowing what monetizes and what people are looking for. What makes good money for the buyer. That's kinda the trick to learning the platform. Plus, I have some buyers that follow me I think. I've noticed a couple of people frequently buy my stuff. They've never asked for a private order, but I think they browse my stuff when they come to buy.

It's also good to know where Google is with their algorithm, believe it or not. I think evergreen is dying, because that kind of stuff is hard to rank now if you aren't an authority site. The algorithm changes affect what buyers are looking for. For instance the mobile market is popular, because it's saturated. I can't tell you how many android/ios sites I've seen where it's tanked and the site owner wants to know why. 9/10 it's a low quality site with poor writing. You need to have some kickass stuff on an android/ios blog if you ever want it to see the light of day. What better way to have kickass content but to hit up CC where people are writing about stuff they have done with their Android that isn't found somewhere else and it's already edited for good grammar/spelling? If I had a content site, I'd buy from CC. Same with payday loans, insurance, and anything SEO related. There are some industries where the competition is fierce, and we all know Google tanks low quality writing.

The unique part about CC though is that you can make your way on the site in your own unique way. This will never be full time for me, but I'm like jkcki and come and go, depending on the mood. I've seen times when sales are slow and times when they were great. I'd say right now it's on the good side.

[weagle87]

Wow! Y'all are awesome. Thanks for all the tips. I have been focusing on evergreen topics. But I think I'll branch out. That one article that had 400 views now has nearly 650 with no buyers. It's so weird.

Here's to changing gears . Specific articles here I come.

[Constant]

Just wanted to chime in on a few things in this thread.

The key to CC is knowing what monetizes and what people are looking for. What makes good money for the buyer. That's kinda the trick to learning the platform. Plus, I have some buyers that follow me I think. I've noticed a couple of people frequently buy my stuff. They've never asked for a private order, but I think they browse my stuff when they come to buy.

Many customers will subscribe to writer's RSS feeds off their profiles. We have some clients who follow certain writers and are on the site within an hour to buy pretty much anything the writer adds.

The unique part about CC though is that you can make your way on the site in your own unique way. This will never be full time for me, but I'm like jkcki and come and go, depending on the mood. I've seen times when sales are slow and times when they were great. I'd say right now it's on the good side.

Sales are stronger than ever right now.

When I first started on CC the emphasis was towards evergreen content that could be used to populate websites for random projects. Dogs and gardening were still popular at that time, though energy and mobile phones were not as popular.

The emphasis now seems to be less on evergreen content and more on timely news. I think I could make more money selling $30 usage on mobile phone articles about iOS 7 than selling $60 full rights on a gardening or dog article. My iOS 7 articles sold IMMEDIATELY, whereas my dog article took about a month to sell.

I wouldn't say that the need for evergreen content is gone, but more newsworthy topics are definitely a strong market for us now. They're also much more likely to sell quickly, whereas an evergreen topic might take longer to sell on average (and, you might have to wait for the right season for some of it, such as the gardening articles you mention).

Another note - most of our clients now are looking for Full Rights, so if you do only offer Usage, you're probably limiting your potential market.

Weagle87--if you're tired of doing peanuts on TB, I strongly advise you to sign up for WriterAccess.com. I make over $5k/month on this platform, which has extremely supportive writers and fantastic administrators. It is NOT in competition with Constant-Content--it is a direct order site, not a spec site. It's like TB but so much better.

We do offer direct order and custom content to our clients, and it's a very big part of our business. Many of our writers do very well writing for clients, and have been able to turn catalog sales into ongoing gigs, get added to clients' projects, and work through the writer pools.



In terms of selling more - pay attention to the Standing Requests that we send out, and email alerts to current needs too. When we identify hot topics we do try to guide you on what to write to improve your chances to sell articles. You can also keep an eye on the recent and popular search topics in your account, as well as recently sold content (which only shows catalog sales), to get a sense of what is in demand at any given moment.