Constant Content

I am a new writer here, and I am trying to determine if I want to spend my time writing articles that might not sell. In other words, I am trying to assess the likelihood that a given article will actually sell. I saw somewhere else in the forum that approximately 70% of articles eventually sell, and that is pretty promising. However, I am trying to understand that 70% figure in relation to the following observation:

According to my last search, there are currently 51,565 articles for sale on Constant Content. Then I go to the "Catalog Sales" list and I see that 11 articles have sold so far today. The day is about half over, so perhaps it would be fair to assume that 22 articles will sell today. But I will be conservative and assume that this is only one-fourth of the articles that will sell today. So in one day, 44 articles will sell out of the 51,565 articles that are currently available. This corresponds to .08% (less than one-tenth of one percent).

Thus, if I write one article today--thereby increasing the article count to 51,566--I will have a .08% chance of selling that article. Now perhaps this is too low because the mediocre articles do not sell initially, then they become outdated, then they accumulate in the catalog. Perhaps new, well-written articles with relevant content are much more likely to sell than old articles that are simply taking up catalog space. Nevertheless, .08% percent is a long way from 70%.

Am I missing something here? I am not trying to be contentious, but I do want to have all the facts before I invest valuable time in writing articles that have--at first glance--an extremely low chance of being purchased.

If anyone has thoughts, comments, or rebuttals, I would appreciate it.

Not sure how you got your stats, but I know that only the last 20 sales are listed on the site. Sometimes I have been notified of a sale and never see it in the list becasue by the time I get there, it is way past the last 20.

regarding the sales percentage, my own experience is that the number of licences I have sold for my articles comes to just over 72% of the number of my submitted pieces. Around two thirds of these were for full or unique rights and the rest for usage. Some of the pieces that went for usage sold two or three times.

I have to admit though, that the first sales were quite a while coming for me, thought I have read in the forums of the delight of some newbies on early sales. Another thing I have noticed is that when I had time to be prolific here, the sales came thick and fast. Build up a portfolio, and I'm sure the sales will come.

My own experience:

Back in May 2012, I noticed that sales were really slow and I quit writing here, because I wanted to average 2-3 sales a day and there was just no way it would happen at the time.

Fast forward to now, and CC must have really buckled down and advertised, because I've noticed they are doing extremely well. It could have something to do with Panda, because having great content on a site really does affect its ranking. You buy a $3 article somewhere, and you're gonna get what you pay for and the site won't be as valued as the guy with greatly written content.

People are a lot more concerned with the quality of content on their site, so I figure it's a combination of CC making some great marketing strides and people finally figuring out that they need to have edited, good content to compete in Google.

With that said, I've noticed CC goes up and down with sales. Mondays are great, and then they slow down a lot on weekends. Fridays are horrible too. I'd say they do the best Monday-Wed, if I had to guess. Even though weekends are slow, I've noticed that I still make 1-2 sales on weekends, so maybe I'm lucky. They could be controlling those numbers too. They can slow down advertising to deliberately slow down traffic on the weekends, since they aren't staffed on weekends (or have a skeleton crew). I've seen small businesses do that, so they don't have any crazy 911 issues come up on weekends. They might also control the type of content they let through, because I'm sure they monitor what people are looking for at any point in the day.

What they do with the controls is their business and I'm just guessing, but I have to say this is one of my favorite places to write. I make more at other outlets, but I have 0 SEO rules and dumb, rigid requirements here. Like jak said, you have to build up a portfolio. That's the hard part here. It takes time, obviously, to get 500 articles written, but the more you have available, the more you will make. I've been tracking some writers for my personal stats, and the people doing well are writing like 100 articles a month and selling like 2-4 articles a day on average.

I'm at about 50% sales, and I mostly write to the open pool. When I write here, I figure 50% will be somewhat immediate (within a month) and about 20% will trickle into other months.