How to Sell More Article Part II

[Constant]

Answering the Question: How do you sell articles on the site?

A Note: The stats in this article are compiled by taking averages over the total life of an author's account (which can be as many as five years). This means that there are statistical outliers that may impact the real world average experience of writers. Obviously quality, topical decisions and a little luck can lead to differing individual results, but we are hoping to provide you some insights in to the texture and trends of article purchasing on the site. We are going to do a more in-depth analysis of the lag time between submission and sales.

One of the many things that we try to do here at Constant-Content is make our authors better, not only as writers, but as marketers of their own work. It can be an arduous task to become an online writer. Any information we can present you with helps make the process more efficient, and we have compiled statistics about the process of selling writing on Constant-Content and have come up with some suggestions to help you work smarter and more effectively.

This article took form through a desire to see what percentage of our authors had submitted articles, and then to look at how many of our writers who had indeed submitted articles had sold them. As we peered into the murky depths of a site-wide author analysis a very clear message started to poke its head from the magic eight ball of Jeff's (my partner in crime) computer station: If you publish they will come!

Perhaps the most important stat that we discovered in our analysis was that accepted articles on the site have a statistical average of selling 70% of the time. If you submit five or more articles you have a 97% chance of making at least one sale! Now obviously this isn't as earth shattering as say the invention of cooked food, but it certainly is a buoy to those who work hard on articles and worry about all that work being for naught. If you write it, they will buy it. And if you write lots they will almost CERTAINLY buy it.

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Another metric that we looked at was the affect of multiple sales of a single article on the value to a writer of each document that they submitted. So we took the total licenses sold and divided it by the total articles submitted and the result was that you can expect to sell licenses equaling 87% of the articles in your catalog (ie: if you have 20 articles you will be likely to sell 17 licenses, made up of more than one sale of some articles and no sales for others). Another striking piece of information that started to emerge is that 30% of our writers license sales equal 100% or more (up to 500%) of their total submitted articles, and that stat took on an upward trend if you isolated for writers who had more than one sale, the amount of writers that have sold licenses equaling 100% or more of their catalogue jumped to 50%. This suggests that getting that first sale is the biggest hurdle in getting your name out there, and becoming someone that buyers come to trust and rely on to develop their content.

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[JShade]

As it is obvious to have over a 100% sales you must sell certain articles for usage rights, I am curious what type of articles are best sold multiple times? Anyone out their who would be willing to share?

[Constant]

HI JShade-
I'm not sure that there are any particular types of articles that sell multiple times, in fact the articles that sell more than once are often just products of luck. Often if a good article on a hot topic (one of many hot topics) ends up selling for usage right away then it is only available for usage and will sell a a number of times. Most good articles are snapped up for fullrights and thus are not available for multiple sales. In fact it is often better to not have multiple sales since it may take a more sales than are reasonable to make up for the loss of a fullrights sale.

Make sense.

David

[Debbi]

David,

Right! So can we have an option NOT to offer usage rights, pretty pleeeeese

[hiding for asking for too much]

[Lysis]

Debbie, what you can do to really discourage usage is set it to the same price as fullrights. There are some things I'm just never going to give up for usage at $7 even if it sits on CC until the hard drive crashes and the website disappears. LOL

[Celeste Stewart]

I often do this:
Usage - $40
Unique - $40
Full rights - $40

[Debbi]

Yeah, I know there are good workarounds. I'm just a nut for clean, concise presentation style.

CC, please don't take my suggestions as criticism in any way. I love you!

Debbi

[Celeste Stewart]

Yeah, but if someone wants to pay me $40 (or whatever I have set) for usage, I'll take it and then get to sell it again

[Debbi]

Right on! (Does that expression date me?)

[Constant]

Debbi-
I don't think that we would do that. I just think it would create too many logistical problems especially since there is absolutely no benefit to the current system. Doing what Celeste suggests creates the same thing without creating more work for little result.

David

[Debbi]

Ok

[JShade]

Right on! (Does that expression date me?)

How do you date an expression?



Their has to be a good joke somewhere in that sentence.

Will try again at another time.

[Phil]

Right on! (Does that expression date me?)

If it does, make sure that dinner and a movie is good to go. Once hubby finds out then all bets are off.

[BarryDavidson]

I am curious what type of articles are best sold multiple times? Anyone out their who would be willing to share?

Different people get different results. To date, the only articles I've had which sell multiple times are ones which would be categorized as filler content. Most of the people or businesses which bought them used them to drive traffic somewhere else. Granted, the only articles I have up for usage are the ones which are posted or published elsewhere that I still retain the rights to.

In my opinion, it's better to write new articles and sell them for full rights. I've made far more that way. Eventually I'll NEED to sell a few "non-filler" articles for usage so I can beef up my writing resume, but until then I'll keep selling for full rights.

[RobertCade]

The average lag time between acceptance and sale would have been a very useful metric, but you said that you are working on that - when can we expect an update? In the meantime, does anywhere care to make an estimate on their personal lag time?