How to Sell More Article Part II
Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 2:19 pm
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.
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.
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.
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.