What is your CC "Eureka" moment?

[Celeste Stewart]

Selling words is fun! Congrats and enjoy the first taste

[Evelyn]

I've been selling my words for more than 20 years and trust me, my first sale on C-C was a special moment. Keep it up, my friend.

[mrgamboloyd]

Congratulations Charlotte. I know that feeling well. Enjoy it

[CharlotteAndrews]

Thanks for the congrats, all!

[Gouldm80]

I am so thrilled to finally be a contributor to this thread! It's been just 8 days shy of a month since I first happened upon this wonderful site, and I just had my first sale today. I've written 28 articles so far about various topics, and their length varies from just shy of 300 words to over 2,000. Lately, I've been wondering about whether I had made a wise choice in investing so much time into writing for this site, and validation came this evening when I logged in to CC. My first sale!
I rejected a lousy offer about a week ago, but tonight someone purchased a 575 word piece for full rights of $30. I made $19.50 for something that took a little more than an hour to write, edit, and post. I definitely think this qualifies as a "Eureka!" moment and hope it is but the first of many.
I'd like to thank all of you who have contributed to this forum with helpful advice and encouragement...it has made a huge difference. Thanks also to the editing staff for your patience with my blunders. I hope that we can all make some money together.
I'm really kind of in shock right now, and I hope that I don't sound like a bumbling idiot, but this is just too great. For the first time in my life, I was paid to write something!
Ok, I'm going to go make myself useful elsewhere before I make an idiot out of myself with my display of overwhelming excitement. Who knew making just under 20 bucks could feel so great?!?

[jadedragon]

It's ok - it feels pretty good to get paid for writing the first time. I remember my first check for a magazine article when I was 14 and getting paid to write never gets old Your building a great portfolio and you can expect many more happy moments if you continue writing.

[CharlotteAndrews]

Congratulations! BTW, I blundered on like an idiot more than you, and m first sale was for use for only $7! For a whole $30, you definitely deserve to go on for a bit.

Enjoy!

[Celeste Stewart]

Congrats on your Eureka moment! Enjoy every minute - you deserve it! Best of all, the feeling never gets old.

[Gouldm80]

Thank you all for your kind words. That first sale seems to have set something off and since then I've sold two more pieces including the longest one I've written to date. I'm now working on a private request for a buyer who purchased the second and third articles that I've sold. The only tragedy here is that I didn't discover this site years ago. I would have been writing up a storm.
Thanks again for all of the useful advice. The camaraderie amongst the members here is amazing. It's really refreshing to be a part of a group of people who are essentially competition for each other and yet don't act like it. I'll do my best to be a positive and helpful influence on these forums to continue what is already in place.
I hope everyone had a safe and sound Labor Day.

Cheers,
Mike

[raywinters]

This thread can be a little dispiriting. I have been publishing for over 20 years, and I recently started doing this because I am out of a job. Granted, I am only in my second week, but reading about these people who several years ago had such quick responses to their joining up makes me think the magical eureka times might have passed. CC advertises to its customers that it has 43,000 writers. If that is true, what chance do we have at getting noticed? I believe that 2-4 years ago hard work and stick-to-it-ive-ness would do the trick. We may have passed a threshold where there are too many of us non-hall of famers to really get rolling. What do you think?

[Antonia]

Ah, but this thread IS current! It was started in 2008 but it's been going steadily and if you look at the dates on the posts you'll see many eureka moments in the past couple of months.

A couple of notes that may help put things in perspective:

- 43,000 is simply the number of people who signed up as writers. It doesn't mean all those people are active writers. Some people never submit an article, some submit 2 or 3 and then fizzle out. You can get a better idea of how many writers are active by looking at the recently sold list and the forums.
- "Getting noticed" is sort of a non-issue. Many customers search by topic. They don't care whether you've written 1 article or 200. There's enough work to go round. Being in the Hall of Fame must be nice, but nobody starts out there.

Is there anything specific that's causing you to feel dispirited? How many articles do you have in your portfolio?

[raywinters]

Thank you for you kind reply, Antonia. My accepted articles are small, although I've written a bunch that I haven't even been able to submit. (6 in the hopper rule until you get 10 accepted.) I don't want to hijack this discussion with a complete segue. What I was concerned about was as the years went by people's eureka moments seemed to be less and less intense. In 2008 people seemed to be able to start making real money pretty quickly. In the last several months people get excited about making $20. In all honesty this is my problem: I don't have a job and I need to support a family. If I churn out about 100 articles in the next month or two develop a real portfolio, will I be on my way to picking up some private requests and bring in some real money? By real money I mean averaging $150 a day. Maybe that is what's behind it all.

That said, this thread is not supposed to be about bumming. We have other threads for that. I was just seeing if others had noticed what seemed to be diminishing returns as time went on.

[Celeste Stewart]

If you look at the first post in this thread (started by yours truly), you'll see my "Eureka" moment was over a $13 net sale and the realization that this site was a good fit for me. The spirit of this thread isn't how much money is flowing in, but that moment when the discovery of what this site can mean to you really sinks in. The discovery could be as simple as realizing that there's a built-in community to shoot the breeze with in between articles (or sentences for that matter) to realizing that the same customer is buying every single business article you write to "Hey, maybe I CAN give up my day job."

While more writers have signed up since this thread began, so have more customers. The site has grown across the board and there are lots more public requests coming in than I remember from 2008.

[raywinters]

Thanks a lot, Celeste. Maybe this is my Eureka moment: I can communicate with other writers. I appreciate all that you've done.

[messenger77]

I'm new to CC and fairly new to the world of freelance writing. All the other freelance writing sites I've tried so far charge outrageous amounts of money to be able to place bids on projects that are highly underpaid. It's almost like slave-labor!

Anyway, when I came across CC, I believe it was on an About.com sidebar, and I checked it out, read through some forum posts, seen how it worked, and looked at the prices being charged and paid for articles, I was astounded and realized the potential there was here.

So here I am. I haven't sold anything yet but I have had two articles accepted and one under review as of today, I just need to spend more time on article writing, which I plan to do now that some other things are out of the way. Thanks CC!