Your first AdSense click
You have written and published one quality blog post after another, and finally, your application to display ads on your blog and earn money through them has been approved.
And then, literally out of the blue, and after a few days have passed with your AdSense dashboard showing zero earnings, you log in your AdSense account and see 1 click that has earned you the incredible amount of $0.58!
At first, you cannot believe your eyes, and press the Refresh button of your browser, but the amount of $0.58 stays fixed right there in front of your mesmerized eyes.
Thoughts start springing to mind without any control. Could this be the start of your journey to online riches that you have always dreamt of?
You do your maths and discover that, if you manage to have 1,000 daily impressions on your blog, this could earn you a decent living, like a normal 9-5 job. Incredible, isn’t it?
Then, unintentionally, you start recalling memories of various events and milestones during your adventure as an online writer, while you tried to earn income from writing.
When you wrote for Helium.com
Your first attempt to establish your presence as an online writer was with Helium.com, which was an online platform for writers who wanted to share their knowledge on various subjects, and get paid at the same time.
This was back in 2009. It’s been a long time since then, hasn’t it? Helium used a revenue-sharing system to pay its writers that was based on a fixed amount per thousand views. For example, in the business category, writers were paid $1.5/1,000 views.
I know that many readers will say that this was too low. However, if you managed to have a steady flow of views, every single cent added to your earnings in the long run. You had a couple of articles and the accumulated earnings of each one of them slowly but steadily reached the amount of $15 over a period of three years.
Then, the platform owners changed their publishing model and offered other models of payment to writers, and that was the point when you stopped earning any money from this website.
Being active on Redgage.com
This is another online writing platform where writers can share their posts, links, images, and videos, and get paid per view on their content.
If you believed that Helium’s payment rates to its writers were low, what would you say if you knew that Redgage pays just $0.60 per 1,000 views?
However, I managed to get paid twice ($25 each time) through the Redgage prepaid card that was sent to my address by post.
Unfortunately, it was too good to continue, and although Redgage is still an active online writing website, many writers have abandoned it, since it has effectively stopped processing payment requests for some years now; another casualty in the list of revenue sharing websites that went down.