Lesson Learned: Why Give Them a Cut of Your Cash?

Nearing two years now, I have published articles at a large variety of sites including Suite 101, Hubpages, Examiner and several others as well as several smaller sites, guest blog posts and etc. This is where earned all of my passive earnings until one day, almost a year ago, that I stumbled upon No Job For Mom and read Felicia's post about earning revenue from your own blogs and sites. Like a light bulb, the realization of what this actually meant flashed in my head.
By creating a blog or purchasing a domain, I create a site where all the profits from Google AdSense (the most common revenue program used by large content sites), Amazon Associates and Info Links, among others, come straight into my pocket. Nobody gets a cut of my cash. Well, except maybe the company behind the ads. Nobody takes a percentage of each ad click into their pocket. There are no pesky "How much do I actually make" formulas to figure out. You already know if someone clicks an ad, the entire profit from that click goes to your account.

Did I immediately jump on the band wagon and create a mass of well written, great producing blogs/sites to increase my revenue earnings? Not exactly. Yes, I created the Freelancing Mommie and when it had only earned about $10 in six months, I left it alone for awhile. I justified it by thinking "I didn't really know what I was doing anyways." I returned to content sites to post revenue articles. Then it HIT.

What hit you may ask? But if you are a residual writer, then you know the big bang that depleted our revenue earnings on these content sites was none other than Panda.

For those that may not know, Google changed their algorithm which resulted in any site that offered a large variety of topics by an even larger amount of writers with articles being published in the thousands each day being labeled a content farm...content mill...content factory. I heard all the terms, didn't like none of them. 

The simplest way to look at this algorithm change is to understand that these types of sites lost their page index with Google, resulting on being knocked to the bottom of the list on search results when they previously were frequent first pagers. When the page index dropped, so did our page views and earnings. It was then I realized I should have been more focused on Freelancing Mommie as well as other ideas I have for blogs and sites and less focused on providing content for sites who only give my a small portion of my articles earnings.

Did I let this get me down? Did I give up? Nope! I watched my earnings continue to drop while organizing and creating new sites and improving Freelancing Mommie. I wasn't angry at the Google slam down. I was upset with myself that I allowed myself to give up on my site to place my articles on other people's sites. If nothing else, Felicia from No Job For Mom is my inspiration as a freelance writer and I should have taken her advice long before the elusive Panda came crashing into my passive income.

Today, I have four functioning, income earning blogs and two more in the works, some receive better views than others...some make more revenue than others. Am I saying this isn't hard, time consuming work? Nope, I have had many sleepless nights working on my sites and researching tricks of the trade. But the more high quality articles I write, the more revenue income I earn.

Do I still publish articles at content type sites? Yes, I do. My earnings have continued to rise at several of these sites and I feel the more passive income articles I have online, the higher my earnings will be. Writing is writing...if you have a passion for it, it doesn't matter where you post it. Good quality, well written pieces will earn money.