Category Archives: Suite 101

Suite 101, Writing

My Income Taxes…

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…are done! Put a fork in them. Finished the Federal last night; will have to pay a small amount. Not too bad considering Lynda’s stock trading made a decent profit. Of course, we have to move the maximum into our IRAs to get the taxes as low as possible. Finished the Arkansas state taxes about a hour ago; will get back a nice amount–not as good as last year, but several times over what I have to pay to the Feds. Had to figure it two different ways to determine which way was better. I’m a happy man.

Tomorrow I will copy and mail them. That’s actually a challenge, for due to businesses I have lots of attachments.

I’d like to get back to this blog with some kind of regularity, but alas a number of things have dropped while I was working on taxes, also due to having to work on my church’s parking lot rehab. For the rest of tonight I’ll simply say I have to spend some quality time with my checkbook, and make sure all is well there. Then there’s the kids and grandkid coming tomorrow, so there’s some prep work there. So I can’t spend much time here tonight, and probably not again till Friday night or even Saturday.

Oh, I will say that, after a significant drop over the Easter weekend, my page views are climbing nicely at Suite 101. The last three days have all been well above average with revenue as well. Maybe my stock trading tax articles and my Earth Day 40th anniversary articles are pulling their weight and more-so.

Suite 101

Thinking out loud: Is Suite worth it—for me?

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The Suite mantra:
– Average $3.90 per 1000 PVs
– Average $1.00 to $2.00 per article per month
– Page views go up over time

If those are averages, then someone must be below that. It appears to be me in the extreme.

I just did an analysis on my page view statistics for articles I posted in June through October of last year, 57 articles. They are all evergreen, except perhaps for one article somewhat related to the US Independence Day that I posted July 2, 2009. I checked to see if my page views were going up over time. See the attached graph.

The only month that, in March 2010, had the most page views was my June 2009 articles, and that barely so. All the others peaked in October 2009, and have declined ever since. July articles are down 33 percent from their peak in October. Aug-Sep-Oct articles are down 50 percent since their peak in October. The graph shows a slight uptrend in 2010, but a very flat uptrend. So, as of right now, I conclude that I’m somehow not able to achieve the Suite mantra concerning rising page views over time. And, despite posting 36 more articles since the end of October, I’ve not come even close to the October highs with all articles counted.

Now, if revenue were good, I might ignore falling page views. But my present rate of $/article/per month is $0.13. Yes, a mere 13 cents per article per month. That’s my average for the last 30 days. In 2010 it’s been as high as $0.20 and as low as $0.08, but for the last month it’s been pretty stable at $0.13.

So, if I don’t post any more articles, and page views and revenues stay the same (i.e. the trend of declining page views stops), I can expect to earn $12.09 a month in residual income. My articles take about 2 hours to write, between research, writing, and the nuisance of finding, documenting, uploading, and captioning images. It would be nice to earn $15 per hour for this work. That’s kind of low, but it beats what I could earn delivering pizzas. For 93 articles published, and 2 hours per article, and $15 per hour, that would be $2,790. Based on what I’ve earned so far, including the $101 I earned for a contest, it will take me 216 months to get up to $15 per hour. 18 years. That doesn’t account for the time value of money. If I figured that in, I’ve no doubt it would be 40 years. If page views were increasing, I could perhaps ignore current revenue in favor of future prospects. But page views are going down.

Am I crazy doing this, writing for Suite, writing for Internet content? A Suite writer once wrote in the Suite forums that some people can’t or won’t write in topics that are lucrative enough to be successful at this. That seems to describe me. I can’t write about something about which I know nothing. Another wrote in the Suite forums that Suite 101 is not for everyone. I’m starting to think that includes me.

So, it seems this is the time to back off Suite and think about it. I’m going to write just the minimum, ten articles per quarter, and see if something turns around. If it doesn’t, I may drop out all together and just take the $12.09 a month and fill up the pick-up three times a year.
freelance writing, Suite 101, Writing

Reversal of Fortune

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Well, the article that BiblioBuffet accepted is now rejected. A week after acceptance they e-mailed me requesting changes, saying, “You do have a wonderful topic here. But…it needs to be more you and less a college assignment.” I tried. I looked at it slowly, reading it over and over, finally coming up with a “patch”, an addition to it where I used words for the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence to express my feelings. No good, according to the editor. I received the e-mail this afternoon: “While I do find [your essay] well written it is missing…passion. I still see nothing of you in it. …There’s nothing that tells me…why you…or care about it. I am afraid I am going to have to decline to run this essay. …I urge you to continue with your writing group. Perhaps in a year or you might wish to try us again.“

“A year.” That in itself speaks volumes.

Oh, well. But to what do I ascribe this failure? I’m wondering if the uber-objective viewpoint required by Suite101.com has caused be to think only in that mode and have trouble with the personal point of view and with creative writing. That’s a possibility. Or maybe I really want to write college essays rather than creative pieces. That’s a possibility. Or maybe I just don’t have it. Whether or not I turn out to be the hero of my writing career…blah, blah, blah.

Oh, well. Tonight, being in a bachelor mode with Lynda in OKC, I went to Barnes & Noble after work. I had a gift card burning a hole in my pocket, and last time I was there didn’t find anything I really had to have. Tonight I picked up a remainders copy of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Six hundred and eight-six glorious pages of his letters, plus index; a fair number of footnotes, and I love footnotes. This will be enjoyable reading for me, even given ACD’s spirituality issues. Into the reading pile with it; should get to it in late 2011.

I also looked in three writing magazines and culled some ideas. I’m wondering now how to approach my freelancing, or if I should just go back to novel and Bible study writing and see what I can do there. The good news is I made a whole $0.30 at Suite101 on Tuesday. Two tanks of gas per year for 72,000 words. Either I’m crazy or obsessed.

Carlyle, Suite 101, Writing

The Roller-Coaster Ride Continues

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…I feel as of old that the only true enemy I have to struggle with is the unreason within myself. If I have given s[uch] things harbour within me I must with pain cast them out again.

Thus wrote Thomas Carlyle on August 27, 1833 in a letter to his brother John. I read this today, not for the first time, as I was doing some more research into the relationship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. The article I wrote and recently submitted to BiblioBuffet (now word yet, BTW) dealt with Emerson’s first letter to Carlyle after they met. I wanted to research more about their meeting, as background for the next of these articles or to perhaps expand and re-market the article already written. But I prate.

I found Carlyle’s words to be exactly what I needed today, for again I’m on the writing roller-coaster ride. Despite adding several new articles to Suite101.com as of late, page views are not really growing (just a little, perhaps), and revenues have quit growing and are regressing. For Feb 7-9 I earned 10 lousy cents. For all my 64,800 or so words posted there in a little less than ten months, I’ve earned just over $60 dollars, not including the one contest I won. That’s less than 1/10th of a cent per word, and less than $1.00 per article in total. The Suite gurus say $1.00 per article per month is the site average. I’m sure skewing the curve on the low side.

On days like this it doesn’t seem that I should continue to write there, if at all. Why bother? Fiction is too difficult to break in. Bible studies are saturated. Non-fiction requires credentials. Poetry is a non-starter. Political essays are fun but where’s the money in that? And freelancing requires so much work and so much patience and such a long lead time to earn any money or build any platform that it doesn’t seem worth it.

The only thing that recommends writing to me is that I enjoy doing it. Is that enough?

Carlyle seems to have ridden the same roller-coaster I have, or should I say I’m on the same one he rode almost 180 years ago. That wasn’t his first time. But is it “unreason within myself” to question whether this writing thing I so enjoy is something I should pursue for economic gain, or for ministry? I don’t know. I guess I’ll spend a couple of weeks considering this.

Meanwhile I will still write articles for Suite, so long as I have subjects to write on. This afternoon I wrote and published one about construction engineering; this evening I wrote and published one about pollution prevention at construction sites. I have perhaps twenty more articles cued up, some of the research already begun or done from my regular course of vocational duties. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up, but I will for a while.

Although my novel in progress is open on my computer. I have a new poem rolling around somewhere inside my skull, waiting to land for a while at the correct side of my brain and in the correct lobe. A friend is reviewing one of my incomplete Bible studies, and I just borrowed a book from the pastor for research for another. So Suite better start making economic sense, if it wants me to continue.

Engineering, Suite 101, Writing

It’s Snowing – Again

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Why does a snowstorm seem to be so distracting? We’ve had snow showers forecast for today for several days. Only Saturday night did that change to a winter storm warning, with 4 to 8 inches expected in our parts. For some reason, this storm has not had the media build-up that the last one did. The press has barely mentioned this one. Still, third snowstorm in 40 days makes this the snowiest winter since 2002-03. My mind today is too much on snow and not enough on engineering.

For the month of February, so far, I have been a good boy about my writing career. Just a few moments ago I fired off a freelance submittal that I had been working on for a couple of weeks, and which I ran by the writers guild last Tuesday. I have written and published four new articles at Suite101.com in February, including two over the weekend. I haven’t posted four in one week since–what was it, August? I would love to be able to post four new ones every week, and see if I can get un-stuck as far as revenue and page view growth is concerned. Actually, beginning in January I did see an uptick in revenue, both total revenue and revenue per article per month. It’s still pretty small, but at least it’s heading in the right direction.

Over the weekend I read an old Writers Digest magazine that I picked up somewhere. And I subscribed to Poets and Writers magazine, with an incredible one-year deal. I normally look at this mag at Barnes & Noble, it’s so expensive. But it’s about my favorite writers magazine. Of course, the checkbook is so low right now I probably shouldn’t have. I’ll get a $25 payout from Suite101 tomorrow, so I guess I earned it.

Some other ideas have begun to gel. I have about twenty Suite101 articles beginning to cue up, with six or so having some research already done. A Bible study that’s been on my mind for a few months has found its way to paper lately. I’m about to work on my novel in progress, which will make me feel incredibly good. And almost all my chores around the house are up to date.

The last three paragraphs have nothing to do with the snowstorm. I tried to find a master metaphor between snow and engineering and writing, but alas I’ve failed. So I’ll simply say: Let it snow! I’ll bring home some work tonight, some studying I need to do for in-house classes to teach, and spend a joyous eight hours at the kitchen table tomorrow, planning and writing three or four classes.

content writing, environment, Suite 101

The HEED-onist Rises

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I’m thinking of applying for a Feature Writer position at Suite101.com. Right now I’m a Contributing Writer there. The CW earns money when people click on ads, and when they get to fifty articles they earn a 10 percent bonus on those clicks. If one is a FW, the bonus changes to 20 percent and, when you get to 100 articles, it changes to 30 percent. A FW has a slightly higher commitment for writing articles, and must write so many articles in the category they are FW of. I would like to be FW of engineering, but that’s taken and I don’t know if I want to wait around and hope it is relinquished.

Yesterday, I learned the the FW position for Environmentalism is open. I learned that somewhat by accident. I had been planning to write some articles on Earth Day, this being the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day. Yesterday I was researching ED for some in-house CEI purposes, and decided to make an article out of it. Hopefully I’ll be able to write four or five related articles.

Why now, you ask, when ED is not until April 22? Well, just as in print publishing, articles in on-line publishing need some lead time. The problem is how Google and other search engines index articles, which includes some of how Suite101 pages are organized. Google, I take it, is not constantly crawling the web to find every new article. The web is too big, and just as a city will plow the snow off the main roads first and the side roads second, the search engines must prioritize. Some areas of the web they crawl regularly, some less frequently. Suite101 has a home page for each category of articles, and on each of those home pages is a list of latest articles. Google crawls those pages multiple times a day, and the new articles get picked up right away and indexed. However, once the article falls off that page, as newer articles are added, Google somehow de-indexes the article.

Also, I understand that Google et. al. gives a page rank boost to new content. So in the first few days of a web page’s appearance, Google gives it a boost. However, once the new page boost ends, a page sinks to lower ranking in the search. It then has to sink or swim on its own based on quality, back-links, and whatever other factors the search engines put in their search algorithms.
So that all means that if I want my articles to stand out from the Internet crowd as much as possible as April 22 draws near, I have to write them and get them posted now. The lead time in on-line publishing is much shorter than for print, but there’s still a lead time.

So I posted the article, then went to the home page for Environmentalism to see how it looked among the new ones. When I got there, I didn’t see the picture of the FW for Environmentalism. A light bulb flashed. Ah ha! There is no FW for Environmentalism. Why, that’s something I could probably do. I was one once–an environmentalist–and still believe in much of what the movement stands for, though not what I consider the excesses. Perhaps I could apply for and get this position and add some balance to the environmental debate on the WWW. I’m thinking about it. The time and creativity commitment is really minimal. I would probably change my article mix at Suite101, but that’s no problem. I’m taking a day or so to ponder and pray about it, but will probably make the application.

Those of you who didn’t know me in college are probably wondering about the title of this post. The student environmental club at the University of Rhode Island was H.E.E.D.–Humans to End Environmental Deterioration. I joined right away freshman year (fall 1970) and became active. I never was an officer in the club, but made some significant contributions. Some one of my friends at college (not sure which one, though I think it was CJN) started calling me the Hedonist, getting a chuckle out of the play on words but not really getting the spelling right. So that became one of my college nicknames, and continues to this day among the (un)informed.

I suppose, if I get that FW position, I will once again be the HEED-onist.

Examiner, freelance writing, Suite 101, Writing

Sleeplessness

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After sleeping [cliche alert!] the sleep of the dead Wednesday night, which followed a day of mostly sleeping while my body fought the stomach bug, last night, Thursday night, started sleepless. To find the cause(s) that set my mind going so strong I guess I need to retrace the day.

  • At work my weight was down to an 11 month low. I’d have been disappointed if it wasn’t, after what I went through Tuesday night/Wednesday.
  • Also at work, I took a stand against a bad practice I feel another engineer was doing, refusing to approve something for submittal to a State agency, and that felt good.
  • By the end of the work day I (think I) figured out what is wrong with my flood model, which caused FEMA to reject it. Today I get to put that theory to the test. Unfortunately it’s going to be tedious work, model revision cross-section by cross-section, tweak upon tweak, plus adding about three cross-sections, which is tedious in itself.
  • At home I had a good evening playing with Ephraim, giving him his bath, reading stories, and rocking/singing him to sleep. He’s responding well to what I have him do.
  • After that, I completed an article for Suite101.com and posted it, the first article I posted since Dec 17. It felt good, and it’s the first of a cluster of four or five articles on the same topic that should go fairly easy.
  • Then I left the Dungeon, came upstairs and read 16 pages in my current reading book, The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. I’m not yet half-way through its 680 pages, though getting close to that milestone.

So, which of these things caused my sleeplessness, such that laying down at 11:45PM saw me still awake at 1AM? I suppose all of them. I had visions of Ephraim, knocking down the block towers I built, and asking me to do the “pokey pokey”. I had visions of a floodplain model, corrected and doing exactly what FEMA wants while at the same time providing protection and appropriate access to flood insurance for residents of the city. I saw a company that puts ethics above mere adherence to an arbitrary schedule, and engineers who knew the right way of doing things and did things that way. Strangely (?), I had no vision of any short story by Mr. Twain.

But most of all I saw writing projects, many of them. I saw a whole host of articles at Suite101, including rising page views and revenues. I saw my short story published. I had a vision of teaching a poetry writing class [this one is on-going, nightly], asked to do so based on my Suite101 articles on poetry. I saw Father Daughter Day published and a huge success. I saw the e-zine/magazine I’d like to publish, Technophobia, published, and a wild success. I saw my newspaper column, “Documenting America”, syndicated and a wild success, with spin off books as a result. And I saw myself writing for Examiner.com as the Northwest Arkansas Christianity Examiner, again with wild success.

All of this because I managed to get eight hundred words and change coherently put together and published, after a sickness-caused dry spell of a month. No telling what visions of failure will do.

So at 1:15 AM I got up, had a bowl of cereal with real sugar and cinnamon, watched a little of a news program replay, found a Writers Digest I hadn’t read yet and read an article about religious publishing wars (which turned out to be a bit misleading based on its title), and went back to bed around 2AM. Sleep came at some point, not sure when. The alarm at 6AM seemed a lot louder than normal.

Suite 101

Year-end Summary for Suite101.com

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I began writing for Suite101.com on June 21, 2009. I see this as part of my platform-building plan, a slow plan that I hope will increase potential readership of books I someday hope to publish. I’m not sure that I’ve explained this plan in detail on this blog, nor that I will, for fear it is going to have zero impact on my publishing worth. But it’s a plan, and I’m following it. So how did I do at Suite, in about half a year? Here’s some stats:

Articles published: 72
Words therein: approx. 58,000
Revenue earned: $40.57
Views of articles: 31,014
Revenue per article: $0.56
Revenue per word: $0.0007
Revenue per 1000 page views: $1.31

Paltry. Pathetic. As far as revenue goes. Although, I was one of the winners of that November contest at Suite, which paid me $101. I suppose I should add that in. Then it would be:

Revenue earned: $141.57
Revenue per article: $1.97
Revenue per word: $0.0024
Revenue per 1000 page views: $4.56

Better, but still weak.

And those 31,014 views of my articles, while not bad, are certainly not a platform, as those people almost all found my articles from a search engine, not because they were looking for me or my work.

So, has it been worth it? I set aside my novel-in-progress to work on Suite articles, as I said all in a platform-building exercise. Has it been worth it? My assessment: Too early to tell. I need to stick with it, try to add 150 or so articles this year, and re-assess next January. Also, I need to find a way to make a little more money writing, and to continue to work on my novel as I do all that.

Retirement is only 7 years, 11 months, and 12 days away.

Suite 101, Writing

Good News to Counter the Bad

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Well, my arthritis in my fingers is still bad this morning. Saw the doctor yesterday. They x-rayed my right hand and found no trauma. His conclusion is a severe rheumatoid arthritis attack. He prescribed me a steroid and a strong pain killer. Went to the pharmacy later that evening and they had the painkiller but not the steroid. Seems something was unclear about what the doc wanted, and they wouldn’t fill it until he returned their call. Since the doc’s office is closed today (a special day off, it appears) I may not get that medicine till Monday. The painkiller is helping a little, I guess.

And I got my pickup back yesterday. New engine, rebuilt clutch, new warranty. I’m considerably poorer, though I’m glad to have this friend back who has carried me for over thirteen years now. Looks like I’ll have to take it back in tomorrow morning, for they failed to properly fasten the boot in the cab at the bottom of the gear stick. It’s kind of flopping around and I can hear all kinds of strange noises coming from below somewhere.

But the real good news is last night I had an e-mail from the Suite101 editor-in-chief. My article on homemade turkey soup was chosen as one of the winners in the Best of the Holidays contest. The announcement hasn’t been made publicly yet, but I imagine it will be today. The prise is $101, which comes at an opportune time, both in terms needing the money and needing the confidence boost.

Suite 101

A Report on Suite101.com

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I have now finished 5 1/2 months as a writer at Suite101.com. I have a little bit of perspective, though not really enough yet to know if it is worthwhile. As I’ve stated before, I first applied to Suite in the hopes of using it to increase my platform–that is, increase the number of potential book buyers I would bring to a publisher. For that purpose, how much money I earn there should be irrelevant. Of course, I couldn’t let it be irrelevant forever, so money has become one of the goals and motivating factors for participation there.

For platform-building purposes, the number of page views I get is most important. The first graph (wish I could get the graphs clearer–click on the graph for a clearer image) shows where I stand with page views. I peaked in mid-October when I had 53 articles posted, and began a slow decline. Page views tanked over Thanksgiving, though that’s to be expected. They have recovered nicely, but not to where they were right before Thanksgiving. Still, my current readership is 86,000 people per year with current article total at 70. That’s not too shabby.

Revenue is going up, though I’m way below the reported site average. The second graph shows my revenue history. It is more volatile than are page views, but the trend is upward. The third graph shows revenue per week. While revenue is still low, I had four of my best weeks in November to early December. As I wrote once before, I began writing some different type articles around October 21st to try to stimulate revenue. That seems to have worked, though the coincident peak in page views at the same time is curious, if not causal. I’ll have to watch that and see how page views go in January, after we get past all this holiday hubbub.

Last week the site went through a major face lift, completely changing its look. The site had limited functionality for about 20 hours, which probably hurt page views and revenue. It’s too soon to know if and how the new look will affect readership and revenue. I can and do hope for the best, however.