Associated Content is a website that allows freelance writers to make some cash online by writing articles. I've been a member at Associated Content for 3 years and people are constantly coming into the forums asking if if they can really make money online writing articles at Associated Content and how much money they can make. It's impossible to say how much money you'll make writing online for Associated Content but it is possible to make money. Associated Content is not a get rich quick scheme though. It takes work. For some it takes too much work for the amount of pay. For others it's a nice way to make a little cash. I will attempt to go over some of the details.

The first way to make money online at Associated Content is what they call an upfront offer.  The author will submit an article online.  Associated Content will review it and decide whether they want to pay for it.  Then Associated Content will send you a price that they will pay for it.   Some authors at Associated Content say they get offered between $7 and $9 for articles. Personally I get between $4 and $5 for articles and I have both a high amount of page views and also a high page view average. These are supposedly factors in how much you will get paid so if I'm only getting $4 and $5 offers I doubt the amount of $7 to $9 offers is very high. Sometimes I'll even get an offer as low as $2 but that is usually for religious articles and Associated Content doesn't seem to think they will get enough page views to be worth more money than that.

$5, $4 or even $2 doesn't seem like much does it? Those looking to make money writing online are probably expecting more.  It depends on a lot of factors though. How fast can you type an article? Some articles I can write in 30 minutes. So sometimes I'm making $8 - $10 a hour. That's not a lot but it's good compared to some of the scams for making money online.

It also depends on if you have other options. Have you ever sold an article to magazines before? If you have, or you think you can, then you can make A LOT more than $5. But writing for a magazine means getting accepted, and it is a lot more difficult to get accepted, and then possibly waiting months to hear from them, and then waiting more months to get paid. The downside for making money by writing at Associated Content can definitely be the amount paid for upfront offers but the upside is getting accepted within a week and getting paid within another week. There have been a lot of complaints about Associated Content over the past three years but those complaints have never been payment. Associated Content always pays the money you are promised.

The upfront payments at Associated Content might not knock your socks off but even more money can be made writing online for Associated Content with the page view bonus. At Associated Content for every page view the author will get somewhere between $0.0015 to $0.0020 per page view. That doesn't seem like much but it adds up quickly if you get a lot of page views. That means for every 1,000 page views you are getting between $1.50 and $2.00.

The picture above shows just how much money you can make writing online from Associated Content's page view bonus. The problem most people have with Associated Content is they sign up expecting to write crappy little articles and have Associated Content hand them scores of money for it. It's not that easy. If you actually work hard to write articles that will bring in a lot of page views then you'll see that the page view bonus is where the money is at.

Take my own page view bonuses as an example. Back in January 2008 I was just spitting out article after article trying to make money on the upfront offers. I wrote 35 articles in January 2008 and I made a total of $170 on upfront offers. Add my page view bonus and I made $255. $255 over 35 articles is about $7.20 an article. That's not bad.

Put eventually I learned to stop just cranking out the articles and actually write good articles with keyword density in order to make them searchable on the internet. As you can see my page view bonus kept getting higher and higher. This month I have written less articles than I've ever written for Associated Content. Half way through the month of June I've only written 7 articles and I've only gotten $26.84 in upfront offers. But my page views are on pace to increase once again and give me a bonus of $221. I'm going to make $247.84 this month for 7 articles and back in January of 2008 I made $255 but it took 35 articles. That's $35.40 per article instead of $7.20. 

Are you going to get rich writing online for Associated Content? Probably not. Can you make extra cash at Associated Content? Absolutely. If you take a look around Associated Content you'll find it heavily populated by stay at home mothers and college students. That's because, while Associated Content is not a place to make a living, it is a place for people that need some extra cash but not be able to get a fulltime job because of school or kids. As you see above I've made $11,489.52 during my three years at Associated Content. An extra $3,000 a year never hurts and the more you put into it the more you can make.