I signed up at Associated Content quite some time ago – last December. I was lured in by the prospect of earning up to $20 per article that I wrote – the advertised top upfront payment.

I didn’t actually write an article until September of this year. For some reason, I never got around to it. I was quite pleased when they offered me an upfront payment of $10 for my first article.

Since then, I’ve written another 30 articles and published them at Associated Content. I’ve gotten a better idea of what to expect, payment wise. The initial $10 seems to be a high payment to entice you to write more… and it definitely worked.

Like I wrote in this page about how much you can earn at AC, I came to expect an average of about $4-5 per article. For a while I experimented with non-exclusive articles and I saw that average drop to about $3-4 per article.

Since September, I’ve published 31 articles at Associated Content. A handful of those were not for up front payment. A few of them were already published on another blog, and I felt uncomfortable asking for upfront payment (although at this point I think I should have). A couple others I used to promote my own website – so I figured it wasn’t right to ask for payment for those, either. 

So, between the 25 or so articles that I published up front and the performance payments for the past few months, I’ve earned about $120.00. I also have not had any of my articles that I submitted for up front payment rejected.

Is this typical? I’d say it’s typical of what you can do without doing a lot of work. I didn’t attempt to publicize my work – so I didn’t reap a lot from the performance payment. I also didn’t experiment much to find a niche that was more popular than education. I found it very easy to write those 25 articles and earn over $100 – and I think anyone can do a similar thing.

I also wasn’t writing as fast as I could have. I just started a new job teaching in September, so my free time for writing was drastically cut back. When I sat down and wrote a few articles at a time, it was easy to make $20 – other times I’d just publish one article in a week for $4.

A lot of money? No. But it got me a little spending cash, and I really didn’t put a lot of time into it. This is, however, proof that the money is there – and they pay consistently. The amount that you make is based on how much you’re willing to work and how much time you’ve got to spare.

So if you haven’t signed up already… head over to Associated Content and write an article or two. There’s some spending cash waiting for you.