Earning Online

Aside from Squidoo, the most popular paid to write (PTW) programs online are Helium, Triond, and Associated Content. They pay a residual income for articles you write about whatever interests you and in some cases, upfront payments, bonus payments, and incentives for referrals.

If you are a bit shy and just getting started in PTW, then I recommend starting out with Triond, since in many ways it is the easiest to use. When writing for Triond it is very important that your article be your own work, not published anywhere else on the internet, and mechanically clean. They have no referral program. All you need to do is sign up, click on the publish button, and follow their simple online instructions for uploading your article. They then look your article over, run it through plagiarism checking software, and when approved they showcase it online and send you an e-mail link to your published article. They welcome writers from anyway, pay net 15 monthly, with a low minimum payout of only 50 cents for PayPal, the best of their 3 payment options. It is pretty hard not to make payout every month with Triond, so even if your residual income stream starts out small, there is motivation to keep up the momentum. Additional encouragement comes from other Triond members who can be uniquely supportive. Triond facilitates interaction among members by providing a unique and informative dashboard with various attractive profiles for each member.

If you are brave and like to work more openly in a community of writers where writing is a bit on the chic side and members are encourage to debate issues and complete with essays on the same subject, Helium is the place to start. Their minimum payout is much higher at $25, Helium articles are rather conspicuously rated by other members, but this kind of competitiveness is often just the thing some of us need to get the juices flowing. Helium requires that members either write or "rate" at least one article every 6 months to stay active. That is a pretty easy requirement, since rating an article is pretty much just like reading someone else's work, an activity that usually inspires me to want to write another article of my own. Helium vigorously promotes member interaction by allowing users to have buddy lists and send messages to other members. For people interested in getting paid per article rather than waiting for the passive income, they have a Marketplace where free lance writers can tackle assignments that may pay up to $80 each. In my experience, Helium pays the casual writer a bit less in earnings than Triond, but that is probably because I am somewhat less outgoing than the Helium superstars. Helium pays 5% commission to you on your down line earnings.

Associated Content is a wonderful place to write for passive online income, too, and probably pays the highest earnings of the three. However, even with many years of experiencing writing in a computer-assisted environment, even I find the interaction with AC's web site a bit daunting at times. There minimum payout is only $10, though, and do have a referral program. Unlike Helium, where you pretty much have to know the people you refer, AC gives out referral links which can be advertised anywhere.

All three of these programs have volumes of FAQs and other helpful information to set their members on the right track and help us maximize earnings, along the lines of Squidoo's excellent SquidU. It is also possible to make changes and corrections if you submit articles with mistakes, although there is a strong emphasis on getting it right the first time. This brings me to the reason why Squidoo is moving up fast toward the top of my list of favorite paid to write programs. Here we can write articles that are fully within our own power to reshape and grow. In truth, however, all of the PTW programs work quite well with one another and there is no reason not to enjoy income from them all. Unlike those using a personal blog, members of programs such as Squidoo, Triond, Helium, and AC are under no pressure to work. We can submit when and what we want to and all the tedium is left to others. All we have to do is have fun and share the revenue.

So far, I have commented a little on each of the top programs for earning passive income for casual online writing, but there is another paid to write program which is very popular. Although it does not pay residual income, except through the magic of referral commissions, myLot boasts a membership of over 100,000 people who earn a few pennies every time they contribute to a discussion that interests them in this highly addictive social networking paid to post program. MyLot accepts international members with the only requirement that be able to make themselves understood in English, which is the site's official language. With a minimum payout of $10 per month many members who reach payout every 2 or 3 months say they would participate in the program even if it did not pay. In truth, myLot is where I first learned about all four of the other PTW programs reviewed above. Almost every article I've written for the other programs has also arisen out of ideas hashed out on myLot first. Therefore, as much as I love passive income, in my view no article about PTW is complete without a mention of myLot.