Writing for Triond

I’ve not been writing for Triond quite a whole year, so you can’t really say I’m an expert on the topic.  August 2008 I was desperately searching the Internet for some way to supplement my income.  I was already working two jobs, so adding a third was seriously out of the question.  I had been looking all summer, so I had seen a lot of “get rich quick” and “Pay me to make money” schemes.   (Commemorated in one of my first poems for Triond  “Work at Home”.)

I found Triond through an ad.  I think through Writer’s Market, although it might have been on a different page.  I looked it up.  I was immediately impressed with Triond.

            1.  It did not promise instant riches.

            2.  No money was requested from interested writers.

            3.  There was a real, honest-to-gosh contract that laid out terms of association.

            4.  Although there were some detracting articles about Triond on the Internet, even the detractors  confirmed that Triond did pay—small, slow, but reliably and on time.

             5.  By receiving my remuneration through PayPal, I could receive payments as low as fifty cents; no need to wait for my account to build up to a large sum.

The first month, I mostly wrote poetry.  I received twenty cents, which I thought was pretty good.  That’s about a penny a poem.  Since poetry usually is published gratis for the love of doing it, I was fairly impressed. 

The second month, I earned forty-three cents, just a few pennies short of the needed fifty cents.  I wrote a couple of short articles, a few more poems, still kind of keeping after it.  I was pretty busy by this time.  Elementary school was back in session; and my little junior college was under-going accreditation reviews.  (Passed with flying colors, by the way.  I’m proud of us.)

  In October, I received my first PayPal deposit from Triond.  I had earned barely enough to receive a payment, but something is better than nothing (which is what I usually had received for my writing), so I felt encouraged.  I kept writing and posting.

By the end of January, I began noticing that some things sold better than others.   Some of my favorite topics, such as “Teaching HTML to Middle School Students” or “Meeting Theodore Sturgeon” languished while others such as “Fleas” and “Home Remedies for Sore Eyes” just kept on earning.  So I started looking for common characteristics in my successes:

            They were:

            1.      Solutions to universal problems.  (“Fleas” and “Home Remedies for Sore Eyes”)

            2.      Appealed to the stomach and the sweet tooth. (Toaster Oven Cookies)

            3.      An unusual approach to a life event. (A Family Wedding)

            4.      Made people feel happy.   (My Favorite Funny YouTube Videos)

            5.      Dealt with a popular or controversial topic.  (Heroes, Acai)

Even with this analysis, I never know for certain what response a posted item will bring.  Some things that I think will work just fine (Car Keeping, which received no views at all) while others (My Dog) that I wrote on the spur of the moment have success. 

Slowly, I was beginning to make contacts through the comments part of Triond as well.  I exchanged notes with Westbrook, Ruby Hawk and Quail1957 among others.   On February 9th, I received a kind note from Nicholas Kenney referring me to P.R. Mace, R.B. Parsley, Darlene McFarlane, Liane Schmidt as good people to know.  He also coached me on the use of the Friend listing on my Triond Dashboard.  Since then, my friend list grows every week.  I try not to add too many people, however; I make an effort to read the new items posted by friends.  The Triond/Google toolbar helps with this, but even so I occasionally miss an article or two.  I don’t want to be one of the people who post a Triond article to apologise for not reading!  (I do apologize to those people on my list I have not mentioned in this article.  The people listed here were my earliest contacts.)

With the addition of the new charts on our Triond Dashboard, I noticed that my views spike on Mondays after I have had time to post more thoughtful articles and friends have had more time to read.  I also note that most of my referrals are from Stumbleupon—the one engine with which I am registered.  (I really do need to learn how to use those things.)

I’m not likely to get rich or even earn a living writing for Triond.  But I enjoy the non-competitive “we are here for each other” environment.  The viewing feedback and notes from friends have encouraged me to write daily; I have a larger body of work built up from this winter than I have had since my last Creative Writing class.  In the eight months I’ve been writing for Triond, I’ve gone from barely earning enough in three months to receive a payment to having enough to purchase a hamburger each month (if I drew it out of my PayPal account).  That may not sound like much, but it is more than I have earned with pure writing in the last eight years.  There is also the added bonus that PayPal pays interest on money kept in the account.  The only draw-back to that is that PayPal is not FDIC accredited.  No worries on that score—my retirement accounts are invested in FDIC institutions; I can afford to branch out a little bit.

Triond also solves my “I need something to read” at midnight problems.  If my Triond friends have not published anything new, I can browse the hot list.  If that doesn’t sufficiently provide material, I can rummage through the rest of the publications looking for topics of interest.  Since I used to support Fictionwise with my reading habit, that’s income right there!

The Triond community is a great place to learn, grow and develop writing skills as well as a published body of work.  I give my Triond friends a tremendous “THANK YOU!!!!” and a big “thumbs up” to the hard-working Triond staff.