Improving Article Success Ratio: Write Test Articles (Guinea Pigs)
Continuation to the concept of article success ratio that I introduced in previous article, this one explores a way to improve this ratio. Test articles can help us improve this ratio that comes out of randomness outside our control. Writers too do it like the scientists do it on Guinea pigs.
The only way to succeed in a random world is to first condition ourselves to be deterministic. When you write test articles, you are being deterministic about something that you want to test.
As explained in my previous article, What is Your Articles Success Ratio (At Triond)?, your article success ratio is a powerful indicator available to you, for planning your future articles and to improve it so you can earn faster. Knowing your article success ratio means to know whether you can at all make passive income (not the active income that comes from others’ reciprocation) and how much you can make it.
As I am not spending time on commenting on others which would have let them see that article, I expected not much response to it. However one user (Richie Montalbo) was excited about this concept which motivated me to take it further.
What is the reason we must write test articles?
To improve your earning potential from writing articles online and achieve your writing income goals you should first try to improve your article success ratio. If you are satisfied with the current ratio which might be (1:10 or 1:50) you will conclude that you should write millions of articles (and daily) to earn any sensible income. That is a blind idea to go with when you know that a better ratio (1:3) can make it rather much easier.
As explained, the randomness that results in success ratio is not in your control. However the ratio can also be different for different users. If we also write articles out of ideas coming randomly to our mind, out of random inspiration, we are adding more randomness. This will only degrade the success ratio. The only way to succeed in a random world is to first condition ourselves to be deterministic. When you write test articles, you are being deterministic about something that you want to test.
For me all that many writers (at Triond) write could be test articles as they try to take conclusions from their performance. However did they actually start writing those articles thinking of testing? I am sure they did not.
Ultimately it is the production type that gives me real satisfaction. And testing type give me endless excitement.
Three Types of Writing
There are three types of writing that I use. One is experimental type where my mind is set to think only about testing a certain aspect at hand and not waste time caring about other things. I expect no earnings from these articles. Second is production type where my mind is set to think about producing articles for earning (sometimes mass production happens when our mind is set). Third is satisfaction (or time-pass) type where I just write articles for fun, satisfaction to see audience’s response. If all you do is to look for others’ comments on your articles, you are likely to be writing in the third type. I don’t expect any earnings nor do I go to great lengths to get that satisfaction. Ultimately it is the production type that gives me real satisfaction. And testing type give me endless excitement.
Advantages of Writing Test Articles
When you write in experimental type and tell that to yourself, then your focus is better than otherwise when you write randomly one time thinking of earning from the article and after writing thinking of it as a test. It becomes easier to write test articles (more of them) in a short span of time. These are like Guinea pigs. You don’t expect earnings from them so you write whatever you want but with care only on one aspect that you are testing. For example, that aspect could be to see how important the website that the article published to is. You would write test articles (preferably two) for each test website and take conclusions from results.
If all you do is random writing, then that is neither fully in the experimental nor in the production type. Also your motivation to write will wax or wane depending on the results or responses that it produces. When you decide on which type you are going to write you will be in control of your writing.
Starting with Helium way back in August 2006, whatever site I have written to (blogs, forums, Triond, Bukisa) I have always considered testing first to know the best site/category/styles to write on and whether it is really worth writing. The first test I used to do in those days was to see which site gives more eCPM. Today there are a lot of factors to consider for testing though their final result is to see overall earnings. As they all affect the success ratio of articles it is worthwhile writing test articles and improve your success ratio.
Fortunately I found that it is very easy to write when we set our mind to test mode. The idea of looking at the results of test articles is highly motivating that we don’t stop writing them till we see the results. There is a natural excitement in waiting to see the results. Believe me, it is easier to test articles out of inspiration that to write productive articles out of perspiration!
Related Articles
- What is Your Articles Success Ratio (At Triond)?
- Discipline (Not Inspiration) Gives You Success in Writing
- Writing Bonus: Understanding Triond Popular Article Lists
- Comparing Features of Two Writing Sites: Triond and Bukisa
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September 6th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Great one…
thanks for great share.
September 6th, 2010 at 6:14 am
Never thought about this…………I fully subscribe with your views….
September 6th, 2010 at 7:06 am
You mean you first test what articles become successful in a website like Triond. And when those articles become successful, you write more of them in the production type mode.
This is really a great idea.
I think what is important in this testing phase, as you have been stressing in this article, is the mindset that you are only testing and so you don’t have to give a lot of emotion to your articles so that you will not be frustrated in the end.
What have you found out after testing Triond aside from determining the best eCPM of the websites?
September 6th, 2010 at 9:09 am
i just feel that different writing sites accommodate different needs and nature of the articles.
September 6th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Very good psot
September 7th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Nice Share.
September 7th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
interesting, informative.
September 7th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Great angle…I think most would do much better if they adopted your idea of a test first…especially, if our goal is trying to increase traffic. I’ve been doing a lot more of this lately, since my goals have changed towards increasing my income… it does lift us and make things exciting, and we become more perceptive to what works and what doesn’t.
September 8th, 2010 at 1:11 am
NIce post.
September 8th, 2010 at 6:34 am
thank you for sharing this with us!
September 8th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Great tips. It’s always fun to try out new things.
September 8th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
ShaggysView, as you said our goal can be anything. My main goal is to get article traffic that stays almost constant with time without needing any activity from us.
Another goal (I had set for future once I reach my earning goals) is to write stories/novels in a professsional way only for Triond. I am sure we can make money from poems and novels too if we test how to improve them. But that is not the priority for me now.
September 8th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Once again, A nice write up.
September 8th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
Great information
September 8th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
Thanks for the comments.
September 8th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Richie,
You are right. That is the way I go whether it is for Bukisa or for Triond. At Triond it is trying to see how articles on bizcovering, socyberty, scienceray would do. Whereas at Bukisa it is to see how articles on different categories like Art & Entertainment, Science & Technology, Hobbies, Business etc. would do.
At Helium I found Business to give more eCPM (as high as 7 cents per view back in 2006). At Triond I found Gomestic to be having highest eCPM rate. You can find more details on Triond eCPM rates in this article.
Triond Earnings Rate Reduction From June to July 2010
You know about Bukisa. They are transparent on earnings rate (3.22) no matter what traffic or how much traffic or which category you write to.
September 8th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Richie,
“I think what is important in this testing phase, as you have been stressing in this article, is the mindset that you are only testing and so you don’t have to give a lot of emotion to your articles so that you will not be frustrated in the end.”
That’s correct. There is no frustrated when you first plan your writing on based on known information. After finding success ratio and which site/topic/category it is better all you would see is what you would expect. You are likely to see better results as your writing improves from testing phase to production phase. Keep that in mind.
Sometimes your test is inadequate. That happens when you have done preliminary tests on the site. For ex., I wrote 20 articles at Bukisa after I found sets of 3 were doing well and wanted to check how a set of 20 on a single topic would do. That turned out worser than I expected, so I stopped writing large sets at Bukisa. Somehow single articles do very well for Bukisa. But for Triond the same large set worked well. I couldn’t completely find out what caused this difference between the two other than attributing it to another level of randomness.
September 8th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Another simplest thing I found about Triond sites is that articles on scienceray and healthmad would have more success ratio than any site within Triond. You can try the same. I wrote six health(mad) related articles in 2007 on a fine Sunday and two of them are still earning views on their own even today!
September 9th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
You may have a very successful article on one subject and the next one on the same subject draw very little attention. It’s hard to judge until you have your article out there. At least that’s my experience. Sometimes I’m surprised at which of my articles get the most views. Sometimes I jot one down when I am pushed for time just to hold my place and it will do just great. Another time I might do research and work on an article that hardly gets any views. The public is fickle.
September 9th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
thanks for sharing this information.
September 9th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Ruby Hawk,
I am not talking about how to judge or whether we can judge one article becoming successful. The idea of success ratio is to look at the pattern of success in your articles. Unless you write totally random without any direction or clear pattern in your writing you will notice a consistent pattern in the number of articles that succeed to get views everyday without any action on your part.
September 9th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
Ruby Hawk,
The success ratio is not affected by the public (audience). It is the handiwork of the systems that are behind the world wide web. As the target audience does not directly reach our articles by tying the url of our article, there results randomness from which can derive the probability of audiences reaching our article daily. This is about statistics and probability resulting from websites we publish to, bookmarking sites performance, search engines indexing, etc.
There is nothing like audience randomly deciding to view articles as you are thinking. That is a misconception. What happens is audiences do their best effort to search for information. But they can’t reach ours if they don’t have visibility. This visibility is affected by randomness in the connectivity between Triond sites and other sites that people start their search from. Hope you get the idea.
September 10th, 2010 at 12:17 am
Good stuff.
September 10th, 2010 at 9:23 am
Richie,
I didn’t notice that you responded to my comment on popular article lists. So I didn’t answer your questions at that time.
Now I have posted my reply there. You can go read that in that article.
September 11th, 2010 at 5:09 am
Nice and well-written article. It is very encouraging too (at least for me). I am more than sure now that I will start with writing test articles. Thanks for the advice.
September 11th, 2010 at 11:52 am
Michal Dorcak,
Thank you. Testing always helps. First test and then only write massive number of articles.
October 4th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I never thought of article ratio before. Good job.
November 6th, 2010 at 6:49 am
I already read this before and learned a lot not only from the article itself but with your interaction with the other Triond writers. Thanks a lot.