I’ve been working as a content provider for two years, and June 2009 was an especially good month for me as an online writer. When I first started writing for web sites in the summer of 2007, I was excited to earn just a few pennies, and as my writing career progressed, I started making double digit checks. Last month, I was overjoyed to take a couple of three figure checks to the bank that represented dollars earned providing content for a number of web sites.

As my writing career progresses I am now faced with the following question on a daily basis: what is the most effective use of my writing time today? And if I focus too much attention providing content for one web site, am I losing opportunities for revenues on other writing sites? I find that as I write for more web sites, there’s the temptation to spread myself too thin. Lately, I’ve been pondering if it isn’t better to make an all out effort to write and earn money at a few key web sites, than it is to have a few articles placed here and there on a lot of different writing sites.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to focus my writing efforts on a few key areas. Here is my writing plan for summer 2009, and how I hope to significantly increase my revenues as a web writer this season.

My Summer 2009 Writing Plan

As I mentioned earlier, there’s always the temptation to spread yourself too thin as a content provider. Once you get a Google AdSense number, you’ll read about many places you can sign up and write for a share of AdSense revenues. Some writers are on so many revenue sharing sites I wonder how they find the time to keep up with them all! I suspect that many will sign up and add their AdSense number to a lot of sites they hear about, maybe adding a few pieces of content to one site, then moving on to another if their revenues are low, or they’re bored writing for a particular site.

While it’s good to diversify your writing, and not put all your eggs in one basket and rely on just one site for all your online earnings, on the other hand, it takes time building up content on a site to see a corresponding jump in AdSense earnings. This certainly was my experience last fall, when I joined the web site Xomba.com. At first I made only a few cents with Xomba and Google AdSense, and I was tempted to throw in the towel with AdSense and just write for sites that paid me for page views, not AdSense clicks.

I was also tempted to find a lot of other writing sites to try out my shiny new AdSense number! But Xomba was so easy to use and I found it fun and intriguing, so even though my earnings were almost nonexistent at first, I stuck it out on Xomba. I wrote a few brief articles called Xombytes, and started posting a ton of bookmarks to interesting sites, photos, videos and blogs (these are called Xomblurbs.)

It didn’t take that long before I started seeing money trickle into my AdSense account from my work on Xomba. I found I could post 3 to 5 (or more) Xomblurbs a day in my spare time, and my AdSense earnings would rise. I kept at it, and soon I was seeing a few dollars a day in my AdSense account, which was very exciting. My daily AdSense earnings reached a high in December 2008 with about $5 or $6 a day from my Xomba work, then it declined after the holidays. I didn’t panic and kept on working on Xomba, and now I’m making on average about $2 or $3 a day, which means I qualify for an AdSense check about every other month (your earnings have to cross the threshold of $100 to qualify for an AdSense check; each time you surpass the $100 mark, Google AdSense sends you a check for your accumulated earnings).

Boy, how I love to go to the mailbox and see that Google AdSense check! Since my blog (thecommacafe.blogspot.com) is more of a personal journal and makes only pennies in AdSense earnings, I know that all my AdSense revenue was earned on Xomba.com. Just this week, I received my third AdSense check for $101.94, and I’m currently making about $60 per month on Xomba. This summer, I intend to ramp up the number of Xomblurbs I’m posting on Xomba. I currently have 846 Xomblurbs on Xomba and I intend to cross the 1,000 mark with Xomblurbs this summer. I’m inspired by a Xomba writer who says he makes over $600 a month posting about 3 to 5 Xombytes and 300 to 400 Xomblurbs per month.

I feel that the money making potential with Xomba is endless, and it represents one of the best earnings opportunities out there with AdSense. Other places to write for a share of AdSense revenues include Hubpages, Flixya and Infobarrel. These three writing sites look interesting to me, especially Hubpages, where you can also place affiliates ads for eBay and Amazon.com. I’m definitely thinking about expanding sometime to write for these web sites, but since I have built a presence on Xomba, I’m thinking that I’m just going to go full out on Xomba.com this summer. I plan to significantly raise my AdSense revenues by building up more Xombytes and Xomblurbs there.

Writing for Associated Content (also known as “AC”) is also a huge part of my summer 2009 writing plan. I’ve been a content provider on AC for two years, and I’m very loyal to Associated Content. They continue to be a prominent writing site with great opportunities for earnings and exposure for writers of all levels, beginners to professionals. My work on Associated Content has varied over the years, and when I first started there a few summers ago I was just getting my feet wet as a content provider. My first articles were more like magazine type articles, and as I spent more time at the site I learned more about keywords, search engine placement, and writing for web sites.

I wrote my first articles on AC for small upfront payments, and when those upfront payments seemed to dry up for a while, I started writing for Triond and published lots of articles on Associated Content just for the page view revenues. Recently, I was excited to receive upfront offers again from AC for my articles (I receive an offer of a few dollars per article, and I also earn page view revenues or “performance bonus” on all of my published AC articles). I plan to greatly increase the number of articles I’ll write for AC this summer; ideally, I’d write a 100 articles a month to bring in a few hundred dollars in upfront payments.

While I’ve found that with careful planning and great diligence it’s possible to write a hundred articles per month, I don’t think that’s a realistic goal for me now, since I’ll be working on a few sites this summer, not just AC. I hope that increasing my AdSense revenues with Xomba and writing articles for upfront pay at AC will help me move toward my goal of earning significant part time (eventually full time) income as an online writer.

The last part of my summer 2009 writing plan involves getting back to writing for Triond. Triond is my favorite writing community and I’ve always felt it’s a special place to be; however, my earnings have always been the smallest on Triond. Judging from the way my earnings seem to go higher once in a while on Triond, I’ve come to believe that there’s a great untapped earnings potential in writing for Triond. I definitely hope to add more content to Triond in 2009 in hopes of earning a nice residual income stream.

My summer 2009 writing plan also involves adding lots of photos to Triond’s partner site Picable. A short while ago, I started an experiment where I planned to publish lots of beautiful digital photos that were just sitting on my hard drive on Picable, in hopes of developing another income stream from the site. I was distracted when my digital camera had to be sent away to the factory repair center shortly after I started publishing my photos on Picable, but now that I have my camera again, I’m eager to get out and shoot some new photos to be published on Picable, and publish the ones I already have on my computer.

So there you have it: my summer 2009 writing plan involves working hard on Xomba, AC, Triond and Picable. These are the sites I have experience with, and my plan involves going deeper into each site and building up more content at each one, in order to boost my online earnings. If you’re looking to bring in some three figure checks yourself during this dismal economy, know that with a lot of hard work and hours of writing effort, it’s possible to earn dollars writing for web sites, you just have to hang in there and keep trying.

I recommend that all web writers take stock once in a while of how the work is going and what you’d like to be earning as a content provider, then develop a writing plan to increase your revenues. Good luck to you in all your writing endeavors and happy summer!