Maybe I have done it wrong all these years. People are starting to throw money around at me now, to wit:
Hi,
My name is Bethany from (a company), the content delivery wing of (a larger company), a UK-based Internet Advertising Consultancy. I came across monoblogue.us recently and would like to inquire if we could write an article for your site.
The proposed content shall be exclusive to you. It would also include a brief citation to one of our clients, and for this, we would be happy to send $100 through PayPal as a thank you for your time.
If this is something that interests you or if you wish to see a sample of our work, please get in contact.
Still trying to chase me down on my way out the door.
So let me get this straight, Bethany. You hired some writer who’s probably not very proficient in the Queen’s English for a quarter and paid him (or her) to write an article with a link to some site that’s probably the end result of one of the seven deadly sins just to have me place it here for my dozen readers a day. Yeah, that’s a good business practice. No wonder these internet startups burn through wads of cash.
I sometimes wonder, though, if anyone ekes out a living like this. There’s no shortage of content out there and if someone was really getting paid $100 an article to post whatever dreck came their way, they would be living pretty well. So somehow I don’t think there’s $100 there, or, that’s the introductory price that comes down for whatever reason. (Sort of like the payouts did when the Examiner website was still around since that was an unsustainable model, too. When it first started the most successful could almost make a living, by the end no one was profiting, least of all people like me.)
But this is one reason that, the more I do Substack, the more I like it. Sure, right now I’m a very small-time operator who gives away his wordage for free. But there are people who do fairly well at it and I think I have a couple niche ideas that might buy me lunch once a week once I monetize it.
That’s the reason I’m going there. Losing these people who want me to post their questionable dreck is just a bonus, so to you Bethany the answer is “no, thanks.”