Earn Upfront With Your Articles from Looking For Clues

While there are quite a large number of sites which pay you through passive revenue share are, the number of sites which pay you upfront for your articles is dramatically less and those that are around have one (or both) of the following issues:

1. They require absolutely perfect English and the bar is almost ridiculously high.
2. They tell you which topics to write on and this might really cramp your style, especially if you are not a pro but just keen to have a good time and make a few bucks on the side. 

In fact, Looking For Clues is the only site I could find where you will face neither of the aforementioned issues. They only require you to be passionate about your topic and your English to be coherrent, which of course is the very essence of blogging (I mean no one's expecting your blog to read like PG Wodehouse!) So here is a quick review of this real life saver for struggling small timers.


Submission Guidelines of LFC
As I have already mentioned LFC publishes articles on just about any topic but generally pays more for reviews than for general info articles. The only issue with their submission guideline is that each article must be at least 800 words, which significantly longer than the average 300-500 word articles you write for other content directories. Articles must be unique and exclusive to LFC.


Submission Process
The submission process at LFC is very low key but highly personalized and efficient nonetheless. You just have to e-mail your article to their editor who will get back to you in around 2 weeks time and inform you if they are willing to buy it and how much they will pay for it. If you accept their terms then your articles will be edited (just grammatical and spelling errors) and once you approve the edits you will be paid and then your article will go on online.


Though there is no passive income scheme, LFC expects every author to promote their articles and this you ability to generate traffic for LFC may have a bearing on your future transactions with them.


LFC Author Compensation Scheme
Usually LFC will pay you something between $10-$20 for each article and it gradually increases as you publish more and more articles there. However, payment is only made to business or premiere paypal accounts which means around $1 will be deducted for transaction.


In addition LFC also allows you a 2-3 sentence long author box and 1-2 dofollow backlinks to your personal blogs etc.


Despite its seedy looks LFC is a 100% genuine site and they have paid me a total of $42 for 3 articles. You can check out my articles at my LFC profile page.

Get Paid to Write Sites You Haven't Heard Of : Part 2

This is a continuation (or second installment if you prefer) of my reasonably popular hub Get Paid to Write Sites You Haven't Heard Of where I have mentioned a number of less popular but 100% legit and quite profitable get paid to write sites which do not have the backing of Yahoo! and don't make as much noise as Associated Content, but can quietly earn you a reasonable amount of money. So lets get rolling then:


Looking For Clues
Looking for Clues is the stand out site in this list because it is one of the few sites which offer an upfront payment ($10-$20) for your articles instead of revenue share. Approval period for LFC is rather long drawn and can take between 2 weeks and a month, but if you follow their criteria and write passably good English (no need to be absolutely perfect) then you have a pretty good chance of getting published. LFC also expects its contributers to drive traffic to the site and your payout for subsequent articles increases if you can manage to generate sufficient number hits to your articles. You can also promote your other sites and blogs through an author box.


Snipsly

Snipsly is arguably the most popular site in this list and fast becoming a rival for the likes of Infobarrel and Xomba. The things that has enabled Snipsly to gain such widespread popularity amongst the online writer community are 

• Snipsly's revenue share is better than almost every other Adsense revenue sharing site with an author ad display ratio of 80%
• You can write about anything you want and have no issues getting it published so long as it is unique and over 3 sentences long.
• All links are dofollow. So you can use Snipsly to generate quality backlinks
• Snipsly uses the popular WordPress format and many writers are already so familiar with it that they can just start creating great content without having to familiarize with the user interface.

Seekyt 
Seekyt is yet another Adsense revenue sharing site where the author ad display ratio is 70%.Content must be unique and substantial. Check my detailed review of Seekyt and how it is evolving into a major player in the industry.


Zestbit
Zestbit is a Squidoo style publishing platform (but obviously not as cool) where you can earn revenue share from a number of affiliate programs by creating Twists. Like Squidoo, you can earn from Zestbit without having any affiliate accounts in general and Adsense account in particular.