What to Do When Your Residual Income Plummets

If you write online and earn residual income, you already know that there will be income fluctuations.  Whether you write articles that are seasonal or evergreen, there are certain times of the year, times of the day or times of the week when some articles seem to do well, while others don’t.

Some seasonal fluctuations are obvious, such as your Halloween article becoming popular for the weeks leading up to Halloween; or, your tax preparation articles reaching a peak in early April.  However, sometimes there are fluctuations that you just can’t explain.

Explaining the fluctuation isn’t the problem, surviving it is.

Just recently, folks who were a part of eHow’s Writer Compensation Program experienced a major drop in income.  Most writers noticed an 80 to 90% dip.  Income drops like those don’t happen often, but they do happen.  The question is; what do you do when your residual earnings take a major nosedive?

1. Get rid of the emotion. You start asking questions like, “How can they do that to me?” Or, “What the heck is going on here?” Dump the emotions and put on your investigative cap. It’s time to find out what really happened.
2. Comb the forums to see if you’re the only person with the drop (misery loves company). If you find that you’re not the only person experiencing the drop, you feel empowered. Although, until the website liaison responds and tells you why the numbers are down, your feeling of power soon dissipates.
3. Contact the website and ask what is going on. Most content mills will provide some sort of explanation for a site wide significant income drop. Granted, some respond sooner than others, but usually there is some sort of response (there’s nothing worse than a writer in limbo).
4. While waiting, add a few quality backlinks to your articles.  Backlinks always help to make your articles more visible.
5. Find new writing cheese. You might have to pull out the book “Who Moved My Cheese” to truly understand the ramifications of finding new cheese, but it’s time to cut your loses and start building an empire elsewhere.
6. Check back every so often. If the 90% nosedive is not fixed (or even if it is fixed) proceed as if you are starting all over again, but this time diversify your online writing income even more Never allow any one source to be the only source of your online income. Set up your writing income so that if one site goes down, you can keep on going without skipping a beat. Losing 20 to 25% of your income is a lot less painful than losing 50 to 55% of your income.

Since HubPages was a long dormant piece of ammunition in my freelance writing arsenal and, with eHow’s recent revenue scare, I thought it was time for me to dust it off and start using it again.  Time to take my own advice.