Revenue sharing can be a very good opportunity for writers. But it can also be a very bad opportunity. This article will help you know the difference! (I will also reveal the one revenue sharing site that I recommend without hesitation.)

Before we get into the nitty gritty, let me tell you a little story.

Several years ago there was a company called Associated Content. This site was great for new writers because it offered a small upfront payment but a lifetime of revenue sharing. Often people would ignore the whole editing process for upfront payment and post their article immediately to get the revenue sharing into gear on a hot topic. A few years ago Associated Content was bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Voices, a site I have reviewed on here twice, once as a company review and once to explain SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

Several other companies I have reviewed also have revenue sharing of one form or another but Yahoo Voices is the best of them all for one main reason: The revenue sharing is for life. To the credit of Yahoo, when they bought Associated Content they honored the agreements between the writers and Associated Content. We all just merged into the new system and in reality very little changed, especially where revenue sharing is concerned. If anything we all made more money because of the Yahoo name.

So what is revenue sharing? Someone pays for virtually all content on the Internet and sites like Yahoo are paid a premium by advertisers. When you post an article on Yahoo Voices that article has ads displayed. Revenue sharing is when you are paid based on the number of times people view your content; you are paid a portion of the ad revenue generated by that view. It’s pretty simple really: The more people view your articles, the more money you make for them.

Now Yahoo also has a level program. For so many views of content you rise in the level system. The higher your level, the more you are paid. These views accumulate over the life of your account. So if you are a level 1 you make roughly $1.50 for every 1,000 people who view your body of work. At level 10 you make $2.00 per 1,000 views.

There are several reasons to have a Yahoo Voices account. One of these started as an inside joke for those who had learned to work the Demand Studios system. One thing you learn quickly there is to never challenge a rewrite or a rejection (a huge flaw in their platform) or you risk being dropped as a writer. Many people opened an Associated Content account to have a place to dump their rejected Demand Studios articles. It turns out that this was actually pretty smart. The idea was that at least you would get paid revenue share earnings on the article. But something happened that no one expected: They made more money from the articles on Associated Content than they would have from Demand Studios.

Yahoo Voices is still a great place to put otherwise unusable articles. You may not earn anything upfront but over time you can earn a great deal. You will earn on these articles as long as they stay in your account.

This is where SEO comes into play.

Quick Back-story:

We have all run a Google search and ended up at a page that was nothing but a worthless list of thousands of keywords. There was no other content, just keywords and ads. These pages were set up to get views and used the keywords to direct the search engines to those sites. The owners of those sites were making money off of ad programs that paid via page views. So you can imagine that a few thousand keywords would generate a lot of hits. Google figured it out and created a new program to eliminate those pages from their system. The also took to blacklisting the owners of pages like that.

Google hit writers of articles that were little more than keyword stuffing hard as well. Many writers found themselves blacklisted for 6 months. Great SEO became the way to get your articles seen and it’s been working much better than the old system. You have probably noticed that it has been a long time since you saw a keyword stuffed page; this is why.

Now we can continue with the original story.

When you write articles, you want to follow good SEO. Because so many bad sites were removed, good SEO articles will appear high on the list. This is especially true for Yahoo Voice articles because this is a respected Internet company. Yahoo has rules in place that prohibit keyword stuffing. If you get caught, and you will, your account is terminated. Google knows this so your articles submitted through Yahoo have essentially been vetted.

Let’s say you write an article on transplanting roses. You use good SEO techniques and the article is submitted. It goes through on the Yahoo platform and is at the top of the list because of its reputation. Now someone searches for information on transplanting roses. Because you have used good SEO, the likely search terms are going to point them to your article. You get credit for it. The better your SEO, the more people are going to find your articles and the more money you are going to make. Stuff the article with keywords that make no sense and you will make nothing because Google will refuse to index the article and no one will know it exists.

Now knowing all of this, relax. The algorithm that Google uses knows the difference between keyword stuffing and an article where the rules have been unintentionally broken and when they have been necessarily broken.

Look at your article on transplanting roses and you will see what I mean. Let’s say that it’s a 1,000-word article. The keyword or keyword phrase should be used no more than 4 times. But how are you going to write an article like this with the keyword ‘rose’ and not break the rules? For starters, you switch to a keyword phrase. Such as ‘transplanting roses’ this gives you the ability to use rose and roses multiple times without worry. Let’s say you forgot and used the keyword ‘rose’ anyway. It will likely pass the indexing process just fine. If, and it’s unlikely, if Google flagged it for review it would probably pass the computer inspection. If it didn’t, a human would see it and it would pass. You would never know any of this ever happened because it’s not anything official. It’s just how the system works.

While good SEO will drastically increase your page views and thus your earning from revenue, I have never heard of an honest writer getting into trouble over bad SEO as far as Google is concerned.

I don’t know about you, but years ago I had been hearing my friends complain that the first few pages of Google had become useless because of keyword stuffed pages. That is why Google took the steps that it did. I don’t hear those old complaints anymore. But revenues sharing earning are way up.

While it is very important for anyone writing content for the Internet to learn and use good SEO, write the best articles you can. If you can make minor changes that don’t impact your article but improve the SEO, do so. Do not sacrifice the integrity of your article to create good SEO. SEO is for computers while the article itself is for readers and clients. That is your first priority. That said, once you master good SEO you will find that you tend to write it without thinking about it.

Revenue sharing is always based on good SEO. If you are writing for a revenue share site then use it as much as possible. Sites like Yahoo Voices are great because they take articles that would otherwise never be published or are from first time writers. The site gives you published clips to use in your portfolio and on your website and Yahoo Voices will continue to pay you for them as long as the program exists. I still get money every month from articles I wrote a decade ago for Associated Content.

So if you are wondering when revenue sharing isn’t a good idea. Well that is pretty easy to tell actually. In some cases the site will pay you a penny per thousand views. Obviously that is a bad deal. On the other side, there are sites that pay you well for a short period of time, say 30 days or cap you at a certain amount. Then the site continues to earn money from your articles but you get nothing.

So far, Yahoo Voices is the best of all of the revenue sharing sites and the only one I recommend without hesitation.