My Journey as an Amateur Writer

I tried to create my own blog site(s) before. Well... I did create a number of blogs but was not able to maintain any of them. Some of them in Blogspot still exist, but they were not updated for a long time. Then I joined various social blogging platforms and lately some forums.

There was a time that I have earned at least a hundred dollars per month from my content, and there were times that I can barely earn five dollars a month. But the key take-away that I had is, I had developed my writing skills and even my photography skills over the years.

Hello, my dearest friends and readers. I am going to share with you another one of my journeys in the digital world.

Writing is not my strongest skill. I am more on abstract reasoning and math. But in this post, I will share with you how I started and developed as a writer and my journey through various writing sites.

Looking Back

Back in high school, I joined a journalism workshop seminar. I guess this is where my writing journey began. There were contests on different writing categories. I joined the news writing competition and I won against the student two years my senior. Then I became a news writer for our school paper. Only for a year though. I lost interest the following year. I don't know why.

It was more than two decades later before I got into writing again. Blogging and SEO was the trend at the time. I tried doing it. I made some blogs on Blogspot, but somehow it did not prosper. I tried several times, but I could get enough views to monetize it.

I.PH

I.PH was a local blogging platform. It was a great platform. I can't remember if I have monetized it or not. But I enjoyed the site. Members can interact with each other. I made a few friends on that site. And for the first time, I made a post that became number 1 in Google Search. But the following week, that article was plagiarized by another member! He did not know me, but I know he lives in our city too.

But after a while, the platform had to shut down.

RedGage.Com

Redgage was the first paying social blogging platform that I have joined. It was a fantastic platform. In Redgage, users can upload articles, photos, videos, and even links. I have earned more than a hundred dollars a month from that site. I upload mostly photos and some articles.

I met a lot of great content creators there. Including @CarolDM who is in Noise.Cash right now and Soulophere, who inspired me to practice macro photography even with just a digital camera. (Soulo, I hope you are feeling better now).

Sadly, after the upgrade, the platform became too slow. The site still exists at the time of writing, but I don't think they are still paying.

After that, I joined several content-sharing sites like the original TSU, Bubblews, and Niume. All folded within a year or two. Bubblews was besieged by spammers, scammers, and schemers who played the system until it bled out of cash.

Paid Writer.

I don't remember how this guy found me, but he invited me as a writer for his blog. It was a Blogspot site. He would give me a topic to write and post it as a draft so he can proofread it. He would correct my mistakes and taught me how to improve my writing style for blogging. I think that was when the first time I got oriented with a passive and active voice in writing. (I don't remember those in my English class). He paid me about $20 per article depending on the length.

Sadly, after a while, he said has to go to Europe (I think) and he can no longer maintain his site.

Over the years I kept looking for other writing sites that pay. Some are too strict though, and I could not pass their qualifications. Maybe the fear of failing again makes me stay out of Hubpages. I don't know, maybe I should try that platform if it still worth it.

Free Hosted WordPress

I tried making my own website using Free Hosted WordPress. AT least I don't have to spend anything. So if I can't monetize it was fine. That's where I found out about the plugin called Yoast SEO. The plugin helped me improve my writing style. I learned how to write more in active voice and other technicalities that would attract the Google crawler.

Virily

Then I found Virily. It was another great writing platform. The earning was not as good as Redgage but the interaction between members was great. I also found @CarolDM there. I met new great writers as well. But my Internet connection was too slow that I could upload only a few articles per month. Thus my earning was too slow.

Lately, a lot of users have quit Virily because of a number of issues.

Bitlanders

I forgot how I found Bitlanders. But when I found it, the site was already eight or nine years old. It used to pay the members with bitcoin, but they switched to fiat money. I don't know why. But the platform was great. It was strict on quality and originality. You can publish only one article per day. They have a daily task of viewing at least 5 articles and 5 videos per day. You get rewarded for accomplishing your tasks.

The articles are rated from 1 to 5 stars. With 5 stars you get to earn more bitmiles. Which you can convert into dollars. The challenging part was to get that 5 stars. I was dismayed at first, I only get 1-2 stars for my articles. And another challenge was, one of the qualifications to get more stars is, the article must have at least 1,000 words!

At the time, I consider a 500-word article is too long to write!

I looked at the leader board, read the articles of the top five members. I studied their writing style (but not to the extent of copying).

Shoutout to the Two Ladies Who Inspired Me to Improve My Writing.

Before I continue, I will take this space to the two ladies who were always at the top two in Bitlander's Leaderboard, @LucyStephanie aka ArtGirl and @Momentswithmatti aka JeanBeltran. Yes, I haven't said it before but you two inspired me to continuously improve my writing and to join you in the top three. There were three of you, actually. But PinayAko has not joined this platform yet.

I wrote almost every day, then the one thousand words became a norm to me. But I wanted to improve my writing style to get at least 4 stars. And here are some things that I have learned.

• Keeping it Simple.

• Short sentences and paragraphs.

• Formatting and Sectioning using bullets and header tags (H1, H2, etc...)

• Using images more often. In Bitlanders, it is required to use 10 images

• How to cite image sources properly.

• I started using Grammarly to improve my grammar and eliminate a lot of my typographical errors. I highly recommend using this tool.

These are just a few of the things that I have learned from that site... or because of that site. Since I wanted my articles to get 5 stars, I learned to improve my writing style.

Sadly, most of the happy days must come to an end. Bitlanders stopped paying real money. Bitlanders still exists, but it now focuses on its AI lab project. Maybe I will make a post about this site soon.

Steemit

Before Bitlanders stopped paying, I joined Steemit, I think it was also because of @LucyStephanie or @Momentswithmatti. But I find the site full of low-quality content but earned a lot of dollars. I realized then that they have an organization that they tip each other's posts. At the time, I thought it was just ok. But I did not join any group and later on lost interest in the site.

New Tsu and Project BlueFire

TSU was revived as an app by a new team. Sadly it was easily overrun by what we call Spamocalypse Tsumbies. Members who spam and post stolen content to earn. And a lot of groups supporting each other's content even if they are low quality or stolen. A scheme that did not work in noise.cash. A lot of content creators left the app. One good thing that I got from that site is, I found read.cash from a post by @bloghound.

Project BlueFire was born. Created by one of the top earners of TSU. PBF was more promising. The platform did not tolerate stolen content or spam. Sadly it was short-lived.

But from TSU and PBF, I came to know a lot of great content creators. @MarSou, @AwakenToLife, @aj_u2, @bbyblacksheep, and again @Bloghound and a lot more, but I could not find them here or in noise.cash.

My Writing Journey Goes On...

Now my writing journey continues here in read.cash and soon in Publish0x. But if I want to help spread BCH awareness, I know I must start writing about BCH outside the realm of cryptocurrency. I have been planning to start writing for Medium and Maybe in Hubpages. I'm not sure if the latter is still worth venturing into.

This is it for now. This is my journey as an amateur writer and it doesn't stop here. Thanks for reading.

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The content of this article is all mine unless otherwise indicated.