How to Increase Your Clout Index in a Few Easy Steps

I first joined AC on Oct. 18, but didn't actually submit an article until a couple of weeks later. I had no idea what to expect in terms of whether to ask for pay or not, how long it would take to get an answer, nothing really. So I winged it, writing an article on fantasy football, something I know a bit about. I had been writing for a site, www.footballjerks.com for a month or two as a staff writer, so I did a little research and voila!, out popped Fantasy Football: Oxygenic or Oxymoron. A week or so later, I got an offer of $5. I felt like Steve Martin in The Jerk, running around in circles yelling "the new phone book's here!, the new phone book's here!"

Then, I was hooked. However, I didn't have a clue about promotion of my work, page views, etc. For all I knew, page views were something Mark Foley did with a pair of binoculars peering into a boy's dormitory, or on some seamy website. Spurl could have been an amalgam of the words "spit" and "hurl", referring to something some will do in pub crawls in an alley on St. Patrick's Day. Raw Sugar could have been the Hooker caught with Hugh Grant a few years ago or some "exotic dancer". Blogspot could have been a stain left by our new puppy on the carpet. Okay, I did know what a blog was. A Squidoo Lens could have been an underwater camera to see through ladies swimsuits for all I knew. You get the idea by now, surely.

In any event, to say I was green in the ways of writing for the internet would be an understatement. I still am, I suppose, but like Billy Joel said in a song years ago (before he started crooning elevator music like Uptown Girl): "I am the entertainer and I've had to pay my price, the things I did not know at first I learned by doing twice".

I started trying to find articles on AC about promotion, increasing page views, etc. and there are some good ones out there, CP Tori Thompson has some informative articles, for instance. That young lady has come up with so many different ways to make money, I just wish I had time to implement more of them.