Economies of Content: Should you Post your articles to a personal Blog or to Content sites such as Helium or Associated Content?

This blog started out as a series of articles written for Helium. I discovered Helium by mistake and immediately discovered the joys of writing. After posting several personal finance articles to Helium an obvious thought occurred to me. Why not take these articles and start my own personal finance blog?

Having set up my blog I continued writing at Helium and also began posting the articles I’ve written to my blog. A couple of weeks later I found associated content and Constant-content and began to ponder the wisdom of posting to content sites vs. posting to your own blog.

Obviously the following tradeoffs need to be considered:

1. Exposure – Starting your own blog is easy. Getting exposure is the hard part. Posts to content sites gain exposure quite rapidly (depending on quality of course). Getting regular readers for you blog is another matter entirely which requires to put in extra time and marketing efforts.

2. Profitability – If you are posting for additional income a careful consideration of where to post is required. Content sites use different revenue models which suit different authors. A more detailed look and a good comparison of these models can be found here. The main consideration here is how good a writer are you and how much time can you spend on a personal blog. The financial comparison should be income per time spent.

Publishing content on your own blog can be very profitable as Adsense pays generously for content oriented advertising. However, as aforementioned, marketing efforts and time is required to generate significant income.

In my opinion posting for page view payments is a waste of time.

More competent writers should not suffice with posting to Helium or Associated Content for page view payments. Competent writers should look at Helium’s Marketplace, Associated Content’s advance payments or Constant Content’s author-publisher platform.

Less competent writers should try and produce massive amounts of content for a personal blog and after a while post to content sites for page view payments.

I’d dare say more competent writers would do better off selling content then writing a personal blog financially wise and income per time spent. There are other advantages to having you own blog of course.