Ironically, reading blogs about productivity can often be the perfect reason for procrastination, and actually diminish our actual productive output. There is one blog, however, that seems to avoid just that. It is the Ultimate Productivity Blog, and also the ultimate minimalist blog.

It is published through Tumblr, which is another microblogging tool. It is supposed to be anywhere just in between Flickr, and regular blogging. Short and sweet like Tweeting, meets the ability to share anything and everything, from any platform (including your phone). I am going to look into Tumblr some more, and follow up on whether it might be useful in business, marketing, or writing at a later point in time.

Bookmark the Ulimate Productivity Blog though. I think it is to the point and perfectly true; ultimately… you get more done if you just get to it. So stop reading about how to get more done, and just do it.

My new adventure writing for the Examiner.com is on quite a positive road. I am contributing short articles (or posts, whichever you would like to call them) about topics that are interesting to me regarding the economy. Unlike some other examiners, I am adding a more personal spin to my column, and try to incorporate some humor and personal opinion as well. If people just want to read the news, then they are better off going to MarketWatch, or Bloomberg. I am not focusing on reporting straight up news-y facts, but instead take something from the news and comment on it.

In other words: I am having a lot of fun writing this column. Keeping this in mind, you will understand that my standards for a return on my investment are different from a column I am writing out of personal interest, and for my personal satisfaction, than I would from a more traditional freelancing opportunity. It is important for me to emphasize this, because if you are going to equate my excitement about the extra money coming in from this opportunity with my regular standards for regular writing work, then I would be placing myself in the category of writers who are willing to work for dollars per article. That is not the case. Nor would I ever encourage anyone to do that.

Having said that, I think the Examiner writing opportunity is paying off for me because it is a creative writing outlet that is keeping my fingers on the keyboard. The more you write, the better you eventually get. As I write more and flex those muscles, I am also getting a small, but slowly increasing, return on my time investment.

Yesterday, my page views were over 200, and the income I am getting from that one day is $2.11 (see below).

The other day I reported getting $1.09, after writing a short commentary on Windows 7, and how I doubt it will make any Mac users switch back to a Microsoft platform. After writing this, promptly 7 people commented, even though I only just started writing for the Examiner and am anything but established.

As I am writing this, my metrics for today (and I haven’t had my coffee yet, it’s not even 8:30am) are as follows:

Yes, this is NOT spectacular. But, I haven’t written a word on the Examiner yet today, and it is early in the morning. I’m in the Eastern time zone, so a big chunk of North America, where most of the traffic comes from, is still happily snoozing in their bed.

My income from the examiner for the current week, so far, starting on Sunday, is over $8:

I’m curious to see if today will surpass yesterday’s performance. If it grows at a steady pace, and keeps growing, the income from the Examiner actually has some potential for the future. And as I just take it as a creative outlet, there really isn’t any pressure…

If you’re a writer starting out, or a more established one looking for an additional outlet, and want to write for a good quality website, then I still recommend giving the Examiner a try.

We’ve all seen the good advice from top bloggers around the world: write interesting stuff. This is supposed to be the holy grail to Blogging success, and ultimately also to some form of reward from your blogging. Whether that reward is personal satisfaction, or an income.

I’ve been thinking about writing on some good content networks for some time now, as part of keeping up my regular writing-for-fun habits. I’ve blogged about these plans in the past few days. One place where I am experimenting with getting both some more articles published, and experimenting with the potential monetary return, is on my Examiner.com Economy column.

Yesterday, I came across an article idea I particularly liked, and which worked well for the Examiner. I wrote a very brief article about Windows 7, and how it is probably not going to turn Mac enthusiasts back to PCs, just as it has done very little for the Microsoft stock. What I had never expected was to get 7 comments on the article right away! My attempt at some humor, and a stab at Windows, left a few PC-enthusiasts upset enough to comment.

I’m never out to make people angry with my writing, quite the contrary, but this does show that creating a spark with readers can be a good thing. As with all other things in life, writing a slightly more spicy, or controverial, article can really elicit a reaction, which brings in more readers, and in this case, also more revenue. My humble income from yesterday’s writing efforts (I wrote another article aside from the Mac vs. PC one) are in the screen shot below. Yes, it is just a Dollar…for now… but like Russel Peters said (in a Chinese accent) in one of his comedy shows:

“…and then you have a dollar, and then you go to the dollar store and buy yourself something nice…”

The whole idea with publishing venues like the Examiner is that you get residual income. So although in one day 122 page views translated to about a dollar in revenue for me, the hope – and general assumption – is that over time these same articles will still get page views and continue to bring in some revenue. Although everyone wants to be paid a lot at once, there is no harm in creating some residual income streams. After all, those come in even when other freelance work is low, or other aspects of life take over temporarily.

Yesterday, I wrote about my renewed commitment to building a more elaborate online portfolio using a few different publishers. Among these is the Examiner, and here is my first step towards my new goals: an article about one of my favorite pieces of technology, the Macbook.

Here are all my other articles at the Examiner.com

The Internet is a wonderful place to get more knowledge (or doubt… don’t Google your symptoms when you’re sick!), and it has provided a large number of people with more or less stable incomes. Unlike any other venture, making money online can be done with a very minimal investment, and the payoff is potentially very high. Although a “sky is the limit” attitude is good when getting into any type of business or job, you need to still be realistic. Not every online entrepreneur, or writer using the Internet to their advantage, is the next John Chow, who says he makes over $40.000 a month from his blog.

For the rest of us, simply getting started with some blog networks or content networks can seem really appealing. The question is, can you really make money with them?

I’m going to find out!

Much like John Chow has documented his success with his blog, his way isn’t the only way to make a healthy (albeit not as much as John’s pay cheq $$ue) income from the Internet. I’ve been told perseverance and professionalism are the two main requirements for the gig, so it shouldn’t be impossible to generate some sort of result.

Here’s how I’ll do it

After some research, it turns out there are a few main promising online publishing houses that are both attainable goals for intermediate writers, and promise a decent return on your time investment:

1. Suite101.com
2. Examiner.com
3. Trendhunter.com

If you have clicked on any of the links, you will have noticed that I’ve already started contributing to each one of these networks. I’m going to say I’ll count whatever potential success I might have from this point onwards, considering I have not contributed significantly to either one of these websites. Others who have gone before me have written about their success, and another person writing for both Suite101 and the Examiner has reported being quite happy with the results writing for suite101 and the Examiner.

My lofty writing goals

Considering the content produced for any of the sites I mentioned above remains my own property, and I can receive residual payback from articles that stay online for as long as the websites exist and receive revenue themselves, I am hoping to start building up a significant body of work on each one of them.

For the Examiner, remaining a writer in good standing requires you to write at least 3-4 articles per week. However, they are fairly lax on article length, and do not require a higher word count like suite101 does. The only downside of the Examiner compared to suite101 is that you are stuck with one topic. I’ve found, from my limited experience with TrendHunter.com and Suite101.com, that I enjoy being flexible and writing for several different categories. The Examiner takes advantage of a particular expertise you have, and in my case I was taken on to write about the economy. Albeit a good topic with endless streams of material, it can be creatively a little limiting as well, and that’s where my challenge will be.

However, we’ll see where this takes me, and I plan to keep reporting back what the payoff from my writing adventures are from these websites. I’m seeing this as something I can do for fun in my spare time, between freelancing gigs. It’s also a great creative outlet for articles that are too short for print, but are still interesting and fun to research and write about but do not fit within the scope of this blog.

If you would like to try this out with me, let me know how it goes! Anyone interested in applying to write for the Examiner.com, and if you found out about them through me, then please use my referral number in your application: 5918