50 ways to annoy Triond writers

1. Copying a Triond writer’s articles. It’s called plagiarism. It’s illegal, as well as immoral.
2. Copying their article titles. This one’s just silly.
3. Copying the subject matter of one of their articles. This one isn’t as bad as others, but it still shows a lack of consideration, if nothing else. Also, the time element has to be taken into account. If two articles with the same subjects are published within a day of one another, it’s kind of cheesy. But if several months or years have passed, no harm, no foul.
4. Posting tons and tons of your own links on the Triond forums.
5. Posting tons and tons of anyone’s links on the Triond forums.
6. Trash talking another writer on the forums when they’ve done nothing wrong. Are you 14 and still in junior high?
7. Leaving spam on article comments.
8. Leaving tons of links to your own articles on another’s articles.
9. Messaging another Triond writer and begging them to read your articles.
10. Messaging another Triond writer more than once and asking them to “friend” you on Triond.
11. Messaging another Triond writer more than once and begging them to “friend” you on any other site.
12. Trash talking Triond for stupid reasons on the forums. There are, at times, legitimate reasons to be upset with Triond. Most reasons on the forums aren’t legitimate. They’re stupid, and make you sound petty and stupid.
13. Lying in the forums about how you’ve made tons and tons of money on Triond. It’s old. It’s boring. And it’s hardly ever true. You look like a fool, at best. And anyone who spends a fair amount of time on Triond already has a pretty good idea of who the big earners are. You’re not one of them.
14. Posting your referral links to other sites in the Triond forums, without pointing out it’s a referral link. We’re not stupid. We don’t mind helping out someone from time to time, just not those who are trying to trick us.
15. Writing stupid articles and having them do very, very well. This one’s not your fault. You got lucky. It just annoys the rest of us.
16. Writing really good articles that make money. Yes, the rest of us are still jealous.
17. Going to another site and trash talking Triond writers. Then returning to Triond and acting as if nothing has happened. Many Triond writers use more than one site. They’ll know.
18. Trying to police the Triond forums. I’m the first to admit, the forums have a lot of garbage. But in all the years Triond has been around, the staff has shown next to no interest in policing the forums. Neither should you. It is what it is.
19. Going to another site and trash talking Triond, then coming right back to Triond to publish your articles. This one makes you look like an imbecile. As always, there are legitimate gripes with Triond. Just be intelligent in what you complain about.
20. Trying to write in English when you don’t know the language very well. This is another one that really isn’t your fault. You’ve got to learn, right? But feeding out bad English doesn’t improve your chances of drawing viewers, and it hurts the heads of the rest of us trying to read it. Suggestion: Don’t try to write in English on Triond until you know the language better. Or perhaps there are sites similar to Triond that allow other languages? Just an idea.
21. Being bigoted against those who can’t write English very well.
22. Blowing up on the forums about your personal religious/anti-religious/spiritual/political/whatever beliefs. We don’t care.
23. Not accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.
24. Writing about the same subject matter. All. The. Time. No one wants to tell you what to write, but come on. It gets boring after a while.
25. Posing as an expert when you’re not. Other writers will catch on to this. How? Because some of them really are experts.
26. Talking on and on about how “real writers do it for the love of writing or to express themselves, NOT for the money.” No. You’re wrong. And you’re an idiot. Real writers write because they love writing, enjoy expressing themselves AND want to make money, if not a living, through their writing. Anything else is a hobby, not a calling.
27. Pretending to be someone you’re not on Triond. Sooner or later others will catch on.
28. Commenting on the Triond forums under multiple user names. Again, others will catch on.
29. Being overly promotional on Triond. It’s okay to post a link every once in a while, or from time to time to mention whatever it is you’re selling, but doing it often is annoying. Others will shut you out, and this won’t help you sell whatever it is you’re selling. Annoy enough people, or the wrong people, and they’ll make it their personal goal to attack you and your product on Triond and beyond. That doesn’t do you any good.
30. Not helping beginning Triond writers. Sometimes it’s fun to be flippant on the Triond forums, but it also doesn’t hurt to help out the newbies. You were a newbie once, remember? If the newbies get a little help, they’ll soon add to the Triond community instead of slinking away or worse, by becoming annoying.
31. Leaving extremely brief, almost unrelated comments on Triond articles. They’re usually something like “Nice article.” These comments scream “I’ve read your articles, so please read mine!” If you have something to say, say it. If not, just click the “Like It” button and move one.
32. Posting on the forums that you have some new way to make others money, if not out-and-out rich. Everyone has seen your scam or whatever other kind of BS you’ve got going on. We know. We will avoid you like the plague.
33. Screaming “censorship!” No. Censorship is what a government does. Private entities, such as individuals and businesses, do not have to publish your garbage. You can write it all you want, and you can find other ways to publish it if you so desire, but you don’t have the right to force anyone to publish anything of yours.
34. Bad language. Oh, wait, who the f*ck am I kidding?
35. Complaining about how little money you make from Triond.
36. Especially if all you write are poems or religious articles.
37. Or post images on Picable.
38. Bad speling. It cun be enfuriating. Especialy considring Triond is spposed to catch this klnd of thang.
39. Being the grammar police. Triond is basically a free for all. We write what we want. You don’t have to read it.
40. Writing poetry.
41. Then begging others to read it.
42. Begging others to read anything you’ve written. Learn the word “promotions.” Begging and spamming are not involved.
43. Acting like a know-it-all. No one knows it all at Triond. Okay, maybe one or two people. But you’re not them.
44. Going on the forums and acting as if you are a Triond employee. It’s been done. A billion times. And it wasn’t cute the first 500.
45. Complaining about how much work Triond is, and you should be making more money. No one forced you to come here. Spend your time job hunting if you want to make money.
46. If you actually work for Triond, one way to tick off writers is by cutting their pay. Without telling them about it.
47. Coming up with a list of 50 ways to annoy Triond writers.
48. Writing a follow-up article titled something like “50 ways to be nice to Triond writers” or some such nonsense.
49. Coming up short on your lists.

Online writers have to be willing to experiment

Let's say you write online for Triond. But you're not happy with the money you're making there. So you go over to a similar site, Bukisa, and you try publishing some articles there. Still not happy with the money. What do you do next?

It seems a lot of writers throw up their arms and give up at this point. No, you're not going to get rich writing for online content publishing sites, but there is money to be made. And quitting won't get it done.

First, you could try even more online writing sites. Do a search. There are plenty of them available. Try some of them out. Perhaps you'll like what they have to offer.

Still, if you're not going as many readers and as much money as you would like, there are still things to be done.

Try using social networking sites to promote your writing. Facebook and Twitter are obvious choices.

Another helpful option is to use online linking sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon where you can place links to your favorite websites, including your own articles, in hopes of drawing in viewers. The key on these sites is to take an active role in the sites and not just spamming your own work. Join some groups on the sites. Leave comments on others' links and articles. Make friends. That will slowly begin to draw readers to your articles.

And you don't have to change writing sites if you don't want. If you like Triond, stick with Triond. But even here you can experiment with different ways to draw in viewers.

Another option is to write for more than one site. Try writing for three or four, or possibly more if you have the time. This will allow you to judge the benefits of each site, and eventually you might settle for one of them over the others or perhaps you'll figure out which one is best for you to place most of your focus upon.

Online writing isn't easy. You have to be willing to take chances. Some of those chances will fail big time for you, but others will pay off. It's all about experimentation.

So get out there and get to experimenting! Don't be afraid to try something new.

Triond allows profile pics to be short videos

In case you are a writer for the Triond online content publishing site and you haven't caught the latest news on the site, you can now turn your profile image into a short, 17 second, video of yourself. How do you do this? Hopefully you've got a camera. That's a good place to start. What's next? For the lowdown, check out the Triond blog.

Lessons learned from a year writing on Triond

I first signed up with Triond in May of 2009 after researching many different online content publishing sites. Like many others who had come before me, I was hoping to be able to make money with Triond through my online writing. Initially I had hoped my 20 years of experience as a newspaper journalist would help me jump to the top of the pack of Triond writers, but while I've done okay, I wouldn't claim to be the best or even the most prolific writer on Triond.

My first lesson

 

What did I learn first on Triond? That getting views for one's articles is no easy task (and views are important because that's how you make money). Sure, I've signed up for plenty of social and linking networking sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit, SheToldMe and others. Those sites do help, sometimes tremendously, but there's more work involved in gaining viewers than just adding a link to some site. For one thing, you have to spend time on those sites commenting on others' links, making friends, being social and hanging out; if you don't, you're not likely to get very many views.

It also doesn't hurt to utilize other writing sites, such as Bukisa or Gather or RedGage or other sites, because on most sites you can link back and forth between articles which can help drive traffic from one site to another. The key though is not to put a bunch of links in your articles, especially ones that are not appropriate, because this will look like spamming and will drive readers away. Two or three article links at the end of, or throughout, one of your articles is generally appropriate.

Quality isn't everything

 

When it comes to Triond, quality writing is not the key to success. I learned that very early. So what is the key to success? Quantity can help, but it's not a given having a bunch of articles on Triond will necessarily bring you a bunch of readers.

What draws readers are articles that are interesting to them. Sometimes such an article can be a simple how-to article, or a health article. Other times it can be an article that's tantalizing, the practically screams weirdness or unorthodoxy. It takes some experimentation here to find what works best for any given Triond writer; health articles and articles about writing tend to work pretty well for me, but I've also had good luck writing about movies, firearms and sometimes goofball stuff that just popped into my head one day.

Sorry, but I've seen no evidence that fiction or poetry does well at all on Triond. If you are using Triond in hopes of making money on your poems or short stories, it's probably not going to happen. Still, Triond can be a good place for beginning writers to get feedback on their writing.

AdSense

 

Thank all that's holy for AdSense. I have used Google's AdSense for my blogs, but my online earnings really took off a few months ago when Triond began allowing its writer to earn from AdSense in their Triond articles. I easily make three times more money using AdSense with Triond than I do with Triond alone.

I know some who report having bad experiences with AdSense or who don't like some of Google's rules, but so far I have no complaints. Each month my earnings on AdSense have been double what they were the month before. I hope that trend continues.

Focus

 

Since making money through Triond was and remains one of my goals, I've also learned that publishing steadily on Triond helps to increase my readership (and thus my money intake). While I said above that quantity isn't so important, I will backtrack a little and suggest publishing at least one article a day does help to increase viewership.

I've noticed that if I go several days without publishing on Triond, overall my general number of views will wilt. But every day when I publish at least one article, the viewership of my other articles tend to go up some. I'm not sure if this is because readers are checking out my other articles or if those who publish often on Triond are given some kind of deference. Either way, writing and publishing every day does seem to help.
But what doesn't help much, at least in my experience, is publishing ten articles a day. Yes, it helped early on when I was starting at Triond, but over time it seemed if I published a bunch of articles in one day, I would end up getting fewer viewers overall.

A goal, then, should be to keep focus, to try to write and publish at least one article every single day.

Writing for money

 

I want to add here that while I do write for money, I don't write ONLY for money. I write because I like to. And because I'm decent at it. I'm also experienced at writing and editing. As I've said elsewhere, my professional experience as a writing might not always shine through on Triond, but that's because I allow myself a huge amount of leeway on Triond that I wouldn't in other, more professional venues. Why? Because quality isn't everything on Triond. Remember?

In closing

 

These are just a few of things I've learned on Triond during the last year. I've learned plenty of other lessons, such as that the Triond forums are pretty much a waste of time unless you're just wanting to hang out and shoot the breeze with some folks; the forums will help you to make friends on Triond, but they're not usually going to net you a whole bunch of readers to your articles.

But as I said, I've learned other lessons. To go into detail about them all would triple the length of this article, and I don't want to put you, the reader, through that. But if you are another Triond writer who has a question, please feel free to send me an e-mail or private message and I'll answer the best I can. I don't consider myself a Triond expert, but I don't mind helping other writers, so much so I've even created this blog for online content writers.

Why I Stick with Triond as an my main Online Writing Site

For those who might not know, Triond is an online site where you can publish your writings, photos, videos and sounds for free, while getting paid to do so.

I recently commented on the Triond forums about why I stick with Triond when there are other writing sites available, many which pay better than Triond. I came up with three reasons why I stay with Triond, and I thought I'd expound upon those reasons here.

The freedom
Triond allows you to publish online just about anything, with very few limitations. You can't plagiarize and you can't publish something that's already been published elsewhere, even if you should own the rights to the material. Triond also usually won't allow excessive cursing in articles submitted to it, and graphic sexual and violent content are generally not accepted. I say "usually" and "generally" because sometimes it seems anything can get through Triond's editors and automated features.

All that being said, Triond still has far fewer limitations than any of ther other online writing and publishing sites I've tried, used and in some cases continue to use.

For example, Bukisa doesn't accept fiction. Triond does. I don't publish a lot of fiction on Triond, despite the fact I'm also a fiction author, but every once in a while I'll have an older short story I've never been able to place with a magazine or ezine, and I'll want to go ahead and publish that story online. It'll end up on Triond.

Other sites, like Helium, force you to have to write to particular topics. Of course you can try to create a topic, but that's subject to approval and I've found Helium to be more trouble than it's worth when it comes to creating topics. I continue to publish there, but only if I happen to have written something that already fits into the alread-provided parameters. I don't go to Helium with an idea of starting from scratch and writing whatever I want.

And that's what Triond does for me. It allows me to write whatever I want.

The payment plan
Some sites, such as Redgage and Gather, don't pay you directly through Paypal or another online service or by check. Instead, Gather offers gift cards. Redgage offers a debit card. While I use both those sites, I find it preferable simply to have my earnings deposited into my Paypal account, which is what Triond does.

It's true many other sites pay much better than Triond, which pays according to the number of views an article earns. But a large portion of those sites pay upfront fees only. Some of those upfront fees sound enticing when compared to the seemingly paltry sums one can earn on Triond. Some of those upfront fees are as high as $5, $10, $15 and sometimes more for a story. But once you've been paid that upfront fee, you no longer receive anything more for your writing. I don't care for that. Triond might pay me less in the beginning, but in the long run I feel I'm being well-enough compensated.

Some places online, again looking at Helium, do offer some payment based upon the number of views earned by an article, but they also have a somewhat complicated payout plan that includes original articles and articles added to particular topics (though not all) chosen by Helium. Frankly, I don't want to have to think about it that much. I just want to write, get viewers and get paid for it, and not have to try to treehorn my writing into certain topics that Helium or some other site considers advantageous to them (but not necessarily advantageous or of interest to me).

One last thing about money on Triond: You can also add advertising from Google's AdSense program to your Triond articles. Believe me, it is well worth it. By using AdSense, I more than double the amount of money I make from Triond, and most other online writing sites don't provide for using AdSense (though some do).

The starting-off point
Okay, Triond doesn't pay much, but its payment plan is simple enough and hardly any restraints are forced upon my writing interests.

So what's my third reason for sticking with Triond? Because it's a great place to begin promotions. Since Triond only publishes original material, any of my articles appearing on Triond have been published there first before anywhere else. Sounds limiting? It's not, mainly because Triond provides easy connections to tons and tons of other places for linking back to your Triond articles, which brings in viewers (and thus more money). Stumblupon is one such place, as is Reddit. I also prefer to use Xomba and SheToldMe. There are tons of other sites that can be utilized for linking to your Triond articles, including socializing sites such as Facebook, Twitter and even the online classifieds site Craigslist.

It also doesn't hurt to have your own blog, or maybe even a series of blogs. Once your articles have been published on Triond, you can republish those articles on your blog. Then you can link from the blog back to your Triond articles, and vice versa. Then link to other blogs. The list could keep growing and growing. Link, link, link. That's one big key to bringing viewers to your Triond articles. You could even use sites like YouSayToo where you can bring your blogs together in one space for promotional or social purposes.

The ideas for linkage are nearly endless, only limited by your imagination and knowledge of what's available out there on the World Wide Web. Triond provides plenty of opportunities for you to link to other sites and blogs, but with some thought you can discover even more places for making connections.

Remember, Triond is just the beginning. What happens from there is up to you.

My First Month of the Triond Experience

Quantity Counts
During my first couple of weeks on Triond, a lot of other Triond writers told me in messages or in the forums that I shouldn't post a lot of articles every day. They suggested that by posting so many articles my stories would be competing with each other and dilute the overall number of hits I would get. After a month of being on Triond, I have to disagree. During my first two weeks I averaged about 7 or 8 stories published per day, and at the end of those two weeks I had earned a little more than $5. I decided to experiment a little, so during my second two weeks I intentionally only wrote about 2 stories a day; my earnings after those two weeks have been about $4. The difference isn't much, only about a dollar, but I feel it's enough to show me that quantity does count to some extent. I'm not planning to go back to writing 7 or more stories a day, mainly because I've recently become involved in other writing projects, but I'm at the least going to write those 2 articles a day.

Quality, Not So Much
I've written a few of what I felt were solid Triond articles, pieces I'd be happy to publish in many professional publications. I've also written a good number of Triond articles that were slapped together quickly from knowledge I already knew. The outcome? Generally those slapped together articles are bringing me a lot more hits (and more money) than those planned, well-thought-out articles. Go figure. I'll probably keep doing a mix of both.

How To Get Those Readers
I've come to the conclusion a lot of it is luck. There are things you can do to increase the number of hits you get for your stories, mainly to do a little publicizing and networking on marketing and interactive social Web sites, but from there a lot of it is out of your hands. Twitter and StumbleUpon net me a fair amount of daily hits, and Reddit isn't too bad, but I get the majority of my hits either from Triond or from other people's blogs and Web sites. The key here is that nearly all of those people who placed a link to one of my Triond stories on their Web pages first learned of my Triond article(s) through one of the interactive sites, usually Twitter. That tells me that networking might not pay off immediately, but it does pay off dividends if I'm patient at least a few days, sometimes longer.

Publishing Elsewhere
While Triond is the main publishing site I'm writing for, I've also of late been duplicating my Triond stories onto Bukisa, a site quite similar to Triond. I'm copying most of my stories pretty much verbatim. Some might scream that this is a disservice to the readers, but the main reason I joined Bukisa was just to have a backup for my Triond stories. However, I've learned that Bukisa is paying me pretty well. In fact, on a day per day basis, Bukisa is paying me better than Triond. The reason I continue to publish my stories on Triond first is because Triond will not publish stories that have already appeared elsewhere, though Bukisa does allow for this. So, it seems to me that any writer will be doing themselves a favor by publishing on more than one site.

It's hard to keep up with others
There are so many articles on Triond, and so many interesting writers, that it's difficult to keep up with all of them, even the ones you label as "Friends." I try to space it out a little bit and go to a few pages each day, but pages from different people every day. That's unless I see some article that really sparks my interest, then I read it right away. I wish I could read everyone's articles and click the "Like It" buttons and give everyone hits, but it's just not realistic. I try to be fair about it and spread it around a bit.

Find a niche, or a few niches
I think one thing that can help any writer on Triond to find success is to pick a particular niche, or several niches, and stick to them for the most part. This not only helps your regular readers know somewhat what to expect from you, but it also keeps you focused as a writer. I've found the most success in writing about writing, but that's probably because writing has been part of my profession for nearly 20 years. I've also had some success writing about '80s nostalgia, video games and the like, and I've been getting pretty regular hits on my stories that provide tips for domestic life, such as ways to clean with white vinegar and tips for caring for leather shoes. But that's just me. You'll likely find success in writing about other things.