Anyway, my congrats to Felicia for making it over five years. I hope to periodically check here for the inspiration as I try to develop my own sites and pursue ebook projects. The Internet is an incredible instrument.

Writing for others becomes difficult as you begin to realize you have skills that could very well be used to build your own business. Felicia, thanks for your example.

Thanks for shedding new light on this for me!

Christina

As far as earnings, the bulk of my income comes from my own sites. I earn a little from Suite, Demand Studios and HubPages, but that accounts for less than 1% of my earnings. It is my opinion that owning your own sites is the way to go.

I’m so happy for your successful last five years. And I completely understand what you mean about getting inspired to write content, rather than just writing to write – I’d musch rather read inspiring content any day.

I’m starting to realize how very silly it was to go 100% upfront income. Since eHow compensated writers who had provided them with years of content and cut off the residual income stream for those articles completely (my major source of residual income), I started leaning more towards upfront income. I ended up creating an Elance portfolio over six months ago to establish myself as a freelance writer and gradually build a portfolio of writing samples. After my first initial few months writing content for clients on Elance, it’s been an exciting, if slightly challenging, ride.

Well, I finally hit one of those months where there just aren’t any jobs coming in and so income has come to a complete standstill. I do admit that I learned a bucket-load during the time I’ve been producing content for clients – I don’t regret switching to upfront income, but I do think that I should have diversified my income a bit.

Now I really wish I had at least some form of residual income coming in. I do earn meager income with Infolinks and the very few residual income articles I did write for Demand Studios. But I really wish I had formed a better Plan B. Demand Studios was my Plan B, actually, until I logged onto my account yesterday and found literally NO titles to be claimed – not a single one.

But I guess I learned my lesson. I am working on a niche site at the moment that I think will have great results, but more importantly – I think I’m going to start writing articles for content websites again.

I know you still use Suite101, but are there any other websites you earn a bulk of your income from (besides your own blogs of course)?

By the way, I did download both of your e-books “So You Want to Become a Freelance Writer” and “Make Money Blogging”. I’ll start consuming the information tonight!

As always, keep on producing amazing content Felicia. And have an incredible Easter (if you celebrate).

Christina