Like many other fledgling Trionders, I suspect, I have become a little disillusioned with Triond after the first two months or so. It’s not about the money; I enjoy publishing my work for others to read and critique, and I’m very aware that earning rates are slow and that a lot of hard work is required for Triond earnings to reach a reasonable amount.

The thing is, I was convinced I would be able to put in that hard work and get my Triond profile boosted and off the ground. I’m a fast reader, quite a quick writer and I like to think that I’m imaginative enough to produce new and varied articles every day. The success stories and ongoing hard work of other writers inspired me and I hoped I could at least get my earnings to the stage where I could, say, buy a Starbucks every week from my Triond income.

However you may have noticed that for the past month or so I have been all but inactive on Triond. I haven’t published, I haven’t commented, I haven’t promoted my work. This spells doom for any writer and I found that it was equally bad for me – after a month of inaction I’m getting about 4 views a day.

Why?

The recent changes to the Google search engine means that Triond and other ‘content farms’ rank a lot lower down on the list. Bad news for writers. This really disheartened me, as I felt that all the work I and other writers put in would now bring in a lot less income as the articles just wouldn’t be shown by Google to all the Internet users that use the search engine and could have potentially viewed our work.

Now that earnings are reduced – I hear it has affected a lot of people – I’m a lot less motivated to work on my Triond because I know it won’t pay off very much.

What am I doing instead?

I’ve been focusing more on my student advice blog, Sorted Student. I’ve been building up the content and soon I’ll add Google Adsense – and possibly Kontera – to it and hopefully see the pennies trickle in.

I also have exams coming up, so my free time to write and publish will diminish exponentially over the weeks to come. I’m free for the summer after my last exam on June 21st – so who knows, I might make a tentative return to Triond. I need to earn as much as I can over the summer for when I will start university in September, so if the Triond community can help me do that then so be it!

However for now I bid you a temporary farewell. I hope to return, I’m looking forward to publishing again and re-integrating into the friendly and welcoming Triond community – but it won’t be for a while.