The Big Lesson I Learned After Turning Myself into a Content Mill

When your side-hustle becomes your personal hell

I used to write articles for money (oh wait, I still do, only here instead of there). I needed money bad and I found all these people writing content for blogs. If a writer had a diverse background and could generate an article quickly, they could make great-ish money — like fifty bucks and hour.

Of course that wasn’t every working hour, but every hour of writing.

A year into it, the bottom dropped-out. Article mills found out that corporate blogs would pay top-dollar for garbage articles, just to get the SEO juice. There were so many work-from-home seekers, the article mills could pay as little as three dollars for a five hundred word piece, and they’d get takers.

Worst part is — I did it to myself.

I worked harder and longer, while I got paid less and less per piece. I competed with overseas writers who were willing to work for pennies, but instead of letting them have their fun I kept typing. I was addicted to it.

I thought, “hey, at least I can get paid doing something I love. So what if my time is now worth fifty cents an hour.” Like so many other writers, I lost my mind. Every content site dropped their prices to stay competitive, while making it harder to get an article approved.

This was fifteen years ago. Before social.

At the worst of my article-mill habit, I made one thousand dollars a month after writing two hundred articles. Five bucks a piece. Like eighty hours a week of typing, or something close to that. The process had turned me into a complete addict.

I’d check my stats, check my approval queue, and check my bank account. Every. Thirty. Minutes. Somehow a light went off in my fried brain. I stopped. I shut down all my accounts. And I walked away from the article mill treadmill.

The dream of full-time writer was still there, but I knew I had to follow a different path or the price would drop so low, I’d have to pay for the privilege of writing my own articles. I took a long break. I started a niche marketing business. I learned I’d be a million-times better-off if I wrote my own books and developed my own content.

There was this thing called blogging. You wrote your own stuff and people came to your site. Novel idea. “Sure, sign me up!” This was now ten years ago, or so. It’s all a little hazy now. I didn’t get much sleep for a five-year stretch.

Then… I had my first content mill relapse.

I started a marketing blog. I wrote seven days a week. Posted articles. And wrote a live email seven days a week. I built a few courses. I wrote a dozen non-fiction books. I followed what I though was the right path — make more stuff and you’ll get more visitors.

I followed that pace for three years. Writing a daily email and daily blog post, plus all the additional books and courses I sold. I was a maniac, completely lost from reality. This was before hustle t-shirts were a thing.

Again, I shut it all down. I removed a dozen books off Amazon. I closed seven websites I operated all by myself. I shut down my courses. I didn’t even say goodbye to my customer list. I just woke-up one morning and shut it all down. Like a junkie who found herself lying in the center lane of a highway. I stopped writing altogether — for five or six years.

…but the writing bug wouldn’t leave me alone.

So, four-five years ago I decided to teach myself how to write fiction. I had no formal training and it showed in my learning process. I’ve written about that mess before. Some of it’s here in this post:

I fell off the wagon again. Enter the third stage of my content mill relapse.

This time, I welcomed the training. I only wrote for myself. The first five manuscripts I wrote were unreadable. But I learned. And I grew. I finally published my first novel, and that led to a new hamster wheel of content — social media — the most-insane wheel ever created.

I’d check my stats hundreds of times a day. I liked and clapped and commented. But the harder I worked on social, the further I moved away from the actual writing. I didn’t have time to create the actual books I wanted to promote, because I was too busy trying to build a social following.

Social media is the largest, free-content generating scam ever built. Think about it, for all the good it does (letting Grandma see your kids grow up), there’s so much more damage.

If I told you I was building a factory where everyone would work for free, 24/7/365, happily, at the expense of their relationships — all while watching as the parent company made more money than any other factory on earth — you’d laugh and tell me I was crazy.

This is what we do when we spend all our time posting on social.

We don’t own our followers. We can’t even reach our followers without paying to do so, yet we work for free, for the hope of a traffic trickle to our writing. We get jealous of twelve-year-old influencers (which is a perfect term, because they influence their followers to buy advertised products). We work harder than we’ve worked in our lives. I get the chills thinking about it.

I didn’t pull the plug on social. But I rarely post now.

I’m trying hard to keep my Medium habit at bay, although I’d say some days I’m very close to a fourth content mill relapse, here. But I love Medium. I appreciate the human process. I really appreciate the high-caliber of its readership.

So, I’ll keep writing. And I try to keep aware of how dangerous the content mill can become. There’s always more to write. Some posts stick and some don’t. I also learned this is no place to earn a full-time writing income. Not directly. But you can do a lot more if you add one component to your articles: email.

Email is the great equalizer. And email does all the heavy lifting automatically, so you don’t waste your writing time with posts that disappear ten minutes after you launch them into the black abyss.

So, I’m not out of the woods yet. I never will be. Once a content mill addict, always an addict. At least I recognize it now. I see the signs when I start to check my stats more than twice a day. I take a step back from the keyboard and breathe.

Maybe you can breathe too.

(Enroll in My Free Email Masterclass: Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers)

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

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