Help

What Should I be Writing About?

Imagine being a teacher and having to keep your students interested; essentially that’s what we’re doing on a much larger scale. We’re catering to the interests of 16- to 25-year-old males, so topics that are preachy are completely out of question. The idea is to make people go ‘WOW’. After all, visitors to the site are interested in offbeat things they’ve haven’t seen before: freaks of nature, incredible green design and amazing pictures.

Tips on How to Make Your Article Sparkle:

Article Choice

There are three main elements which make an article successful.

1. The first, and most important, is an image. If you find an image which you think is excellent but isn’t incredible, search for more images. Image choice should determine what you write about.

2. The second most important thing is the title. Go for sensational and bizarre headings that will make people click. Ask yourself the question – would you want to find out more if you read the heading elsewhere?

3. The third essential element is to find a unifying concept. For example, if you’ve found a cool picture of light, instead of talking about light in general spot a trend and make sure it lives up to the expectations of the title.

If articles don’t suit the site or are light years away from EG’s style, we’re very sorry but we won’t be able to publish them.

Titles

Sensationalist headlines will make your article stand out from the crowd and seem more appealing. Especially with people‘s short attention spans on the internet. Take, for example, these two headlines about light. Which would you rather read?

The Lights of Nature
Or
20 Most Incredible Phenomena

(We definitely know which one we’d pick)

To think of a great headline, imagine yourself in the mind of your reader. What would grab your attention while surfing online? What would make you click on a story?

The Importance of Photos

As you’ve probably noticed, Environmental Graffiti is all about the photos. If you can’t find stunning images to accompany your article, don’t write the article. Once you have an idea, search for images first, if you can’t find decent images, change the topic. Honestly, it will save lots of time because nothing gets published on EG without images.

Creative Commons http://search.creativecommons.org/ and the advanced search on Google are normally good enough but if you find images elsewhere be sure to get permission from the photographer. Most are delighted to have their work published on our site. And only ever choose images that are crisp and clear. A wee word of warning: never use images from Getty, Associated Press or any of the big image banks as they will sue our ass, big time.
Make sure you credit the original photographer and insert a link to their site. Take a look at some of the recent articles to see how it’s done.

In summary then, all our articles should have:

- a punchy headline

- great picture/s

- incredible and interesting content

- a unifying concept

Payment

As for payment, we pay at the end of the month by paypal. Currently, we are paying out 25% of ad-revenue associated to the traffic your article brings in, but we plan to increase this up to 80% once we’ve built scale. It’s an extremely expensive task running Environmental Graffiti, and we’re reinvesting everything we can back into the development of the site.

You can check the going rate for how much we pay using the Graffiti Index, which displays the rate users were paid per 1000 unique views to their articles from the US, UK and Canada last month.

Why do the stats track only the US, UK and Canada? Does this mean we only pay out on that traffic?

Absolutely not. We aggregate all of the earnings from international ads and pay those out too. The reason why the stats are only geared to the US, UK and Canada is to prevent people from manipulating the system by buying cheap traffic from countries where it is almost impossible to make money from advertising, devaluing the amount you get paid for articles. In short, any of our earnings outside of US, UK and Canada only serve to increase the Graffiti Index, so gaming that will not benefit the user.

What are earnings from your network?

For every friend you refer you’ll receive 25% of what they make - and this doesn’t come out of their pocket, but ours i.e. the more traffic your friends get, the more revenue you make. As you’ve only got 10 invites, you might want to choose who you invite carefully!

How much can you make?

The amount you make is uncapped. It’s really a question of how much effort you put into it. The more articles you write and the higher-quality they are, the more you make. Our top writers are making upwards of $2000 per month, though they have written hundreds of high-quality articles.

Additionally, if you’ve had problems signing up, you can register here: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/byinvitation or if you have any other specific enquiries you can email Simone Preuss (simone@environmentalgraffiti.com)

Thanks very much. We hope you enjoy writing for the site!