Photo: SXC

1. Suite101.com – Still the best as far as I’m concerned. I write 4 articles a month and get over $200 in residual income. If I would put more time in, I’d be getting a lot more, but I prefer to write for as many places as possible because I don’t like the eggs in one basket way of doing things.
2. Infobarrel.com – It is a fairly new site, but I’m starting to see a bit of success. To be paid for writing here, you will need to become a Google Adsense affiliate and a Chitika affliliate. Many people are pulling articles off eHow and putting them on Infobarrel. I’m leaving my eHow articles up because I prefer to write longer articles for Infobarrel and eHow is still paying me for my content. (My mama always said, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face!”)
3. Examiner.com – Examiner was off my list for awhile, but they’ve straightened out their Google indexing issue and have added $1 upfront pay to the pay per thousand for local Examiners, so I’m testing the waters again.
4. Squidoo – I’ve joined a 52 week Squidoo challenge put together by the awesome Tiffany Dow and am working on a lens a week. It is fun. It is free. It earned her hundreds a month around Christmas last year. What’s not to like?
5. Factoidz.com – Another fairly new site. The owner actually listens to writers and seems to be a very fair person. I get very nice earnings for the number of articles and I love that he’s planning a religious/inspirational site for writers instead of just refusing religious content because it doesn’t quite fit the Factoidz model and leaving it at that.

Other sites I have written for that seem to do okay but didn’t make my personal top five are:

• Mahalo – Very complicated to figure out and your pay is in Mahalo dollars, which need to be converted to dollar dollars. I was really happy with the site until they raised cash out to $150 right before I reached the previous $40 cash out limit. People who are accepted on the how to team and write just a few articles a week should have no problem reaching $150 in a month, though. I still plan to write here if there is any time to spare.
• Firehow – Articles do okay and I should write more. I just don’t have time.
• Xombytes – Some people do very well here. I basically use it for links, but someday…
• eHow – A year ago this would have been my number one site. I am hesitant to write any more articles for eHow because of all the problems there, but I’m not taking them down unless eHow stops paying me.
• Bukisa – I like Bukisa. I just don’t make decent revenue there. One writer there made over $2000, so it does have possibilities, but I think you need to ride Google trend waves like a pro surfer and not worry about building a library of evergreen content. I don’t have time for that.
• Associated Content – I think this was actually my first residual income site. I knew nothing about SEO at the time and only have a few articles up. Someday, I will write a bunch of articles that are SEO optimized and see how it goes. I still get about $1 per month, but I know people who get hundreds. Add the upfront payments and it can be a very nice chunk of money.

What sites make your top five?