Whew! Scrubbing the Internet is Hard Work!

I have just started republishing my deleted eHow articles, only to find that some of my best earners were copied all over the internet, by places that should have known better. It took me several rounds of emails to get the duplicated content deleted from Yahoo!, but iVillage and others responded quite quickly. What I want to do is compliment HubPages on their site, as to how I learned from this experience. I copied my article from its cache on the Internet Wayback Machine and published the article (along with some great photos from art.com). Almost immediately it was marked as a duplicate. I sent an email showing them the cached page and that I was the original author, and they responded by immediately overriding the duplicate flag within minutes.

So I am impressed with the HubPages team for, first, alerting me that my content had been duplicated, and sending me at least one link to the duplicated content; and second, for reinstating my hub within minutes of the proof that I was the original author. And thank you to the sites that took down my duplicated content (including a lot of sites that should have known better). And boo to the sites that refuse to take it down, or have no way to contact them to ask that they take it down.

The fact is, it's almost impossible to enforce copyright on the Internet. But by posting it on a highly-trafficked site like HubPages, Squidoo, InfoBarrel, or another article site, it's quite possible that you will eventually outrank your duplicated content with your republished original content.

I'm off next to Google to ask them to de-index the offending sites until the duplicate content is removed.

Update: I'm lazy, so here's my way to combat the thieves.

Zazzle

 One account that has been doing well for me is Zazzle. Zazzle is one of those print-on-demand stores, where you upload an image (or put text on something), and if you sell it, you get a royalty. If you sell something (your own product or someone else's) through your referral link, you also get a referral of 15%.

Why do I prefer Zazzle over the other print-on-demand stores? Simply because there is an integration that is user-friendly and allows for many options. For example, you can have separate stores, such as I have a general type store and one for specific music-oriented items. You get volume discounts if you sell large numbers of items, and by setting the royalty yourself, you can control the price of an item.

I'm not lost. by musicker
Browse Funny music T-Shirts

Another thing is that the payout level is low ($25), and I've achieved almost that in just over three months. In addition, the integration with Squidoo is easy and tagging the items helps them be found in search engines.

The End of eHow

I've written before about eHow. While I have fond memories of the Writers Compensation Program (hereinafter abbreviated WCP), when eHow quit accepting new posts, I decided to leave my articles where they were, and they continued to earn well.



However, with only a few hours' notice, eHow discontinued the WCP, a move I had been expecting, but not ready for. Having learnt something about which articles will do well on which site, I am now in the process of moving my 98 remaining articles to other sites. I decided not to take the buyout, as I received an offer of $160 for 90 articles, which I can make back in about five months.

So farewell, eHow. You were a great learning experience for me, and a lesson that I should diversify, diversify, diversify. Thank you for introducing me to writing articles for residuals, and for the cash that definitely helped me pay the bills each month--but I know more than I did then, and I expect to make much more with my work elsewhere than your offer. I leave eHow with a sense of relief, after their treatment of writers, and have set my sights on greener (and fairer) pastures.

A Few Bad Apples . . .

90% of everything is crud by classicalgeek
View other Sturgeon's law T-Shirts

After the Google Panda update, many revenue-sharing sites are changing the way they do business. Xomba no longer allows you to link to your own work, and now TheInfoMine and MyGeoInfo are closing their doors to new writers, and asking writers with less substantial bodies of work to move their articles to another site. Since these two sites had a responsible and responsive admin, and an 85-90% revenue share in favour of the author, the loss of these two fine sites is devastating to the revenue-sharing community. More sites, I am sure, will follow suit.

At some point you have to decide if you are in the making money online game for a quick buck or for the long-haul of providing valuable content or curation to the public. If you've been in the former camp, I encourage you to change, as you are spoiling the revenue-sharing sites for the rest of us writers, who work hard to come up with creative, original content. Your "Cheap ________ for Sale for Under $100" articles will not stand the test of time, and eventually you and the other authors of those articles will find themselves without any income as readers, search engines, and site admins catch on. In order to make revenue-sharing work in the long run, you have to take the high road. The site admin at TheInfoMine/MyGeoInfo recently emailed me and said, "I wish I had a hundred ethical writers like you." I think he's speaking not only for himself, but for all revenue-sharing site administrators, who had hoped to build a community of people willing to share their knowledge for free. It's time to grow up and stop gaming the system; otherwise, most, if not all, of the revenue-sharing sites will collapse under the mountains of spam and junk articles.

Ah, Tax Time!

Last week's post got torpedoed because of federal income taxes, but never fear--I'm back! I actually look forward to doing my taxes, because it shows me what activities are productive, and what activities are non-productive. To that end, in the aftermath of doing my taxes, I've made some decisions.

Income Taxes Norman Rockwell

First off, the internet writing definitely stays--from a tax perspective, internet writing is definitely worth the effort! I've even upgraded my internet connection and I'm going to be investing in a new computer: a Mac Mini (I have not had an Apple product since the days of the Apple ][e).
Because the internet writing is starting to pay so well, I'm going to be investing more time in the process, and probably moving articles around for a while, or rewriting them and posting to other sites.

Also this year, I'm reviewing my record-keeping practices, and investing in some low-tech devices to keep my tax records organized. While I may make a little less money this year (after all, I won a ton of writing contests last year), I'm expecting that on my 2012 taxes, I will see a huge jump!

By the way, you should have to write out a check at the end of the year to the IRS. If you are getting a tax refund, you need to rethink your investment strategy.

The Value of Your Online Properties

I was speaking with my financial advisor last week, and adding my $60 per month in predictable online income to my retirement calculations, to come up with a plan for the next few years. When she heard $60 per month, she was shocked, and she pulled out one of her own financial statements: she was making about $60 per month on the best investment she could find, with an investment of $20,000. If I took an hour to write each of my 600 articles, she explained, I was making the equivalent of $33.33 per hour, after taxes.

Now some articles earn more, so obviously, those are worth more. Many haven't earned me anything at all to date, although it's impossible to tell what indirect effect they have (for example, they could generate interest in other articles, or generate Amazon sales. In any case, on most sites, each article provides a backlink to your other online properties, and your profile page (or should, at least). So when your friends, family, or financial advisors laugh at you for spending hours at the computer, typing away, remember that this is a serious investment of your time, and will pay off in the future, perhaps even in unexpected ways. After all, we don't know what is around the corner, and those of us with established online properties, especially on young sites, stand to benefit.

Green and Yellow Escalator Moving www Upwards

Someone may also offer to buy one or more of your articles (it's happened to me). The thing to do is to look at how much that article is earning you, both directly and indirectly. I have an article that currently earns me $10 per month, and it has numerous affiliate links in it. (If you're curious, it's 50 Ways to Make $1 a Day Online.) I replied with an initial offer of $6000, based on the amount of money I would have to have in the bank in order to earn $10 per month, plus the lost future revenue from affiliate signups and sales. Based on their reaction, I believe the figure the other person had in mind was about $200; that would not have come close to replacing my lost revenue. So make sure you are valuing your articles correctly, or you may wind up losing money to someone sharper than yourself about the value of your articles.

HubPages Applies New Quality Control Standards

In the aftermath of the Google algorithm change (nicknamed Panda), HubPages has employed a new set of rules. I have been busy, therefore, rewriting my hubs to meet their changed standards.

Wagon Wheels in Colorful ... Darrell Gulin

I didn't have to worry about copied content, fortunately, but what I did have to worry about were two things having to do with the Amazon capsules: first, that keyword products in a capsule would be limited to one; and second, that there must be fifty words of text for each Amazon product (the same rules apply for eBay, but I don't have an affiliate for eBay). Writing fifty words for each Amazon product was not that hard, but what killed me was going through and selecting products individually; some hubs had over seventy products featured!

Having just exhausted myself to meet the March 25th deadline, I must say that I think the rules changes improved my hubs remarkably, and I expect in a few months to see much higher Amazon sales as a result. In addition, in researching individual products to recommend, I now read the reviews and descriptions very carefully, and I feel that the products I selected in my hubs are much, much better than having Amazon simply search for a product. By hand-selecting these products, I have added value for my readers. So all in all, I feel good about the work I did on improving my hubs!