Creating Time

We've all heard it: "You have only twenty-four hours in a day." And that's true--up to a point. However, that's not the last of it. The decisions you make about how you use your time affect how much free time you have.

For example, I usually spend about a half-hour a day cleaning my apartment, and that doesn't really keep up with it. I made two decisions about my cleaning that I am completely happy with. First, I invested in a Roomba. It takes me four minutes a day to clean my Roomba, and my floors are sparkling clean and vacuumed daily. For an investment of about $179 (plus tax, minus the 20% off coupon I had), I can eliminate 20 minutes per week of vacuuming and part of the dusting, and get a much better job on my floors (if you're wondering, the Roomba really does a great job, and really picks up that much stuff every day!). In fact, I am spending about 8 minutes more a week to go from a once-weekly vacuuming to a daily vacuuming, thus saving myself about 120 minutes a week in the transition. That's two hours a week to do something I like better than vacuuming, and I still get all the benefits of daily vacuuming!

The second decision I made was to hire someone to clean. Many people, including my parents, see this as an extravagance. I see it as time created. It takes me about 4 hours a week to clean, and I'm not spectacular at it. But in half an hour, I can make enough to hire someone to come in once a week to clean for four hours. Even if I spend half an hour supervising her, that gives me 3 hours a week to invest in writing more articles, or creating more backlinks, or designing more Zazzle products. And rather than interrupting my schedule with random cleaning bursts here and there, I start each Monday afternoon with a sparkling clean house!



In the same vein, I pulled out my slow cooker to cook, rather than cook on the stove for each meal. Four minutes' worth of attention, and in three to four hours, lunch or dinner is ready, and I have leftovers for when I'm pressed for time. (As a matter of fact, I have to drive about an hour and a half a week, and I'm considering a 12-volt accessory to use in my car to put that time to better use . . . but which one?)

So if you need more time for writing, or anything else, the best way to find that time is to isolate the least productive thing you do. In my case, it was cleaning. A year ago, the way my furniture was arranged, it was unproductive. An interior designer put it right in about three hours, and ever since then, I've been much more organized, and there's no telling how much time I've saved in the past year!) Then figure out an efficient way to outsource that task; barter for it if you can't afford upfront payments (even a three- or four-way barter, or some sort of time bank). By eliminating the most unproductive parts of your routine in outsourcing them to someone who either does it better and faster, so that you save money in the long run, or to someone whose time is less valuable than yours, you can get what amounts to more than twenty-four hours in a day!

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!

HubCamp

A couple of weeks ago, I went to HubCamp. Was it worth it? Absolutely!

Although I feel the class was intended for beginners, rather than experienced article writers, I was surprised to see that some of the people there who had written many (sometimes hundreds) of hubs were asking what I considered basic questions. The thing I found most useful was the networking with other writers, and and ways in which we could combine strategies to promote others' work, as well as getting to know two of the HubPages staff members.

The other thing I found useful was their suggestions about titles. I have been experimenting with tweaking my titles to be longer (I tend to be rather terse by nature).

The swag was nice, too -- a moleskine-type notebook with the HubPages logo and a T-shirt (which unfortunately, was not 100% cotton and I had to give it away).

The staffers also explained the April writing contest (where I will be republishing some of my suddenly-deleted eHow articles), and the HubPages changes (more about this later, as I am exhausted from complying with the new rules). And best of all, HubCamp is free, so if you have a HubCamp coming near to you, definitely try to attend it!

Why is HubPages giving free training to its writers? Simple enough. Like all revenue-sharing sites, when you make money, they make money. The more money you make, the more money they make. So revenue-sharing sites want you to succeed, and they'll do what it takes on their end to improve ad placement, attract better ads, and the like. Admins at most sites are working behind the scenes all the time, so as a writer for one of these sites, it's a good idea to remain on friendly terms with the admins. It's not an us-versus-them situation, but rather, "we're all in this together."

Fuelspace

Fuelspace is like Snipsly and Jevitt, although they share only 50% of the Adsense revenue. Still, it's worth the effort for the backlink.

Service Station in Space for Refuelling and Repairing Interplanetary Craft

I've been advised that Fuelspace may have malware on their main page, so I've given you the link directly to the login page. There are basically no rules that I can see for Fuelspace, so this is good for backlinks, affiliate links, articles with too many links for other sites, and so on. As with the other sites, be prepared for rules changes and make sure that you have backups. Again, don't just duplicate content from other sites; rewrite your content from another perspective, or try a new article or backlink your already-written articles. With the new Google algorithm, we can only hope that someday good-quality content will outrank bad-quality content.

I don't have much on Fuelspace at the moment, but like Snipsly and Jevitt, Fuelspace will definitely be part of my overall strategy. Don't forget to illustrate your articles with your art.com  and allposters.com pictures and links, since those are definitely allowed. Those images may show up in Google searches as well--if so you will have yet another chance of getting your articles viewed. Just remember not to be spammy or use the hard-sell techniques (or that really awful technique of trying to get your readers to click on an ad just to get away from your article--you really don't want a reputation like that, do you? Of course you don't. Quality will out over time, so keep that quality up.

Jevitt

Jevitt is just like Snipsly, and so is perfect either for backlinking or for those articles that are too short or have too many links, and so otherwise don't fit in elsewhere. Just like Snipsly, Jevitt gives you an 80% share of Adsense impressions, and is basically a free-for-all. Jevitt is flying under the radar for the moment, and will probably get slapped by Google, but since it's a leverage tool for already-written content, or for articles that will not fit elsewhere, it's definitely worth checking out. I get traffic from Jevitt, and in the end, it's eyes on pages that count.

In Chains Erin Clark

Jevitt, just like Snipsly, is another WordPress-powered site, so once you have mastered the use of WordPress, all these WordPress-powered sites should be a piece of cake. Like Snipsly, Jevitt is full of low-quality articles, but never mind--there's evidence that Google's new algorithm counts only individual pages for content, not whole sites. Time will tell, but in the meantime, you can focus on adding useful content.

Snipsly

One of the first WordPress backlinking sites I used was Snipsly. They pay an 80% share of Adsense impressions, and the posting is really a free-for-all, which is nice for those articles that don't fit in anywhere else (for example, see this article on secret Amazon deals). This article has too many links to the same site (at least until I get to be a Giant Squid) but works perfectly on Snipsly.

Stagehands Pushing a Pair of Giant Scissors Allan Grant

Snipsly has no moderation or flagging, so it's full of useless posts, and just got slapped by Google. However, the moderators have taken notice and I believe policing will eventually be the order of the day. As Google gives its customers (searchers) more of what they want, I believe that in the future posts will be ranked individually, rather than by site. In the meantime, build up great, informative content and backlinks.

Xomba Reinvents Itself

Xomba has reinvented itself, now that Google has started to slap down spam. As a result, you can no longer bookmark your own articles (most of the content Xomba has). Now you can bookmark other people's articles, and stuff you find on the web, or you can write articles for Xomba. Don't try to bookmark your own stuff on Xomba or you will find your account is suspended. (If you don't use the same username, I don't quite know how they can tell, but it's not worth risking your account.)

Xomba has also discontinued referrals for the moment, so as a sweetener, they have increased their Adsense share to 60%.

If you still want to have your articles bookmarked on Xomba, the best way to to that is to set up a randomized ring with at least 50 members, and intersperse those bookmarks with others you find around the Internet (and truthfully, there's nothing easier than bookmarking other people's stuff you like). Setting up a randomized referral ring is tedious and I don't recommend it.

It's easier to subscribe to blogs you enjoy, and bookmark each post on Xomba. Xomba won't let you post duplicate URLs but finding a blog with only a few readers (and preferably not a blog about making money online) won't be a problem. Plus, you'll be paying it forward to your favourite blogger!

Redgage

While Redgage is not a high-paying site (86 cents per 1000 views), the fact that you can import stuff from blogs and Facebook automatically makes it well worth your while. Yes, I have gotten payout there and have earned $60.00 in just over a year. I encourage you to try out redgage for yourself, and post backlinks, photos, rants, whatever you like. It's a good site and over time your earnings will add up.

Close-Up of Links in Heavy Chain Outdoors

SheToldMe

Now that I knew about backlinking, I wanted more. So I signed up with SheToldMe. Although I am not fond of the fact that you cannot edit or delete the posts, SheToldMe certainly brings in the traffic. If you get a friend or two to vote your submissions up, you could even end up on the front page (be sure to do the same for them). SheToldMe is run by a very nice fellow called James, and if you follow the rules everything should be just fine, but with most Web 2.0 sites, the owners tend to guard their sites very jealously and will go to great lengths to protect them.

Conestoga Wagon, Type of Wagon Used by Pioneer Settlers in the American West Gjon Mili

People are often confused about why they should cooperate with other people rather than compete with them, and it works a little like this. The make money online industry is new. There's no telling what could come in the future. The faster we pioneers (and yes, we are pioneers) work to build up that industry, the more money there will be to be made; the more avenues will open to us as more businesses determine that the model is successful; and no-one knows where the future will lead. The sky is literally the limit in the next twenty years. Just think about if you had been in on the start of the banking industry, which started in the Middle Ages with a few nobles, and ended up being so that anyone with a little knowledge can make money off of products the banks will sell. By promoting and building up the online industry, we will be ensuring our own profits, as well as the profits for future generations. Right now, industries are adopting a wait-and-see attitude towards small bloggers and revenue-sharing Web 2.0 properties. Five years from now, who knows where we could be?

Xomba

Step Six -- Backlinking with Xomba

The more I read through forums on InfoBarrel and eHow, the more I heard about backlinking. By May, I was ready to give it a try. I spent some time over at  Xomba, backlinking all my 98 eHow articles. I started adding to those my InfoBarrel bookmarks, but quit later when new challenges came along (more about those later). Since then, I have picked up my backlinking and am currently running an experiment where I hope to create at least 15 backlinks on revenue-sharing sites to funnel traffic to my articles (and incidentally earn a few pennies from the backlinks themselves. At my current inventory of six hundred articles, I am looking at 9,000 backlinks and am outsourcing a few of the sites in exchange for other labour which I find less tedious and time-consuming. This is one way you can create time -- find something that takes you a long time to do, and exchange with someone so that you perform a task quickly which takes you only a short time to do. So, for example, if I want my house cleaned, and it takes me four hours to do so, I can exchange house cleaning for another service that may take me only a half-hour, but might take someone else ten hours or more. That way, I gain 3.5 hours, and the other person gains six hours. Everyone wins and everyone is happy.

This is not limited to online activities. I exchange services on a regular basis and everyone I exchange services with is happy to do so--from the neighbour who lets me do my laundry in her apartment (thereby saving me space and money that would otherwise be taken up by a washer and dryer) in return for my taking out her trash and doing a load of her laundry, to the person with whom I trade piano lessons for other services. By trying to find win-win situations in your own life, you may just be making everyone else's life a little easier, too. That's goodwill spread all around as more people begin to do so. The only problem is that you must maintain your exchange scrupulously!

HubPages

Step Five--February, 2010

By February, 2010, I had been hearing a lot about HubPages, and decided to check them out, too. HubPages had quite a devoted following in various forums, and I quickly decided that I liked writing there, even if the revenue share was not as good as InfoBarrel's. The capsule arrangement pleased me, and I liked the Amazon monetization option. So I quietly started the 30 hubs in 30 days challenge, but fizzled out. However, I was able to turn some of my lectures from high school into hubs, whereas I couldn't face the enormous block of text those take on InfoBarrel. A lot of my hubs ended up linking back to my eHow and InfoBarrel articles, where I had formerly used pieces of my knowledge--but it was a relief to be able to put them all together in one place. I created some successful hubs, and entered a contest on food hubs. It was while I was writing one of these that the flood in my apartment occurred, and I was not able to finish the contest (although one of my hubs did win, and another got randomly drawn when a contest winner failed to return the release form promptly). Encouraged by the $100, I occasionally published hubs, and in January of this year reached 50 hubs. I have still four in progress as of this writing, with at least two to be published before the end of the month, and perhaps more.

Yes, it's another contest time on HubPages, and I had several hubs that had been started and unpublished that will work for the contest. In addition, I know quite a bit about personal finance, taxes, and saving money, so those are quick and easy topics for me to write about. Here's hoping I'll win the contest yet again!

PayBox

PayBox
A heads up--sign up for paybox.me , an experimental payment processing system, for free. Get $25 credited to your account just for signing up, and up to $20 per day until launch, plus $10 for each referral that comes through your link. Go check it out--you really have nothing to lose! In addition, you may be surprised by what you learn through taking the surveys and reading the blog on their site.

InfoBarrel

Step Four: October, 2009

I had seen the writing on the wall at eHow, and started looking for another outlet for my articles. In addition, I was running out of "how-to" ideas at a hundred articles, and people in the eHow forums were complaining. So I took a look at other revenue sharing sites that were being discussed, and decided that my next platform would be InfoBarrel.


 Now InfoBarrel had its own drama, carried over from eHow, but as soon as the Writers Compensation Program at eHow closed, the forums settled down. I discovered that there were people who were genuinely helpful to newbies to InfoBarrel like myself; I learned about signing up for Adsense and Chitika, so I started writing articles in October, 2009. I wrote a few, including overviews, and saw my first earnings in January. From my eHow experience, I knew that it was only a matter of time until I saw earnings start to increase. So I made it a point to enter the monthly writing contest, and to increase my Adsense revenue share. All was going well until, on June 8, 2010, I had a plumbing problem that kept me out of my apartment for the next three months while everything was repaired. With the disruption, I was not able to keep writing at my old pace. In addition, I had found some other avenues to earn money that I was pursuing.

Do You Squidoo?

Step Three - December, 2008

On the eHow forums I heard about Squidoo. At first I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that the pages (or articles) were called "lenses." I put up a lens to promote my classical music blog, added some links to eHow articles I had written on living with multiple chemical sensitivities, and a few eHow articles I had written on coping with cooking and entertaining disasters, and other than that never really gave it much thought. A handful of lenses earned me about a dollar a year, and I just never paid attention to it, until recently.


However, Squidoo was started by Seth Godin, who is universally considered to be a marketing genius. After all, I had read most of what Seth Godin wrote, including his blog, his books, both free and the ones I had to check out of the library, and even tracked down interviews that he had done with other writers and marketers. So I took another long look at Squidoo. I went through and read their terms and conditions, and started looking at other Squidoo lenses that were top-tier (that is, they get a lot of traffic and make a lot of money). In the meantime, they changed the platform, adding levels (some for participating, others for other activities) which were linked to points, which were then linked to new features you could go back and use on your already-published lenses. And new modules had been added, so I went to take a look at those and familiarize myself with what products they offered. Based on what I had been doing the year in between (more about that next week), I went back through and started thinking about how I could start making my lenses make more money for me. I added and deleted modules and text, and started linking lenses together into niches.







This project started me thinking about the features of each site I was writing for more carefully, and now I have a dozen lenses over there, and even the ones I had before are making me much more money now. In addition, my other articles are starting to earn me more through the process of backlinking and link lists. I will go into all that much more, later! For the time being, though, and through most of 2009, I was primarily concentrating my efforts still on eHow, reading the forums for advice (I rarely posted) and figuring out how all this making money online thing was going to work for me. It certainly wasn't easy, and very few people were attempting to make it less difficult. Not only that, but I had my day job, and writing a hundred articles in a year seemed hopeless. Two of my eHow articles got deleted in the infamous "article sweeps," and I learned that you could not depend on one web site as a source of income, because eHow was so unreliable. For that, I am grateful, because I learnt my lesson early about learning to diversify my writing and income sources. To date, I still have 98 articles there, each earning me an average of 30 cents per month. Okay, that doesn't sound like much, but in two years I have been paid back a little more than half the effort I invested.

How do I figure my effort? I figure each article takes me an average of one hour to write, find affiliate links and photos for, and publish. Therefore, by the time an article earns me eight dollars I have made back my investment. Of 98 articles on eHow, twenty have earned me more than eight dollars. Those profits paid for the next 35 articles, bringing my total average earnings to eight dollars per article for the highest 55 earners. As articles get older, they tend to earn more, and so I think that by the end of 2011 most of my articles should be on the profitable side of the average. In 2012 I should go from net negative to net positive -- perhaps even sooner if I have figured out my strategies correctly. And, don't forget, I get a few Amazon sales from eHow occasionally, too, so all in all I consider it a wise investment, though I would definitely never write for them again!

 All in all, I don't regret having written for eHow. It was a great platform for learning how to write articles, learning about affiliate sales and how to promote affiliate products, finding public-domain photos (and why I should use photos), and backlinking and promoting my articles. In addition, reading the eHow forums made me aware of the importance of learning the strengths and weakness of different sites, and opened my eyes to different ways to earn money online. Now that I have currently concentrated most of my new article writing at Squidoo, I am beginning to figure out Squidoo's strengths and weaknesses, and I should start to see increased earnings from them.