Now That Squidoo is Gone . . .

Perhaps your content has already found a home at HubPages. Perhaps you're looking to move it somewhere else. Or perhaps you don't know what to do.

There were all types of content at Squidoo, which was part of the problem. So let me try to help you figure out what to do with the content that just won't go elsewhere.

Naturally, long articles with fewer than one Amazon link per fifty words will do fine at HubPages. If you like HubPages (I do), there's no problem there.

If you have no outgoing links, you might consider Seekyt. They are nice folks, and have a nice platform and nice revenue share (70%).

If you have Amazon sales as part of your outgoing links, try Infobarrel. They allow one Amazon element (not link) for each two hundred words of text. However, your grammar, spelling, and writing will really have to be up to snuff as they are (rightfully so) extremely picky about content. Your content can't be a pure sales page, as was popular on Squidoo; it will have to be real content. For former sales pages, consider reorganizing your content, such as a how-to article with a list of supplies, or a comparison/contrast review of products. You can also have (within reason) links to other, related InfoBarrel articles, and two links off-site (links to sites such as Wikipedia do not count as part of your two-link limit). Remember, just because you wrote an InfoBarrel article doesn't make your articles related. For more information, check out the Newbies Guide (yes, written by yours truly, but approved by the community at large, and the owners of the site).

If you love widgets, such as the Amazon mp3 widget, consider your own blog. You can also add Apple or iTunes widgets if you have a PHG account. For example, a music article with a review of an album, and then the widgets for sampling the mp3s on Amazon, and buying them on iTunes, would be perfect for a self-hosted blog on WordPress.

For a combination of Zazzle, Allposters, and Amazon, Wizzley appears to be the go-to site. Unfortunately, Wizzley doesn't appear to allow videos, except for YouTube.

So good luck finding homes for all those articles (to be honest, there are still some old eHow articles I am trying to find new homes for)!

InfoBarrel Again

After the debacle at eHow, the next site I started with was InfoBarrel. While I did well there with 111 articles (a few were outmoded and deleted along the way), I decided that my New Year's resolution would be to update and review all 111 articles. InfoBarrel has changed their rules since 2009, when I first started publishing there, so I also wanted to make sure I included at least one Amazon module in each article.

As of today, I have added Amazon modules to all but three of my articles (one I'm waiting for an ebook to be formatted; one I can't find anything for, and one I just haven't done yet).

Another thing that InfoBarrel introduced was article scoring. When they first introduced it, I had some article scores below 41, and many below 55. Articles scoring below 41 were going to be de-indexed, and I quickly fixed those just enough to get their scores up to 41. In January I decided to get all my article scores above 55 this year, and I have done it on all but three articles. Those three have scores of 50 or above, but I just can't figure out how to get them any higher.

The other InfoBarrel improvement I am working on is on adding long descriptions to my media pages. InfoBarrel is unique among sites in that opportunity, as you have the ability to earn from pictures uploaded to your article. Not only do ads show on those pages, but in addition, you can have a link going to one or more of your InfoBarrel articles in the description. I'm also adding one outgoing link to an Amazon search page, where appropriate. I've just started this process, so I imagine it will be the end of March before I have finished.

Dollar Question Mark Donatas1205

And will all this translate into improved earnings? It's too soon to tell, and likely I won't see the results for several months. On the other hand, I know that I've done something positive to attempt to improve my passive income from InfoBarrel, and that's what I knew how to do.

I have other goals for this year, too, and so far I'm keeping up with all my New Year resolutions. Unfortunately, in this passive income game, everything is delayed gratification, so one reason for this blog is to keep track of what I did, so that when I start to see results, I can go back and see what worked!

Squidoo Redux

If there's one thing I hate, it's having to do work over and over again.

And in the case of Squidoo, I've just about reached my limit.



First, they locked lenses without warning, and donated all unpaid proceeds to charity (so they say, but we'll take them at their word). There was no indication of what was wrong, so I put the locked lens on the back burner until I heard what the problem was. Unfortunately, some time later, when I logged into my account, *poof* the lens was deleted, without warning.

As my lenses get locked, which I am sure they will be, I am moving them elsewhere. Squidoo was fun, and I liked the platform, but I am not willing to lose work if I happen to go on vacation or have a crisis to deal with. Some of those posts will be moved here, some elsewhere . . . but I can no longer recommend Squidoo as a place to write.

If you have a locked lens, be sure to edit it and post it elsewhere immediately, before your lens disappears!

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

eHow

Step Two -- October, 2008

I had looked up some stuff on eHow in its early days, but had never considered writing for them. However, in October, 2008, I saw a horrible eHow article, and thought, I could do a lot better. Then, I discovered I could get paid to write there, and so I signed up for their Writers Compensation Program (now closed), and started publishing articles there. At first, I published some articles related to my blog to get a backlink there (I didn't understand about backlinking then, but I knew I had to get people to the blog somehow). As time went on, I started reading the forums, where I found a few helpful people (and a lot of unhelpful ones) and ended up with 100 articles there (eventually two were deleted) before the WCP closed and no more articles were accepted under the WCP. At the end of 2009, I added Amazon affiliate links to each of my eHow articles--and just as I finished, eHow announced that affiliate links would no longer be allowed on articles, but that existing affiliate links could remain, so I lucked out. Even before then, it was clear that eHow was having some problems, so one of the things that was next on my list was to diversify . . . and a good thing, too. First off, I was running out of steam on "How-To" articles, and secondly, I was unhappy with dropping earnings from the eHow.uk website copying the writers' articles without compensation (I had read their TOS carefully, and knew that I retained the copyright to my articles). Second, eHow was paying upfront for articles from Demand Studios and then featuring poor content above good content written by writers in the WCP, and even publishing and featuring articles from Demand Studios that were essentially plagiarized works of articles already on eHow by writers in the WCP. They were also using keywords unethically, to send readers to articles that had nothing to do with what they were searching for, but had keywords there. Here's the Kindle edition of the eHow blog of one of the most helpful members: eHow.com/Alrady