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.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Posting Schedule
If you're thinking about subscribing to this blog, I will probably post most Tuesdays. With my other blog requiring posts Wednesdays and Saturdays, this fits into my work schedule. It is my hope that soon I will have enough stuff to be useful to people who are thinking about getting paid to write, getting paid to blog, or managing online stores (either their own products, or someone else's). In any case, I hope to start 2011 with useful information every week to help you get started on your way. In the meantime, happy holidays, and here's a nifty resource: Fifty Ways to Make a Dollar a Day Online. Read the article, find your strengths, begin thinking about the process, and get ready to end 2011 more financially secure than when you started!
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Tuesday, December 21, 2010
My own blog
Step One - June, 2008
When I first started, I had no idea that I would have a blog. But some friends of mine were visiting, and they convinced me that not only did I have useful information to share, but that people would pay for that information in various ways. I didn't have a mentor, but I did set up a blog and decided on a posting schedule, and then work from there. It took a few months to find my exact niche, and then my friends convinced me to add Amazon affiliate links (sign up to be an Amazon affilate here). I was a bit skeptical at first. However, my friends pointed out that they were always calling me to ask for advice on certain products, and convinced me that they really wanted to just click a link rather than telephone me every single time they wanted to know something.
So I rather fearfully added an Amazon astore to my blog, and put a discreet link to it, and two years later got my first $10 payout from Amazon (I now average $3 - $5 per month). I went a step further and added a page for art related to classical music on art.com (sign up for art.com here), under an affiliate link. That page has gotten a lot of traffic, so it's something people must be searching for, and since I have gone to the trouble of searching art.com and finding all the pictures and putting them all in one place, I feel okay about the affiliate commission, too. I haven't gotten any sales from art.com yet, but I can always hope, and it does bring a lot of blog traffic.
To be continued . . . .
When I first started, I had no idea that I would have a blog. But some friends of mine were visiting, and they convinced me that not only did I have useful information to share, but that people would pay for that information in various ways. I didn't have a mentor, but I did set up a blog and decided on a posting schedule, and then work from there. It took a few months to find my exact niche, and then my friends convinced me to add Amazon affiliate links (sign up to be an Amazon affilate here). I was a bit skeptical at first. However, my friends pointed out that they were always calling me to ask for advice on certain products, and convinced me that they really wanted to just click a link rather than telephone me every single time they wanted to know something.
So I rather fearfully added an Amazon astore to my blog, and put a discreet link to it, and two years later got my first $10 payout from Amazon (I now average $3 - $5 per month). I went a step further and added a page for art related to classical music on art.com (sign up for art.com here), under an affiliate link. That page has gotten a lot of traffic, so it's something people must be searching for, and since I have gone to the trouble of searching art.com and finding all the pictures and putting them all in one place, I feel okay about the affiliate commission, too. I haven't gotten any sales from art.com yet, but I can always hope, and it does bring a lot of blog traffic.
To be continued . . . .
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