Chezfat.com | Business ~ Marketing ~ Publishing ~ Authorship

American Freelance Article Writer For Hire

2014-02-13T09:15:00.001-08:00

Brian Chezfat here and I'm looking for work. :)

For my normal day-to-day readers this may come as a surprise but I an opening a few new doors in my career online. I'm dipping my toes into freelance ghostwriting.

Be it content marketing, SEO articles, or basic blog posting; I'm open and willing to get your job done quickly and professionally.

Background

For people who are new to me and my activities across the web you should know that I've been at this game for a while now, since 2009 to be exact and I make the bulk of my income owning and running a collection of websites monetized by affiliate offers and contextual advertising. I specialize in producing content that draws relevant traffic to websites while also expanding the overall authority of the website for it's target market.

I am not a huge fan of the traditional sales page either. I like to saturate a market with information that users are searching for and then provide short lists of products that can be solutions to their needs or problems. I find this to be a very effective way to make a living.

Having said that writing content for my own websites can get lonely and I do look forward to working with others on joint ventures. I enjoy helping other people out with their projects and find it to be a break from the mundane aspects of my own projects.

You can read more about me on my bio page but to summarize let me say this. I am an American who speaks native English. I write in conversational tone on most websites I run; it's most natural to me and it's how I produce my best content.

Credentials

I hold a Business Degree and I obtained my MBA a few years later after working for almost 10 years in mortgage compliance for a large regional bank. I started dabbling in internet marketing near the end of my tenure at the bank and it is now my full time profession.

I know how to write content for the web and for real human readers. I can SEO a site or a piece of content so that it gets regular search traffic and although I can't ever guarantee results I have a track record of success. I was successfully attaining blog traffic in 2009 and 2010 prior to the implementation of Google Panda & Penguin and I've started successful websites in the post-penguin era that also receive lots of converting search traffic.

One of my most successful sites was created in 2013 and it benefitted greatly with the implementation of Google's Hummingbird update.

My Intentions

Until early 2014 I've never opened up my writing (or skills) for hire. Even now I do not want to become a full time ghostwriter or service provider but I do want to add it to my portfolio as an option to you. To maintain a manageable workflow and to limit orders to people who are serious about quality and results I'll be offering those services for the foreseeable future at a premium rate - something reflective of my level of expertise.

I will work with you on your writing project in all confidence and will treat the project as tactfully and skillfully as I treat my own projects.

For the time being I will be facilitating all of my writing gigs via Fiverr Gigs and Gig Extras.

You can see my gigs through the following links.

Ultra Short Blog Posts: ~100 Words ($5)
http://fiverr.com/chezfat/write-a-100-word-article-or-blog-post

If you need ultra short pieces produced that are unique, interesting, helpful, but mainly "to the point" then this is the gig for you. In fact this is the base gig for all my services. You will have to buy this gig even if you want a 1200 word article - it's the way Fiverr works. Buy the small gig and pay for the gig extras to get what you actually want.

*Introductory Special*
As an introductory offer to my services if you order this gig today I will produce any article you need in any tone you wish up to 800 words in exchange for an honest review on the Fiverr platform.

Yes, the gig states 100 words but for the time being (unless you explicitly state otherwise) I will provide you a longer article based on your topic, desired article title, or set of keywords in the vicinity of 500-800 words. Once the introductory period expires this length of article will cost substantially more. Get it while it's on sale folks!

Notes

As more gigs are setup I will update this page. Please, if you are interested at all in exploring a working relationship with me you can get in connect with me via email. All orders are placed through the Fiverr system unless the order is custom and agreed upon via email.

If you want me to add any specific types of services you can shoot those ideas to me via email and I may add them to my Fiverr portfolio of gigs offered.

Lastly, I'd like to reserve the comment form on this post for reviews or testimonials. If you have questions fire them at me via email and if need be I'll append questions that might have broad appeal to the bottom of this post along with my answers. Thanks.

My email is brian@chezfat.com and I'm looking forward to working with you on your projects.

The Best Keyword Research Tools To Try Out Before Your Next Post

2014-02-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

Over the years I've tried a number of keyword research tools but on average I find myself defaulting to Google's auto-complete box on their search page more often than not. Even still there is plenty of value in using tools and even though I don't always use them I do fire some or all of these tools up from time to time... especially the auto-suggest scrapers.

I decided today to list off all the keyword research tools out there that are very popular or very interesting in their own right. In some ways I'm making this pages mostly for my own reference because I tend to forget how I came to know one tool from the next and what is actually different about it from the others.

I've also included below whether each tool is a paid or free model. So have at it. If I missed something then please let me know.

Keyword Revealer

http://www.keywordrevealer.com/home.php

This is a free tool introduced to me by Zeke over on this thread on The Pond. To quote Zeke this tool "gives you relevant suggestions for your keywords and tells you how tough the competition is." It doesn't just list of related terms like Google's keyword Planner or similar tools, it suggests other keywords independently. It's all web based. There's no download but you do need to setup a free account with login.

Google's Keyword Planner

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home

This is Googles tool for Adwords account holders. It's the keywords from the horses mouth and many tools use this as their foundation for research... as you surely know already.

Keyword Researcher

https://clevergizmos.com/keyword-researcher/

This is another tool made by a friend over in The Pond. It was the first of it's kind when it was released. It's a Google autocomplete scraper with plenty of wildcard options. I love this type of tool. It basically automates a lot of the kind of research I like to do by hand. There is a paid and free version of this and it's a downloadable program that runs straight from an executable file. Not exactly handy for mobile devices but seriously, who really works on a tablet or phone? :/

Jaaxy

http://www.jaaxy.com/

This is a super sweet program that is web based (no download). It is a subscription and has a free trial feature and an affiliate program. I used to use this a lot but wasn't using it enough to keep sunscribing but it is extremely valuable if you are creating tons of content. It was introduced to me by Judy over at the Pond. She is killing it online and she regularly says that this is the only program she uses to find keywords. She also pumps out way more content than I ever have so it's her bread and butter. Like keyword researcher this tool not only mines for keywords but also gives you competition analysis on the fly which can really speed up your work flow.

Long Tail Pro / Platinum

http://www.longtailpro.com/

This is the wildly popular keyword research tool used and abused by every niche marketer/blogger out there. I'm not 100% sure if it's because it's amazing at what it does or that it has a nice affiliate program. :/ Believe it or not I've never used LTP before. Lots of people swear by it so it can't be bad, I'm just not sure it's the best; but then again what do I know having never used it. The software has a one time use fee for limited features and an additional subscription for the added features. It's the priciest tool on this list.

Stealth Keyword Digger

http://www.stealthkeyworddigger.com/

This is a one time fee purchase for downloadable software. It's a lot like LTP but cheaper. It takes a seed keyword and looks at the top closely related keywords then uses those top keywords to scrape lots of search engines to generate tons of long tails. You can then use that info or narrow down the list by important the list into their companion software: Stealth Keyword Competition Analyser (also a reasonable one time fee) to narrow down which keywords are worth going after based on estimated traffic and competition levels. These two programs were first introduced to me by Claire aka Skeffling of SkefflingMakesMoneyOnline.com, also a member of The Pond.

Keyword Optimizer Pro

http://www.keywordoptimizerpro.com/

Yet another free keyword scraper of autocomplete search boxes. This one is a lot like the other scrapes that have few bells and whistles. It's simple and free and can give you a bunch of additional keywords that other scrapers miss. Just another free tool to find a few extra hidden gems.

ProMediaCorp's Suggester

http://suggester.promediacorp.com/

A free no bells and whistles Google autocomplete scraper. It's web-based. This is as basic as it gets which is sometimes all you need. This was introduced to me by Hannah Gold, an avid and long time friend from InfoBarrel. She's active all over the place and runs a girl scout blog.

For now that's it. As I come across other tools I'll add them here or expand on my mini-descriptions. In time maybe I'll even do full fledged reviews but I don't make any promises.

My InfoBarrel January 2014 Income Report

2014-02-06T10:16:00.000-08:00

Note To Reader: This page features some affiliate/referral links.

Yeah, I think I’ going to be doing these income reports again. I used to do them a few years back and they were always a good way for me to keep moving forward and at the time everyone seemed to get a lot out of them so here goes nothing.

If you haven’t yet given it a look I first recommend reading my “Graceful Fall” post from a few weeks back. It sets the stage for this income report.

At my peak with InfoBarrel I made just over $1200 but after a ~80% slide in traffic (as outlined here) my earnings for December 2013 were just $160.82.

What About January 2014?

January 2014 saw my about face. I decided to clean up my act. I joined a few social networks that I had been avoiding (Pinterest, LinkedIn, and G+) and started brushing off my Twitter dust. Please feel free to network with me on any of those places - links are in my sidebar.

I also made my appearance again over on IB in the forums and started being up front about my current earnings and the state of my archives over there. I had well over 100 unindexed articles at the start of January and even more that were in really bad shape. Lots of them were crap.

I decided to start cleaning them up as you can see in the thread I started over on the IB forums here.

The goal here was multi-faceted. I wanted to get my “red” unindexed articles indexed again. Without indexation G would never serve them up in search and even if someone did find them they didn’t have any ads on them.

I also wanted to start addressing Panda problems on my lower quality articles. Even those articles that were not red (yellow) were still pretty bad in terms of keyword density, spelling, grammar, and outbound link profiles. The idea is to spruce them up so that the perceived quality (by an algorithm) is improved.

I’ve still got some work to do as I still have about 70 articles that are red and a bunch more yellow but I’m making progress. Eventually I'll tackle the yellow articles but first things first.

Pinterest

In addition to making the articles better and reindexing them I’m also adding pictures to each article – roughly 2-3 in most cases. The pictures get long tail SEO titles and some get paragraph descriptions too so that there is some indexable content on the page.

Sometime soonish I'll post something specific to using Pinterest with Infobarrel to maximize potential. You'll have to check back for that in the future.

In any event, once the pictures are up and the articles republished I then go into each picture page and pin it to a thematically similar board on my Pinterest account. I don’t have many Pinterest followers but I do know from experience in working with other sites that these pins do get found internally on Pinterest and ocassionaly from Google. The pins then get repined, likes, and even more importantly they do drive a bit of traffic back to the website they were pined from.

I've also started using PinWoot to start helping out a few new pins in getting their first repins. You can see my review of PinWoot here to see more about what it does and how it works.

Because media pages tend to convert extremely well I’ve decided to pin the media pages themselves rather than the articles the pictures are uploaded to. Also doing this allows me to pin each picture instead of just choosing one picture from an article to pin. More pins equals more potential traffic.

It will be interesting to see how much extra referral traffic this can drive to my IB pages but for now let’s just look at some stats.

In December my media pages had 283 unique page views compared to 479 in January. My earnings on the media pages were basically flat increasing from $24.31 in December to $24.80 in January but I imagine this will change as we are not comparing against the Christmas shopping season in the months going forward.

Referral traffic from Pinterest in December was 47 visits compared to 69 in January. This is a clear sign that adding pictures and pinning them is a good strategy for the long term. Articles are better with pictures and those pictures are traffic generators at the same time.

Amazon

In December I had 44 items ship for commission $48.59. With the shopping season ending January saw a decline to 7 items shipping for commission of $25.02.

As I started cleaning up articles in my IB library in January I found a number of broken links to Amazon that were coded years ago. I’ll be continuing to fix these links so I expect at least a few more clicks in the coming months.

Shareasale

One of my niche accounts I promote a Shareasale merchant. This isn't a Christmas seasonal item; it’s fairly steady throughout the year. I made $20 on this in December and $25 in January. No action was taken on this during the month. It’s simply on autopilot.

If you've never considered using Shareasale before you might want to at least think about it. Amazon isn't the only affiliate network on the block. One day I may put up some Shareasale guides but for now you can give them a look right here.

My Overall InfoBarrel Income

Overall on IB my earnings declined from December to January predominantly due to declining Amazon sales as Christmas came and went.

Amazon - $25.02
Shareasale - $25.00
IB Ad Program - $85.36
Personal Adsense - $3.87
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Total IB Income - $139.25 (down from $160.82 in Dec ’13)

Of course I don’t make anywhere close to the bulk of my income from InfoBarrel but I did make a lot every month previously. I’d like to see big numbers here again so I hope you’ll follow along with me. I’m not going to get everything right but I’ll get some of it right and I’ll share it all right here on the blog.

Want to try your hand at InfoBarrel? Join right here. But for the love; don't expect to make a ton out of the gate. Try your hardest to get a hundred articles up that are all at least 3 months old before you start expecting anything worth calling home to mom about.

My InfoBarrel Traffic Fell A Ton Last Year: Why?

2014-02-03T17:33:00.000-08:00

Alright, I last posted a collection of guides I've put together of the years regarding InfoBarrel content. It is almost all dated material however all of it is on my to-do list to go over and update so that they're a bit more current and helpful in today's environment.

Although I haven't yet updated all my guides and tutorials I have started looking into my InfoBarrel articles, traffic, and earnings trying to understand how, when, and why my portfolio of "stuff" over there got hammered. See this post for a background on the royal hammering my IB library has endured.

First of all I want to be clear up front. I knew very well that my library was declining as it was happening it just wasn't high on my priority list to clean up so I let it slide.

OK, having said that I wanted to give a brief summarized history of the web.

Where'd My Traffic Go?

In 2011 Google released their first Panda updates. These were targeted at low quality and duplicated information pages on websites all over the place. For the most part big sites (IB included) weren't touched very much. Later on however further updates of this algo really started having a detrimental effect on my extensive IB library of less than good articles.

Over the past few weeks I've been going into my archives and cleaning up spelling/grammar/excessive keyword density and adding media to my pages to make them look better. I even posted about this over on the IB forums here.

I also started removing dead links, various links pointing at eHow, and all those links heading out to redirected domains.

I also have been updating my signature boxes on my articles to start pointing them at my social accounts and to my main profile InfoBarrel page. I think this is better for me, IB, and for search engines anyway, you know, instead of linking directly to other articles of mine or other sites of mine.

In short I'm cleaning up all my pages and making them better in the "quality department" to satisfy some of what Panda is looking for and also to get my articles re-indexed again.

Here's a great run down of the kinds of things I'd like to improve to help ensure I don't get labeled "low quality" by the algo: http://searchnewscentral.com/20130807459/General-SEO/10-on-page-optimization-tips-for-a-post-panda-era.html

The De-Indexing Of Low Quality InfoBarrel Posts

Back in early May 2013 InfoBarrel took it into their hands to start de-indexing low scoring articles in an attempt to only showcase high quality articles to search engines. They did this for Panda prevention at the core.

You can see their official announcement of this move here: http://www.infobarrel.com/Blog/Changes_to_Article_Indexing

Looking at my own IB analytics I can plainly see that when the first Panda update hit in February 2011 my traffic started declining. It actually fell by about 29% between January (prior to the update) and May (after the update).

I eventually overcame this by publishing some more stuff, taking advantage of seasonal trends, adding some media pages to articles that were doing well, and by building links en mass via old school PostRunner and BMR networks.

My best month ever for IB traffic was soon thereafter in November 2011. I then started falling due to the end of the Christmas shopping season and because of various updates to the Panda algorithm (which are no doubt still affecting my published pool of articles).

By April of 2012 I was at about the same spot in terms of visitors as I was in May the previous year after Panda hit.

The first Penguin update hit that month in April 2012 causing another big hit on all my articles (which were at the time propped up by lots of low quality backlinks).

From April 2012 to June 2012 my unique visitor traffic dropped by another 29% and then flat-lined at that level until Spring of 2013... when InfoBarrel finally decided to start de-indexing low quality content on the site.

The Great Traffic Decline Of 2013

In early 2013 IB instituted their Direct Payment system for the first time. In March 2013 was when I signed up for it. At this point I was barely active on IB but still contributing a little on some smaller accounts. I figured I might as well sign up for the program for the extra Adsense ad block.

What I didn't see coming was their de-indexing campaign shortly thereafter which really makes sense in hindsight.

Since all the articles were now under a premium Adsense account administered by IB staff they had to takes steps to clean up the article library that they were displaying ads on. I never took the time to clean up my articles a year ago so roughly a third of my library was de-indexed over night.

IB started a thread on the forums discussing the probable action in April of 2013 and then posted an official post announcing the action a couple weeks later in May. I remember watching this happen and I just didn't care to take any steps to clean up my article library.

My IB analytics took another dive because of it.

My traffic fell an additional 62% from March 2013 through June 2013 where it has basically flat-lined since.

To summarize - Panda hit and I didn't clean up my articles so I lost traffic. Then Penguin hit and I lost all the ranking bonus my articles were getting due to links... I didn't clean up my articles or clean up link profiles. Then IB decided to de-index articles that were low quality and I still didn't clean them up so I lost even more traffic.

When all is said and done my InfoBarrel articles had lost almost 80% of their overall traffic from early 2011 to summer 2013.

My Great Cleanup Begins

In late fall 2013 I finally started looking at my article library and decided to slowly start cleaning up a few of the de-indexed articles that used to get pretty good traffic. Then In January of 2014 I really started going to town cleaning them up and getting them re-indexed.

So far I've cleaned up roughly 35 articles in total and I still have a good 75 more to look into on the first sweep.

What I'm doing though is not just clean them up. I'm trying to marginally improve them.

I enter a "red" (low quality) de-indexed article and clean up the formatting first. Then I repair really bad keyword density problems (which takes the most time). Then I add 1-3 pictures per post and an Amazon module if it makes sense near the end of the article and submit. Then I go the the media pages of each article and pin the photos used to my Pinterest account with the expectation of an eventual Pinterest traffic source.

Doing this can easily bring an article from a score of 30 to a score of 60 but it does take time.

This does get the post indexed again so at least it can get readers and earn again but will it be enough to overcome Panda problems? I don't know but i think it's worth a try.

As for the penguin problems a lot of the link sources I used for links no longer exist so many of my heavily linked articles now only have a handful of links pointing still pointing at them. My guess is that as these numbers normalize over time penguin problems will continue to be less and less impactful on my entire library of articles.

Ohh yeah, In January I also decided to flip the G+ profile on for the first time and claim authorship of my entire piss-poor library so the more I clean it up the better it should reflect on my authorship profile.

Circle me here on G+ if you haven't already. I'm pretty new there.

So has it all helped?

Not sure yet but I see potential.

In December 2013 I had roughly 2700 visits to my IB articles while in January 2014 I had ~3200.

January was the best month for me on IB since Spring 2013 before the de-indexing. Some of that could have been due to my own activity over there bumping around my own articles and chiming in on the forums but I'm sure some of it was due to my tinkering - bringing new traffic streams into play (Pinterest) and re-indexing old posts.

I'm anxious to see what February brings. If I can get all my articles indexed again then I can work on adding lots of good pictures and media to my articles to start overcoming panda problems if any exist.

Anyway, this post was more of a scratchpad for me and less of a tool for you but I hope you found some value in it. I just find it cool that I can track all the major web happenings by simply looking at my traffic stats. It all makes sense... and because it makes sense I see no reason why I can't revive this old account and get it earning good again.

I'll make sure to update again when I'm further along and see a better view of the future.

How To Make Money With InfoBarrel - My Index Of Infobarrel Guides

2014-01-25T08:47:00.000-08:00

I've been a long time writer for InfoBarrel since November of 2009 - a little over 4 years as of today's writing. I know that site like that back of my hand although it isn't all that big of a part of my overall income as it used to be back in 2010.

Can you make money with InfoBarrel? Absolutely.

Is it the best place to make money writing? Depends on what your goals are and what you enjoy doing.

Never used InfoBarrel before?
Open an account here & start writing right away. (ref link)
But I suggest you read this whole post first and maybe some of my other tutorials on the site as well. It's not for everyone.

Who Would Like Writing For InfoBarrel

Do you like just writing articles about "stuff" and don't want to deal with hosting and maintaining a website?

Don't want to deal with the hassles of working on monetizing a site either? If you just want to sit down and write for an hour a day and not be troubled with anything else then yeah, IB is awesome.

For me and many others it's become a great place to spend some time for specific projects, testing, and networking so it can be a part of anyone's arsenal I think.

An Index Of Helpful InfoBarrel Posts

Over the years I've written a lot about InfoBarrel, both over on InfoBarrel's domain and here on this blog. Today I wanted to dedicate a bit of virtual real estate to simply gather all my posts on the topic together into one big place. I wanted to create a bit of an Index of all my InfoBarrel posts for reference purposes.

I've developed a ton of exposure on the site and a lot of people have expressed to me their gratitude for all the posts I've made but now that there are so many of them I'm finding it hard to direct people to the best pages... also, new writers for InfoBarrel are likely finding it hard to find any help from my past writings as it's scattered all over the place.

Below you'll find a big list of helpful posts. Some of these are geared more for the beginner on InfoBarrel while others are for the more dedicated or veteran writer. In cases where it's necessary I've tried to point out posts that are a bit dated and not necessarily accurate any more. I may take some time in the coming weeks to update some of the dated posts to make them more relevant.

In any event here they are sorted as best I can.

My InfoBarrel Experience

InfoBarrel 2 Weeks In - Originally Published December 2009
After My 1st Month On InfoBarrel - Originally published in December 2009.
After 8 Months On InfoBarrel - Originally Published in July 2010.
Chezfat Is An InfoBarrel Success Story - Originally published November 2010.
The Graceful Fall Of An InfoBarrel Success Story - Originally published January 2014.

InfoBarrel For Beginners

My InfoBarrel Review - Originally published in November 2010 and updated since.
Build Backlinks From InfoBarrel - Originally published in December 2009.
How To Choose A Keyword (In Theory) - Originally published September 2010.
How To Actually Choose A Keyword - Originally published September 2010.
Improve Your Search Engine Ranking - Originally published September 2010.
The Amazon Affiliate Program On InfoBarrel - Originally published January 2011.
Build Authority As An Author With RSS - Originally published January 2011.
Increase Income By Adding Pictures To Articles - Originally published April 2011.
Link Directly To InfoBarrel Media Pages - Originally published June 2011.
Beginner's Guide To InfoBarrel For New Writers - Originally published March 2012.

How Much Can You Make On InfoBarrel

InfoBarrel's Earnings Potential - Originally Published in August 2010
Is $1000 Monthly Income Possible? - Originally Published in August 2010

----------------

There you have it. That's a bunch of posts.

In the future I'll update this page with links to particularly interesting forum posts I've made on IB and I will try to add new links to this list if I've missed anything.

Some of the posts listed are dated and I'll slowly start updating them so that they are current and relevant for content marketing/publishing in 2014.

If you want an easy way to start building up a library of articles then IB is a great place to get your feet wet and they pay pretty good too... you know, so long as you get eyeballs on your articles.

You can sign up for a free account here and start writing today.

This is my referral link btw, if you use it I will get 2% of the ad views for your articles at no expense to you.

My Review of PinWoot: Does It Work And Is It Worth It?

2014-01-24T09:51:00.001-08:00

I've officially been using PinWoot for about a week now and in case you are wondering I'm not using it on my Chezfat Pinterest account. I'm using it on a niche account that I setup for an affiliate site I've been slowly building out since early November 2013.

I like to add niche Pinterest accounts to most of my bigger niche sites these days. Some people just create a board on a central Pinterest account but to niche down by site I can get the domain link in the bio to point at my site and get it verified. I can also feel free in that not all of my sites are linked togetehr under one Pinterest acocunt. Keeps things segmented better.

The probelm with doing this however is that once you get the site setup and it goes to "mostly" autopilot mode your Pinterest account sits there with hardly anything on it and very little activity. For this reason I started experimenting with PinWoot.

Click here to join right away with my affiliate link.

(but I advise you to read the rest of this post first).

You can use PinWoot without spending a dollar but I chose after a few days to buy the smallest package they offer. It's $15 and it'gives you some internal credits which they call seeds.

Seeds is your internal currency. You get seeds by repinning other people's stuff, liking other people's stuff, and following other pinners.

You spend seeds by "paying" other people to repin, like and follow you and your stuff. It's a ive and take system.

For free accounts you can pay for repins, likes, and followers but you are capped on how much you can pay. Because you are offering less to other user than you could offer when you buy seeds you get repins, likes, and followers a lot slower.

I ended up buying the smallest package of seeds possible - not for the seeds - I wanted the ability to offer more seeds to other users so that I could get followers and repins faster. I spent $15 and now my account is set for life. I do spend more per action but I can build up more seeds to give away by repinning other people's stuff.

Basically every day I login to PinWoot and repin 10-15 pins to various boards on my account, then I go like a handful of pins, then I go and follow 5ish users and my seed "bank" is refilled. This helps me populate my boards and Pinterest account all while I build up a follower base.

After I get to a desired number of followers I can delink my PinWoot account from my Pinterest account and link it up to a different Pinterest account to get it going.

On my first attempt I linked to my niche account that was almost two month old. I had 13 followers and very little engagement. Within just a few days (less than a week) I now have well over a hundred followers and I'm getting repins every day.

I even spent some seeds on a few specific pins I wanted promoted (likes and repins) to ensure those pins started getting traction on the site.

Doing this for only one week has seen me increase the traffic to my niche site by about 15 unique visitors a day (from Pinterest pins) and I've started getting some clicks on my affiliate links on my site. It's only a matter of time before these clicks turn into earnings. If I were to continue to do this for while longer my numbers would look even better I'm sure.

Overall I'm very happy with my $15 investment into PinWoot and I will be using it on every single niche Pinterest account I setup in the future. At some point I may even use it for this blog but probably not any time soon. I've got a bunch of niche Pinterest accounts to build up first.

As I've stated a few times I decided to pay $15 for expanded use of PinWoot but you can just as easily use it for free - your results will be slower but they will be steady and you'll have less reason to jump back onto PinWoot daily to collect more seeds.

Check it out through my honkin' affiliate link.

See what it can do for your niche sites.

As far as the incentive for me to push this product I believe I get seeds for every person that signs up through my link - not cash. I'll take all the seeds I can get though because eventually I want to be promoting lots of different pins and the seeds give me the currency to do so.

Good luck all and do expect me to embellish this PinWoot review in the coming days, weeks, and month to come as I get more experience using the platform. I don't ever get a polished post on the first attempt - they are all WIP. :)

Do you have experience with PinWoot? Please share your best tip for using it below; I want to know what you know.

Bubblews SEO: Can You Rank Long Tail Keywords On Bubblews

2014-01-24T07:03:00.000-08:00

A bit over a week ago or so I started an account on Bubblews and started writing away. I wrote about it here on Are Bubblews Posts SEO Friendly?

One of the first things I noticed when I started working the site was how the vast majority of users seem to use the site like a social network that pays them to interact. I went along with it but my keyword driven mind was wondering all along if the site would rank in search engines for long tail stuff - you know, really long tails stuff.

You can also see my post on making a quick few bucks on Bubblews here - it went live yesterday: How To Make Money Fast On Bubblews.

The purpose of this post however is not to explore using Bubblews for fast financial gain but to rather use it as a article library for the extremely long tail keywords that draw in recurring search traffic.

We all have sites where we post articles looking for keyword driven search traffic but many of the topics are too narrow in scope for a 1000 word post. On Bubblews you can hit all these keywords with "articles" ranging from 400 characters to a few hundred words very easily.

My First Attempts At Bubblews SEO

I posted on the 16th a post titled: How Long Does The Thermos Stainless King Travel Mug Keep Coffee Hot?

I got the big crazy long keyword from Google autocomplete while researching top selling products. That post has been published for basically 7 1/2 days and it ranks #5 on page 1.

I then posted an article titled: "Is The Contigo Autoseal Travel Mug Dishwasher Safe?" This article is ranked #10 on page 1 7 days later.

"Can You Clean A Coffee Maker With Apple Cider Vinegar" is ranked #20 after 7 days.

"Difference Between The Contigo West Loop And Aria Travel Mugs" - This one ranks #6

"Insulated Travel Mug To Keep Coffee Hot" ranks #18.

How about this keyword which I posted two days ago?

"Is The Thermos Stainless King Travel Mug Leak Proof?" This one ranks #27.

Those Are Awfully Long Keywords Aren't They

Yeah, I know, those keywords are ridiculously long but they are actual questions posed about very popular products that have been selling like hotcakes for years. Not to mention that each question was found via Google Autocomplete so they are in Google's radar somewhere.

Point here is this - I think a 400 character post is short enough. Most of my short posts have been around 150-200 words and probably closer to 1000 characters. My longer ones are probably in the vicinity of 300-400 words.

Even still these are so easy to write that it's very easy to put up a few of these every day - especially the short ones. Bubblews will let you publish 10 a day if you want, that means you could have around 300 long tail posts up every month.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if any of these posts mentioned above get more than a few page views from the SERPs every month but if I had 2 months worth (600 posts) up and each pulled 2-3 page views a month from the SERPS then I'd have (for the time being) around 1350 page views coming in every month, about $13.50 in the Bubblews payment ecosystem.

If every month generated an extra $7 in recurring monthly income then this could be a decent place to make a few extra bucks for minimal work.

I'll keep exploring the topic and report back with my thoughts and findings.

What are your experiences? Do you think this is a royal waste of time for that kind of income?

Have you even signed up for Bubblews? You can use my referral link to try it out; it net's me a whopping $0.20 if you write and publish a post. Hehe :)

How To Make Money Extremely Fast Using Bubblews

2014-01-23T15:36:00.000-08:00

Alright guys I want this post to be short and sweet but I know it's going to be a bit longer. This always happens to me.

For the longest time I've believed that any real money made online takes some investment and/or some time but with Bubblews I'm seeing a site that can create small bits of cash very quickly and it doesn't require any significant skill, experience, or financial investment.

Don't get me wrong, for the most part your Bubblews experience is not going to be full of large chunks of passive income but by doing a little ground work now you can have a place on Bubblews that can get you money deposited into your PayPal account in as little as a a week to 10 days.

You can sign up for Bubblews right here and get started immediately (aff link) but I suggest you read this post before signing up. It will help you spend your time there more efficiently.

How Bubblews Works To Earn You Money

On Bubblews you get paid for page view, page "like", comments, and for every social social share you get on your articles. This is cool since a lot of this is in your control. You can post the article and then share it on five different platforms. The catch here is that you can't share your own article twice on the same platform.

In any event by publishing you can make $0.05 right off the bat by sharing and since every post can be as long as only 400 characters you should be able to make $0.50 in about a half hour's time if you really wanted to.

That's Not Much

I know, that's not a lot but it takes very little effort and if you have followers on Bubblews (they call them connections) then they will increase your earnings by viewing your articles and interacting with them.

For instance if you have a lot of followers and you can reliably cound on 50 of those followers viewing your article within a day of publishing it then that will give you an extra $0.50.

If 30 of them hit the "like" button then that's another $0.30.

If 20 of them leave a comment then that's another $0.20.

And if any of them share your article socially then you get more plus the earnings that the share generates in additional page views from social networks.

With lots of interactive followers you can reliably post a single paragpah of text and get nearly immediate compensation in excess of a dollar and still have the opportunity to earn on that post for the forseeable future.

Obviously you can see that you're going to make considerably more money on Bubblews if you have lots of connections that are deeply involved in commenting and social sharing. If you have lots of inactive connections or connections that only occasionally view an article an no more then your income will be a bit less overall.

We Don't Have All The Time In The World So We Must Work Efficiently

If we had all the time in the world we would connect with everyone, read all their articles, like them, comment on them, and share them socially. By hanging out on Bubblews 20 hours every day commenting on everyone and trying to cultivate relationships with everyone under the sun certainly will work. You'll amass a ton of connections and get lots of earnings but seriously, no one has that kind of time.

Because we all have a limited amount of time to invest into a site like this I suggest taking a different approach. Go for the best bang for your buck. Shoot for the best connections possible and let all other connections accumulate without your prodding.

Why would we invest our networking time chasing any old follower when we can chase only those connections that are active on all levels? This to me seems like the best way to generate connections without letting the site rule our lives. To each his own however.

How To Build The Right Bubblews Connections

It is much more time consuming for a Bubbler to comment on an article than it is for the same Bubbler to just hit the like button and the social sharing barrier is even greater. If you look at any popular article over there you'll see it has more page views than anything else, followed by likes, followed by comments, followed by social shares.

If you head over to social media and search for Bubblers who share then these are the best connections to network with and connect with. And of the social networks the easiest one to research in Twitter.

Use Twitter To Build Your Bubblews Connects The Smart Way

When you hit the tweet button on a Bubblews page you'll see the tweet is automatically populated with the hashtag #bubblews. If you head over to search Twitter for that hashtag then you'll see a large list of the most recent tweets using that hashtag, most are people hitting the tweet link from the Bubblews articles pages.

Twitter Search for #bubblews: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bubblews&src=typd

As I look this list over right now I see a huge amount of tweets with new tweets coming in every minute. Of those there lots of different users I see and by clicking on a few of the urls tweeted out I quickly find a user tweeting a link someone else's content. This is a user you need to connect with and network with as they are highly interactive with the people they follow.

Who is it? Oddly enough it's Deborah75, someone I've known for a long time on InfoBarrel and someone with whom I've connected with on Bubblews already.

The point here is that you can use this technique to find a few users every day who do lots of interacting. Although Deborah will not tweet out every post of mine she may just tweet it out on occasion and that's what I want.

Find Bubblews Users That Comment A Ton

As much as social sharing will help you get more money there will be more people out there who will comment on your stuff frequently than there will be people who share it socially. If you can find the Bubblers who comment a lot then you'll find a person worth getting to know. This person is more likely than other users to view your article and like it because to comment these other actions are extremely easy to do.

How To Find Bubblers That Comment A Lot?

One very simple way of finding these people is to do a simple Google search for them. Of course you can't find them by search for "heavy Bubblews commentors" you have to search strategically.

By dropping this into Google:

inurl:bubblews.com/account/ "comments 10000..200000"

You will find any users profiles that have accumulated between 10k and 200k comments on their articles. Although there's no way to see how many of them they left for others you can assume if they have that many comments on their articles then they have commented plenty on other people's articles as well.

Just change the numbers to find different ranges.

Want to find new users that are comment heavy? Try this one?

inurl:bubblews.com/account/ "comments 1000..200000" "joined: January * 2014"

Doing this search I see there are 3 total users who've joined in January of this year and still amassed 1000+ comments on their articles. You can be sure I'll be connecting with these three in short order.

Play around with search operators and you'll be amazed at what intelligence you can gather.

Drop Comments On The Posts Of People With LOTS of Followers Right Away

This one needs to be done with tact. You shouldn't be spamming but if you follow a handful of people who have many thousands of followers and manage to get an early comment that is somewhat insightful then more people will head over to your profile to check you and your stuff out.

The point here is not to get random followers but to get the one's that scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to read the comments. People who read comments are going to be more likely to leave comments themselves. By being one of the first comments and being helpful/insightful then you will stand out and get more of the right eyeballs on your profile and posts.

Have You Given Bubblews A Try?

I get very very little for promoting Bubblews ($0.20 for your first post) so don't take this the wrong way but if you do head over and setup an account I think you'll enjoy it. It's super easy to make a buck there and you don't feel like you are working at all.

Do stick to my ideas about networking in the most efficient way possible though... unless of course you plan on letting Bubblews rule your life.

There's money over there and a good community so have at it!

Do you have any other tips for making good connections over there efficiently? Let me know in the comments. I'm sure there's lots of people who would be just as interested as me.

Here's The Big List Of IM Blogs I'm Currently Following

2014-01-22T13:49:00.000-08:00

List Last Updated

10/10/2014

This is one of those pages that I'm publishing that is really geared more for me than for anyone else. I wanted to list out all the blogs IM blogs I'm currently visiting, reading, following, commenting on etc.

So without further ado, here's the list. No doubt it will grow as I take the time to actually re-inventory who I'm actually reading.

Blogs I'm Actively Reading

http://lostcyclist.me/ - By Quinton Hamp, a friend I know from The Pond. He's killing it right now and a big motivator for me.

http://www.jacobking.com/ - Awesome info on this blog for the more shady side of affiliate marketing. I don't know this guy outside of reading his blog.

http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/ - Another awesome blogger from the darker side. He's got a very inspiring delivery of material.

http://www.my4hrworkweek.com/ - Eric Gati writes this one. It's a good blog that I've read off and on for a few years. I first met Eric over on InfoBarrel.

http://zenduck.me/ - This is the blog of Zen Duck Dave, the man behind the curtain over at The Pond. He's had a few really great IM blogs over the years and this is his latest one... although most of the action is on the forum from the same domain.

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ - This is the well known Pat Flynn. He's darned inspirational and a wealth of information. Amazingly I first linked to his blog here from mine back in the late summer of 2009. Crazy!

http://lissowerbutts.com/ - A former MMO blogger who now blogs about travel, kindle publishing, and formatting. She's a good friend over on The Pond too and has been around the world of IM for a while.

Old Blogs

These are basically old sites that are not updated any longer. Even still the content on them (albeit dated) is still worth a read every now and then.

http://www.makingmoneyontheinternetfree.info/ - This is the old largely defunct blog of Dave a la Zen Duck Dave, the owner of The Pond IM Forum I am a member of and recommend.

http://www.makemoneyonlinewithseo.com/ - Another old defunct blog with tons of dated nuggets burried in it. Worth a read if only for nostalgia.

Podcasts I Listen To

This site will be populated eventually but I just don't want to take the time to do it now. Check back later; I will link to this post from time to time. You're not missing anything. ;)

http://empireflippers.com/podcasts/ - Quality business guys that are really building an empire and creating an industry in small site brokerage. I listen to these guys a lot.

----------------

I'll plan on updating these lists from time to time dropping blogs/feeds that either no longer interest me or go defunct and adding new blogs I find particularly engaging to me.

Say hi in the comments guy!

Going Ons & Updates: 1/22/14

2014-01-22T09:55:00.001-08:00

Here's a recap of what I'm up to right now.

My BIG Niche Site

A few days back I introduced a project I'm starting where I'm going to build a big niche site designed to serve readers first and make me money second. You can read the post here if you want. I then posted about how I got my new site indexed quickly here in case you missed it.

Over the past couple days I've done a bit more work on the site. I expanded the front page to just shy of 600 words and started building out a bit more content on the main informational posts on the site. I have a lot of work to do to polish the main informational posts but it's better to start and not finish than never to start at all.

I started marketing the site by placing a single well made article on a Web2 site and inserting a contextual link back to the homepage. The link was not using anchor text but was rather just the naked url of the home page.

Since the keyword the homepage targets has very low competition I don't expect to have to do any more promotion like this at all. The domain is an EMD and by putting lots of good content on the site, linking out to authoritative sources that support my main claims, points, and opinions. Including relevant YouTube videos, and maybe setting up a basic Pinterest account to pin eventual images to I expect this site will start ranking for it's keywords in the next few months.

So far I haven't put a custom header or logo on the site but I signed up for Easy Product Displays (EPD) to help me make a responsive grid of affiliate links and thumbnails pointing to Amazon for some of my sales pages. I've traditionally made my code by hand but I'm not a coder and I've never been able to get it responsive by hand. I must say on first use EPD is darned easy to use and looks better than what I've ever created by hand.

At some point I'll probably do a review of the program and post it here on the blog but if you want to try their free trial anyway you can see the link on my ToolBox page.

EMD Sites? Do They Still Work?

I've mentioned Jason from The Pond before. He's inspired this BIG niche site idea of mine with his current method of building extremely profitable Adsense sites. You can see his method on this thread over at The Pond (members only). Click here to learn more about the forum or to join.

For the most part Jason is doing a twist on the Empire Flippers method of building of building EMD sites. The site I mentioned above is an EMD but other than it and one other EMD that I started in the post-penguin era I don't have many at all right now.

Jason contends the EMD update in late 2012 wasn't as crazy as originally thought and that without spamming the crap out of them they still rank better than all other sites with all things being equal.

I've decide to marry his approach with my own preferences. I like big niche sites, sites with 30-100 pages or so. My site mentioned above will be part of my EMD project and will join my other EMD site (nearly two years old) and I will start building a large(ish) portfolio of big EMD sites based on Jason's methodology.

My two year old site is making around $100+ every month right now and it has zero links built to it. I think this new site will make some cash and I'll try to build out a bunch more of these.

Late in the Fall of 2013 I purchased 6 additional EMDs and installed Wordpress on them. Most sites are slightly developed and some are already starting to get a bit of traffic with zero links built. I will add a few new domains to my portfolio and try to focus on polishing up my Fall additions.

One additional note - Like lots of people I used to use GoDaddy for all my domains but these days I use NameSilo. They offer really affordable domains and they include privacy for free. can't beat that. I've added NameSilo to my ToolBox and one day I'll get around to putting up a review page here on the site for you to look at.

Bubblews

I mentioned a few days ago that I started using Bubblews after about a year of resisting. So far I've posted 27 articles on there, connected with a few of the big writers and long term writers, and I've started commenting on a few things I find interesting.

As of yet I haven't made payout so I can't say anything in regards to the redemption process but from what I read it should go fine so long as you play by their rules.

Assuming my first redemption goes smoothly I expect this to be a great place to pop in on occasion and make a few bucks by trading minutes for dollars.

Probably after my first redemption goes through smoothly I'll post up my full review of the site. For the time being though you can my initial thoughts on making money on the Bubblews platform right here.

InfoBarrel Clean-Up

Back on January 10th I started a thread on the InfoBarrel forums saying I was dedicated to cleaning up my old InfoBarrel articles. I was making over a $1000/month on the site and then panda hit, then penguin and now I'm making a little over $150 on the site. You can see my complete report on this fall right here: The Fall of an InfoBarrel Success Story.

Over the past 10 days or so I've dedicated some time (most days) to cleaning up an article here and there on the site. I'm bringing old "red" articles up by improving the keyword density, editing for grammar, removing bad links, and adding 2-3 pictures per post. I then pin all the pictures to related Pinterest boards in hopes of getting trickle traffic from Pinterest users. This is going well and although I've got A LOT more articles to clean up I think it will be worth it in the long run.

You can see my picture techniques in action by viewing my "door lock" series over on InfoBarrel. One such article from the series is this one. Pay careful attention to the pictures inserted and their corresponding media pages. IB Tip - The money is in the media pages.

PinWoot

This is another new tool for me. I started using it this week - about 4 days ago roughly. I've been getting in the habit of making Pinterest accounts for the majority of the sites I build these days and I've never really spent enough time on nay of them to build up a following.

Like many other things mentioned on this page I'll have to make a big review of this program for the site sometime in the future but in the mean time let me say this. This thing is amazing at getting you new followers quickly. I've gotten bunches of likes, repins, and general account activity and I see it all as real and beneficial. You have to give this a try.

I'm adding this with a huge thumbs up to my ToolBox if you want to give it a look prior to my big review post.

Plans For The Future

Taking a nudge from Justin & Joe and Empire Flippers with the title of this sub-heading but I wanted to close the post out with a bit about what I want to work on over the next week or so.

I really need to make some progress on two Kindle books I want to finish as soon as possible. One is halfway done, the other is in the outline stage.

I also am reclaiming old PostRunner posts from 3-4 years ago. Yesterday I reclaimed around 35,000 words of material that I can re-purpose for new uses. It's all offline and deindexed so it's mine to use again as I see fit. If you used to use PostRunner you may have a bunch of old content sitting dormant too. This never occurred to me until it was mentioned by the smart folks over on The Pond.

I plan on segmenting what I have by topic and using the material to populate a bunch of new EMD domains to add to my EMD collection of sites. I may use some of the content for Web2 sites as well. Time will tell.

Get to work guys!

Are Bubblews Posts SEO Friendly?

2014-01-16T01:57:00.001-08:00

I wanted to throw up a quick post tonight for two reasons. I just setup an account on Bubblews (it's a social site where you earn money in case you didn't know) and I started getting social - you know reading other people's stuff, commenting, sharing, etc. I also started writing some posts that were just casual in nature.

Other than my tutorial articles that I'm putting up which are meant to drive lots of internal traffic (and teach myself stuff) I decided to try an experiment of publishing a bunch of random short Bubbles on long tail keyword questions - you know, to see if they rank in search.

My thought was I could be social on the site for current income but also through up keyword posts in hopes of gaining long(er) term search traffic. If these Bubbles actually rank decently in search then you could assume that they will earn consistently based on a smattering if search traffic page views. Add in the social traffic there earning and "I THINK" I can make some decent cash.

Time will tell I suppose.

In the mean time I've decided to stick with one general theme for my SEO posts. I'm going to post short bubbles on lots of questions related to a small sub-group of products. Coffee stuff.

If I just answer questions people have about coffee stuff then I should get some social love from the posts (everyone loves coffee) and long term search traffic from people actually looking for answers to these questions.

Then, if I can stay on the ball and work on interlinking these Q&A posts together I can get some search traffic looking at a handful of posts on the site which "should" make me more money in the end.

I don't want to see comments regarding their payment system. I know it's hot button issue and I don't care about it for now. I want to test things myself and see what happens when I devote some quality time to the site.

Good luck all in all of your endeavors and if you want to see my Bubblews earnings report you can check that out right here: http://www.bubblews.com/news/2065969-my-bubblews-earnings-report

How I Got My BIG Niche Site Indexed Immediately

2014-01-13T02:01:00.001-08:00

So sorry for the title but I can't tell you exactly how I got my site indexed without getting any links of any kind.

Why?

It's not my place to tell.

I used a method that was provided in the Pond. You can see the exact steps I used here for Pond members only.

See this page for more info on the pond.

What Can I Tell You?

I can say this. I registered a brand spanking new domain only 3 days ago and then published 32 pages over the course of just a few hours. Each page was published manually btw.

I didn't get any links, I didn't join any social accounts, I didn't drive weird amounts of traffic through strange means. I simply did a few free things that took about 5 minutes of my time. Anyone can do it.

You can too.

So sorry for not divulging the info but do you know why this is important? If you set up a new site and you don't want to link build (but you want your site indexed so that it can actually start getting a bit of traffic) then this is a method of getting it in short order.

Brand new domains can take a long time to index on their own. This rectifies that problem greatly.

In any event my new site is now setup (need a better theme and design still) and now all I need to do is add more content on each page, more outbound links to sources and authority sites, and add monetization.

In time this will all happen; I'll update as I go.

How I'm Building A Big Niche Site That Serves Readers First And Still Earns A Good Income

2014-01-09T13:10:00.000-08:00

I've been at the niche site game for a while now. I've made a bunch of crappy sites and some good ones but these days I feel like it's in my best interest to build good sites almost all the time. It's what search engines want to serve up in SERPs, it's what readers want to find, share and read, and it's more gratifying for me.

I do need to be adequately compensated however. I dislike the term "MFA" whether you are referring to Adsense or Affiliate but in all honesty who the heck is going to go through the trouble of building a website or web presence if they have no goal of leveraging that site for financial gain?

Non-monetized websites are still about financial gain, they just go about it the round-about way. Authors who don't monetize simply build up a name and audience and then use that to do other stuff like sell books, gain off-line clients, build a list, fill in the blank.

Anyway I don't like beating around the bush and I'm sure you want me to get to the meat of the post so here goes:

As of January 2014 This Is How I Like Building Big Niche Sites

First of all this is what I mean and value in a big niche site:

The site is siloed based on information
The site is siloed based on products (if applicable)
The information presented is accurate, helpful, documented, and sourced (if applicable) - in short, the information presented genuinely helps the reader and provides value to them.
The site is well centered around a tight topic or slightly wider market segment.

How you monetize it is up to you. For me I've been big into Amazon Associates as of late but any kind of monetization will work so long as it's not detrimental to user experience.

I show Amazon links where appropriate and where a reader will expect them and contextual ads such as Adsense or Media.net to name a couple big players should be positioned prominently but not so that they are intrusive.

My Plans For The Near Term

Jason is a Big Duck over at The Pond Forum. He's been making a killing with sites predominantly monetized by Adsense. On the forum he's laid out a method he's developed and been following for building and ranking sites in search that are making lots of money. His sites are mostly less than 6 months old as of this writing and are pulling in around $2k per month combined.

I'll be starting a few sites modeled after his method that fall in line with my values for larger niche sites. (You can only access this information by joining the Pond Forum - sorry it's not my information to share publicly because of the paid wall its behind but you can get the gist of the procedure by following this plan of mine.)

This morning - prior to writing this blog post - I looked at an old keyword that I used to get traffic for over on my long defunct Longevity blog. The post never made a lot of money but it wasn't well monetized and it certainly was't siloed or setup to really help readers or maximize page views. It was just a piece of content that got some traffic for a time (2009-2011) without any links or promotion on my part. For a page published during that time I find this keyword particularly interesting.

I've decided to use this keyword as the main keyword for a new site I'll be building out. I plan to build this in short order and then enhance it over time. This is the Beta version concept. Nothing is perfect right out of the box these days. Build it and improve it over time is the way I roll.

I'll share more detail in upcoming posts and if you are connected you might see updates on my social accounts, forums such as the pond or the InfoBarrel forums to name a couple I'm active on.

I'll likely be leveraging InfoBarrel and Pinterest for this specific site but as my strategy develops I'll have more detail to share.

For now I have identified a siloed site structure and every post title I'll be using at least initially.

To start with I'll have:

1 Homepage
5 Main Articles
8 Sub-Articles That Expand Upon The Main 5
1 Main Product Hub - This is a page that indexes all the product sales pages on the site.
17 Sales Pages For Products

As for structure this of it this way, the 8 sub articles point to the 5 main articles. The 5 main articles point to both the homepage and the Main Product Hub. The product Hub points to all 17 product sales pages as it is an index of sorts. Each of the product sales pages links to a handful of related product sales pages.

The point here is not to game anything or cheat the system, it's to provide a good reader experience. Site navigation is very important to readers and conveniently it's what search engines want too and they tend to reward sites that are well structured.

I'll do my best to update this post as my initial strategy fully forms and I'll provide updates elsewhere on and off the blog in the coming days and weeks.

The Graceful Fall Of An Infobarrel Success Story

2014-01-08T18:13:00.003-08:00

A long time ago I was featured by the InfoBarrel team as a success story. You can read that long buried post on InfoBarrel by clicking this link.

At the time I was still pretty new online and I wasn't very experienced. I started picking keywords based on a spreadsheet I built that was similar to the teachings of the old (should-be-defunct) Keyword Academy.

I researched a bunch of money keywords and then posted a bunch of articles on those keywords. That was cool. I then interlinked the articles a lot. This was also great. I then proceeded to backlink them heavily. For some time this was the way to go about things but by Spring 2011 low quality content filters started weighing on my articles and by Spring 2012 my backlink profile was detrimental to the health of my articles.

Needless to say with my emphasis on niche sites in the 2012 era my InfoBarrel traffic and earnings began to falter and then eventually plummet.

Somewhere in mid-2013 Infobarrel started noindexing articles with low internal scores. This affected a number of my articles because I wasn't tending to them like I should have been. A lot of my stuff is still on IB but just isn't getting PV any more.

What does this mean?

I dropped from peak earnings on Infobarrel in December 2011 to December 2013 by 87%!

December 2011 - $1,201.03
December 2012 - $463.48
December 2013 - $160.82

By last month (12/13) roughly 2/3 of my IB income was from the internal ads program and the other third came primarily from a mix of Amazon and Shareasale.

Ehh.

So what's a guy to do?

I've decided to see what I can do to revive a bit of my former glory on IB by adding better content, re-purposing older content, adding media pages to articles that have little to no graphics included, and most importantly promoting my graphics on Pinterest.

In case you didn't notice. I started showing my face in my avatar. I joined Google+ (circle me if you're into that). I created a LinkedIn account. I connected Twitter to everything. The plan is to use social to boost my older stuff up and create new stuff to increase the quality of my entire portfolio incrementally.

I wouldn't be surprised if I even start deleting some older stuff that just doesn't cut it any more.

In the next few days I'll go into greater detail on my Infobarrel/Pinterest strategy either here, on the IB forums or over on The Pond IM forum. I hope you'll find this series of experiments as interesting and worthwhile as I do.

Money Site Diversification: Focus Revisited

2013-10-19T02:16:00.000-07:00

Way back in the dark ages of the internet - 6 months ago - I published a blog post titled "Why Do Internet Marketers Fail". My main point in that post was to really tell myself why I fail from time to time.

Those times when my income is slipping and my sites are falling in rank I tend to have poor focus. During those times I seem to be trying to learn too many new things and experiment with to many projects.

Often times the things that are working best for me are the things I set aside while I "work" on endless endeavors that don't really get me anywhere. They just occupy my time and make me feel like I'm spinning my wheels needlessly. Eventually that work without return causes me to want to take a break and then where does my business go?

Nowhere naturally.

Funny thing. In that post I called myself out and said that I needed to buckle down and do what was working right then and really go to town at it day in and day out for months on end.

I chose Squidoo as my vehicle as I had built up a $600/monthly stream there in about 5 months time and Lissie called me out in the comments saying in her own way to stay away from spending too much energy on a Web 2.0. Luckily for me Squidoo whet nuts only 2 months after that post and I didn't end up losing it all.

Like any one would have I changed my vehicle out. Although I did not keep pumping out good money lenses I did work on polishing up the majority of my lenses so that I wouldn't lose them and then I started a new site based on ideas from my own experience and some inspiration from my friends over on the Pond. That new site has been my rock all summer long and it's where I've spent most of my energy and it's already making me more money than my lenses ever did.

I can't reiterate enough that in the IM space to succeed you have to have focus. Sure, adjust your plan when major things happen but start one well defined project and work on it like it's the only thing that matters. For me at least it's the only way that I ever seem to have big successes.

When do you diversify?

I used to think you needed to diversify early but these days I say do it much later than you think you should. For the vast majority of post-penguin IMers dodgy link-building is a thing of the past. For the most part I think sites are far less likely to take major hits when you play by G's rules.

For me I've hit a home run with my newest site and instead of branching out into other niches and setting up other sites I've been working diligently on this one main site. I've got social accounts set up for it and even got some good activity going on one of those accounts too. I've even set up a small arsenal of related mini sites as a fallback plan or complimentary set of sister sites should I ever want to expand the project onto multiple domains for whatever reason.

For 2013 this really has been what I've been up to and I hope to continue with the focus. It helps the bottom line a ton... Now, if I could only get my home improvement projects behind me so that I can actually get more work done here at the PC.

If you are having trouble getting anywhere in IM or maybe you're looking to end a long plateau or slide in income maybe it's time you revisited what you are actually doing. Maybe it's time to pick one thing that's working right now and go all in for the foreseeable future.

At least consider it.

The Pond Internet Marketing Forum

2013-10-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

I'll make this short and sweet. Down the road I may expand on this post but for now you should know that I participate quite a bit on an Internet Marketing Forum called The Pond.

The Pond is not my own creation but that of a good friend I've developed online, Dave, from ZenDuck.me. You know, as much as you can become friends online of course.

I do share a lot of information here on my blog (www.chezfat.com) and over on the free InfoBarrel forums but a lot of the stuff I want to share I will only share with paying members of The Pond. The paid forum keeps things somewhat private (at east not open to anybody and everybody to read) but open to serious marketers who I call friends.

I'm not the smartest cookie int he jar either; there are a whole bunch of really intelligent and motivated people on the forum and they all have different areas of expertise. If you are into Kindle books, site building, ecommerce, domaining, web2, content siloing, whatever, there are people there that are in those fields and doing well and sharing golden nuggets all the time.

In any event ff you want to read some awesome content and have a wide variety of experienced IM guys - regular folk like you and me - at your disposal then head over to the Pond and sign up. It's $10 per month to keep out the riff-raff. I've been a paying member since November 2011 and I couldn't be happier with the investment. It's kept me sane and earning through all the animal updates and I appriciate everyone who participates there for it.

I do share more detailed stuff there than I do here on the blog (or on any other forum) including some of my site URLs so if you want this info then signup and drop me a note below and/or over on the forum.

Check Out The Pond Forum Here

(Yep, that's an affiliate link - I get half of your membership fee when you signup.)

Update On The 50 Lenses In 7 Days Challenge

2013-02-20T00:44:00.000-08:00

I know it sucks but hey, I can't do anything about it.

I was going to start this challenge to myself roughly 48 hours ago but after I started doing my keyword research and niche selection I found out that I couldn't publish to the account I was going to use - it was locked due to an account authentication error. :/

In any event I put this project on hold until earlier this afternoon when I finally got access to the account for publication purposes.

Anyway, in a weird sort of way I gave myself some time to do research on what the lenses would be over the past two days and now I have 7 days to get these suckers up and out of WIP.

What's the secret to doing this so fast?

Batch work.

How do I publish so much stuff?

I publish super thin lenses as "rough drafts".

How do these super thin lenses stay out of WIP?

I publish them and then open them all back up a couple days later and edit them for more content - you know, to make them less thin. I do it again a couple days later to add sidebar stuff and internal linkage and on the last day I tweak whatever is lacking and add update the products and add the occasional contextual link to Amazon. The multiple "updates" end up making my lens far less thin and keep it out of WIP.

Will they stay out of WIP?

They should do to the frequent updates and the internal links but who knows - we shall see.

My Progress So Far

My son has been fast asleep since I gave him a bath this evening. Since then I've reviewed some stats on my established Squid accounts and looked at various lenses CTRs to see where I could improve. This was somewhat wasted time as I was delaying starting.

I finally did get started though and in the past hour I've published 3 lenses and typed up this blog post. I will work for another hour and try to get 4 more up at least.

The biggest thing about all of this is that you have to get the drafts up ridiculously fast so that you can interlink them all and pad the content out a few days from now.

Though I don't want to be going to bed at 3am just to get up at 8:30 when the little dude wakes up I do need to work my tail off and get as many published as possible as he doesn't often let me do a lot during the day other than read and brainstorm.

Good luck all.

Chezfat's 50 Squids Challenge: 50 Squidoo Lenses In 7 Days

2013-02-17T21:08:00.003-08:00

I'm introducing a challenge I'm making to myself publicly here on the blog.

Starting right now I am challenging myself to publish 50 quality Squidoo lenses in the next 7 days.

The goal however is not to just hit the publish button but to actually setup 50 quality lenses that will get traffic and will stay out of WIP permanently on a brand new account. In time - maybe not the first 7 days - they will convert well and make good money.

Obviously without sharing the account or lenses with you you will have to trust me but quite honestly it's not about proof. I am not doing this to prove that I can - I'm doing this for accountability and to shed small nuggets of my process with my readers (however few they may be).

I believe it's entirely possible to do this and make good money in a relatively quick manner and I don't think it requires 24-7 dedication or extreme measures socially to do so.

Due to the nature of my life - full time dad - I don't have the luxury of doing a ton of prose here on the blog but I will update daily with a brief synopsis of my progress.

For those of you in the Pond forums I will share a bit more detail because it's in a more private setting but not too much more - just enough that you may want to follow along in closer detail.

That's it for now.

Over the next 5 hours I will be doing my initial keyword research and will begin the publication process. Expect a short update not too long from now.

Get to work all - there's money to be made!

The Easiest Way To Keep A Lens Out Of WIP

2013-02-11T02:18:00.001-08:00

A couple days back I said I would be focusing roughly 95% of my time to Squidoo for the remainder of the year - assuming nothing major comes up to shake things up.

Today I wanted to dispel a myth that keeping lenses out of "WIP" or "Red" is difficult.

First of let me reiterate that I don't have a huge amount of Squidoo experience. I joined there in late 2009 and had somewhere around 4 lens published to my name by September of 2012.

Sine then I've published hundreds and over the course of the last five months I've gone in and edited 1 or 2 lenses in the vicinity of once a week for the sole purpose of adding content and pulling them out of WIP status.

When I publish a lens that lens basically goes green and stays green with very few exceptions.

Do I do amazing keyword research? I'd like to think it's good but I don't think that's what does it.

What do I do? It's Easy.

How To Publish A Lens And Keep It Green

I publish my lenses in groups under the same general niche or topic. When you do that you can easily include hand-coded or automatically generated links in the body of your content to all the other lenses in your published group.

How do I do that however when all the lenses are getting published one by one?

I publish 1st draft lenses quickly and then go back to each lens one by one cleaning up the copy, adding descriptive text, optimizing links for better CTR, and finally adding coded links to every other lens in the group.

Say I publish 12 lenses in one general topic. If all the lenses relate to one another I can link out to 3-4 lenses from the group from each lens in the group That ends up giving me roughly 4 internal links pointed at every single lens I publish.

And because I publish the lenses in two stages I get the added lens rank bonus of updating a lens.

Sure, add some eBay modules comment modules, polls, Google News, etc. but don't forget the thing that moves traffic from one page to another: internal links.

I use the sidebar "Related Lenses" feature in the intro module to link to 6 related lenses and then I use SquidTools Featured Lens Builder to quickly and attractively code 2-4 links to put into a text module.

After a few days to a few weeks you'll likely see one lens getting more traffic that the others. Go into it and add a manually crafted link in the intro module pointing to the worst performing lens in the group. You will get a trickle of traffic flowing to the lower ranked lens and the trickle of page views will ensure this lens stays green.

In time enough page rank and seasoning will happen for all the lenses to start snowballing. Your traffic will grow, you will get likes, you will get sales. You will never again see a WIP lens.

Things You Better Not Neglect

Everything I said is important but you do have to ensure you use a lot of good tags. Find them and add them quickly using the Squidutils browser plugin while editing or building your lens for the first time.

Also make sure you use keywords that are actually going to generate traffic from buyers. This is easy enough for me to do on a small scale by hand using no tools but it's even easier to do on a larger scale with various proven web-based paid tools.

I've used Jaaxy and I've used Keyword Researcher. Both are amazing tools that cost very little but they do make it quicker to build a large list of lens titles for your net set(s) of lenses.

A lot of the time I just do it all in my head on on Google's search page but I do sit down with both of these tools quite a bit. I may get around to discussing one or both of these tools in greater depth at some point in the future but for now I'll leave you to search Youtube for your answers - or the comment box - that works pretty good too.

Why Do Internet Marketers Fail To Achieve Their Dreams?

2013-02-09T02:04:00.001-08:00

It's been ages since I really blogged. I make no excuses. I started out in this game as a blogger and quickly learned that internet marketing was far more interesting to me.

In March of 2011 I had a bad accident. I broker my knee really bad and I didn't even walk for a month or so. I didn't walk without crutches for almost 10 weeks and at that exact time my first son was born.

What happened next?

Life.

I was making decent money online. Not enough to support my family completely but quite a bit. With the challenges of injury recovery and a new baby, not to mention gearing up for an out of state move I just kind of dropped off the map socially.

Sure, I continued working a bit on my websites, this one not as much despite my occasional effort, and I continued working on InfoBarrel under different names predominantly, and I even dabbled in setting up a mini network of blogs.

I worked on a project for a couple of my "dark months" on a series of 1-page websites revolving around newly released products and aged domains.

I worked on learning the art of building a legitimate twitter following. I kind of did so too before I felt like I had learned what I wanted to learn.

Why Do So Many Marketers Fail?

They fail due to a lack of focus.

They fail because they think that focusing on internet marketing is something worth focusing on. They fail because they don't realize that knowing and dabbling in a bit of everything is akin to watching TV all day every day and not actually living life.

I still do pretty well online - financially speaking - but I still can't pay all the bills with IM income. My wife's a doctor for goodness sake. It's going to take a huge income for me to even rival her earning power in life.

What I can say is this - over my time in IM (which is fast approaching it's 4-year mark this May) the times I've been most successful is when I chose one "thing" and just did it without thinking.

I didn't learn. I didn't explore other ideas. I didn't do anything but that one thing.

In the beginning of my online mmo lifestyle I started a blog over at http://www.howtolivealongerlife.com which is actually still live. I didn't know IM when I started that. I wanted to develop a successful blog so I posted about 100 posts in 3 months and in my first 6 months I had a couple hundred RSS subscribers and a number of contacts that I regularly emailed back and forth with.

I focused on one thing and it worked... until I started looking for other outlets.

The next big thing I worked on was InfoBarrel. It was my primary source for backlinks until I started really learning a bit more. Quickly it became my primary source of income when I stopped using it for backlinks but instead used it for income generating articles.

I started writing like a mad man there doing basically nothing else but that and small backlinking campaigns to the Infobarrel articles and my earnings started soaring. I was featured as a success story at IB and my earnings climbed to over a grand a month... until I moved on and then they flatlined.

Niche sites became the next big thing followed by super niche sites and ad optimization strategies, and social strategies and this and that and this and that.

Today I'm looking into ebooks and just published my first but I can't help but think the times I've been most successful I've only done one thing.

Considering what many IMers have gone through in 2012 I have been relatively lucky. My earnings dipped about 50% from their peak after penguin but that's nothing compared to some people out there. I still feel exceptionally good about the cash I have coming in every month but as I figure out where exactly I want to go in 2013 I have to keep in mind focus.

Had I stuck with my original blog where would I be today?

Had I stuck with pumping out 60 InfoBarrel articles every month where would I be today - over 2000 articles actually and raking it in probably.

Had I stuck with my social experiments where would I be? Would I have an audience that I could actually influence by now? Maybe I was heading in that direction.

I'm tempted to start an ecommerce site these days and try to drive traffic through PPC. I think that would be good if I could figure out how to optimize everything well. I am analytical after all but that's just changing games again.

Right now I, and likely you too, need to stop, relax, and focus on one single thing that's working for you right now. It's called focus and it's what so many IMers lack - myself included.

What am I focusing on right now?

Squidoo.

Funny I first mentioned Squidoo in the fall of 2009 on this blog when I opened an account there to send a backlink or two to my human longevity blog. Had I only stuck with Squidoo where would I be now?

I am setting a public goal right now.

For 2013 I will focus 95% of my energy on Squidoo. I've read all the crazy numbers put up by Skeffling on her blog and over on the IB forums and I've started my process. It's been nearly my main focus over the past 5 months and I've done well - gone from $10 or so in Sept all the way to $600 in Jan this year. I will build this out to the max day in and day out without fear of anything.

Across all my Squid accounts I plan on buckling down and milking this cow for everything it's got. I will focus and I will succeed.

What's the end goal? I swear to you the end goal is 5 figures in December of 2013. Who knows if I'll get there but I believe I will and I will do everything in my power to make it happen. Do I need that much money to get by in life? No. That's excessive to say the least but so long as I am at home with a toddler and he takes naps I refuse to sit idle doing nothing with my life. I do what I can to the best of my ability.

If can post a handful of lenses every day all year long just think where I'll be by Jan next year. I aim to exceed expectations. My goal is to get my focus back on one thing and keep it there for another 12 months.

Eventually the little guy will start heading off to preschool and I'll turn over a new leaf in life. I'll tackle that when it comes but for now I embrace the present and I face the future with my head held high.

The other 5% of my efforts?

I'll blog on occasion here, I'll spend some time in the IB and Pond forums for community and learning, and I'll be marketing some ebooks for a close friend. Anything else I do will be incidentals - tag on projects that tie into things that are more important to me or random stuff to occupy my mind when I need a break.

I suggest to all you folk out there to do the same thing. You don't ever see traditional business owners selling candy, shoes, baby clothes, laptop bags, while trying to become popular in the auto racing circles and quilters groups at the same time. Why should IMers be any different.

What do you think? Am I off my rocker? Why do you think so many IMers fail?

Download BackLinks By Date From Google Webmaster Tools

2012-08-06T17:32:00.001-07:00

Via Hobo Web - Update To Google Webmaster Tools – Download BackLinks By Date:

Actually – QUITE a useful update to Google Webmaster tools went live a short moment ago (I think). You can now DOWNLOAD your BACKLINKS BY DATE in your GWT panel – which makes identifying who’s linking to you a bit easier. It might also be useful if you are cleaning up your backlink profile, too.

Before the latest big algo updates from Google a lot of people received unnatural backlink notifications in GWT. I personally don't use GWT nor have I felt the need to do so but for those of you who do maybe this can help you clean up a negative backlink profile... otherwise it's just an interesting tidbit for reference.

Interestingly enough I have no idea what kind of backlinks I have to this site as I've never built backlinks to it at all. If I could see who was backlinking this site I guess I could use it for networking with those who already link to me. That seems like a reasonable idea but I'm sure there are other options for using this info.

If you know of any other good ideas for this info drop a line below in the comments.

Don't Blog - Sell Stuff Online Instead

2012-08-06T16:05:00.001-07:00

Stop Writing Webpages for the Glory of Google – Sell Something Instead:
via Lost Ball In High Weeds

I still see people struggling to find the perfect niche. In my contrarian mind I believe it to be the wrong struggle. Find something you want to sell then get busy selling that ****er. Stop running around trying to find some groovy niche you can ease into for the glory of Google. Quit trying to be an authority. It ain’t going to happen, pap. Go to Amazon, find three diamond rings over $2K and sell the shit out of them. Go to some health site and find some nut bag full of nutritious weight loss properties that you can get some loser paying for a residual monthly plan.

Splork gets up in your face on this and it's something that I've been slowly getting on board with as of late. Many MMO/IM tyoes are now looking to Amazon Direct Publishing to sell a book. There is no beating around the bush about this. They create a small digital book and sell it. Many are not even building a site to go with it.

I'm working on a small project like this myself. We'll see how it goes but this is the way things are going.

Times are changing but not everything changes. More money is exchanging hands online than ever before. There will always be room for the little guys to make a buck too.

Chezfat Update - I'm slowly going through a transformation online. Expect a good number of site updates to occur in the future. Like many everything I was online has changed a bit over the past year. I am now a full-timer and and doing things differently... but still trying to find my way.

Good luck all.

Your 1st 10 Free Links With BMR

2011-11-23T20:40:00.000-08:00

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I know not every country celebrates Thanksgiving but you can’t go wrong with giving thanks for what you have.

This morning I mentioned in a forum post or two on InfoBarrel that I have been seeing some fantastic growth in my InfoBarrel income this month. I am still trending just shy of my $1000 goal for the month but it’s close. Today is actually my best day for earnings there this month. With a little luck I may get to $1000 after all.

How am I doing it though you may ask? I built a bunch of media pages to existing articles and linked to them from the article they are attached to. This will be outlined in an upcoming post here on Chezfat.com and I am building links to my best earners with BuildMyRank (BMR) as outlined in my plan to bring more traffic to my best earning articles on IB.

I noted on the forum and in many posts here on the blog that this service is quickly becoming my new favorite service. I’ve been a member for about 5-6 months or so and I used it quite extensively in the beginning and then less so over the summer – I had a new baby in the house otherwise I would have been all over that. :)

Link Building With BMR - A Breeze

Let’s just put it this way. You can only post up to on average 8.5 links per day to a given domain on BMR. For the InfoBarrel domain that means I can only get about 85 links in a 10 day period. I can have up to 5 domains that I submit to every day which means I can also link build to my own sites but for IB, which this post is about, I can only send so many links out every month.

Each link I build is only 150 words or more of text. That’s it. It only takes me around 3-4 minutes to crank out 150 words and I usually finish them up around 200+. Basically an hour’s worth of work every day can yield me links on IB for the entire day plus some more.

Is it worth it though…

YES

BMR is expensive; I can’t lie. I had reservations when I signed up but they offer 10 free links during their free trail.

A Few Of My Experiences With A Handfull Of BMR Links

In late October I had a brand new site (target Amazon), a few months old at least, that had no links built to it at all. It was receiving on average 4-6 unique visitors a day. I fired up BMR and sent 10 links to the home page, 10 links to an interior page with a “for men” modifier, and 10 links to a page with a “for women” modifier on my root keyword.

These 30 links went live in approximately 4 days and they took me about 3 hours to write. The site immediately, within a few days, started getting around 30-40 unique visitors a day and has already made me 10 Amazon sales of the product. It took me three hours worth of work. This should probably continue happening month after month for a long time. I will obviously be continuing to build this site out and build more links too but that's another topic all together.

On IB, I chose a handful of my best earning articles and started sending them BMR links (see my last post for details). I started out doing 30 links to each page. It takes about 4 days to publish 30 links to the same domain so I’ve only backlinked a few IB articles this month so far. Despite that my income has shot up around $670 per month and this month it’s approaching $1000. BMR links are ridiculous!

I make no apologies for linking to BMR with an affiliate link. Use it if you wish or plug the domain name into your browser and skip the affiliate link if you wish but if you haven’t tried BMR yet I urge you to try the ten link offer. It’s free and there are no commitments except about an hour of your time to write (from scratch) ten 150 word posts to build links with.

My Advice For Best Using Your 10 Free Links

Whether you do this on InfoBarrel or another site you own makes no difference. Identify (if you don’t know already) one of your best performing pages published online and link to this one page only with all 10 BMR links. This will maximize your efforts for promotion and give you results you should be able to measure with in a week to 10 days time.

Ideally you will find a page that ranks somewhere around #10 in Google for it’s keyword and has already shown the ability to earn you money. The 10 links will all go live within a couple days of you publishing them and your page will almost assuredly shoot up higher than before giving you better earnings than before.

This is not guaranteed by any means but it happens almost without fail for me. Vary the anchor text a little with your submissions but just push out 10 links as quick as possible and see what happens.

You have 15 days to publish the links and see what happens before you decide to subscribe or cancel the subscription. If you build all ten links immediately you should have more than a week to watch your rankings improve before deciding the program is worth your time and money.

Give it a shot; but let me say this.

If you try the free trial out and like it you should only subscribe if you are going to use it. The membership fee is steep - $59 per month. If you are not actually going to post anything then just get your 10 free links and move on. If you use it however you will be handsomely rewarded and your membership fee will not be wasted.

OK, enough from me. It’s back to pumping out more BMR links to my stuff. I’ve got student loan bills to pay down. :)

Chime in below with comments about your use of BMR or your questions about the tool.

My Plan To Bring More Traffic To My Best Earning IB Articles

2011-11-05T02:18:00.000-07:00

If you’ve read my last few posts I’ve been talking a lot about my plans for this month.

I want to make $1000 this month on InfoBarrel in addition to what I make elsewhere online. In October I made in excess of $670 so that means I need to make an additional $330 this month alone.

I’m doing that by doing three things:

Publishing new Articles On The IB Domain
Adding Media Pages To Existing Articles On The IB Domain (and linking to their media pages)
Promoting my existing articles on the IB domain which have made the most money recently

For the purpose of this blog post I’m only going to be discussing the third item: promotion.

Identifying The Best Earning Articles

This is easy. If you have Google Analytics running through the background it’s easy to see what articles have made the most over the past day, week, month, year, or whatever. I decided to look at the past three months worth of data and see which articles have made the most.

I narrowed it down to about 10 articles I want to promote heavily. I chose ten because I will be doing a lot of the promoting with Build My rank (BMR) which will send between 7-10 posts a day to their network of blogs. That’s about 8 per day. Over the course of a 30 day month that’s 240 posts published. If I promote 10 articles then I can post between 20-30 BMRs to each one.

20-30 may be more than I need considering most of the articles I’m promoting have been published on the IB domain for some time now and they all are already receiving search traffic but I want to really apply the 80/20 rule here. in this case it’s more like the 95/5 rule. :)

How BMR Works

I’ve said this in recent posts but I will say this again. With BMR I can send between 7-10 links per day to a domain… or even a single URL. I can have 5 domains to submit to if I want or more if I pay for a more expensive membership to the program – basic membership is ($59/month) but as much as I wish it wasn’t the case I’ve never published 50 BMRs in a day. I usually max out at around 30 from brain fry.

The BMR posts allow you to add one link to your site or article for every 150 words you publish. The minimum word count for a publication is 150 words so I generally do 150 word posts for the one link. Sometimes I do the 300 word posts for 2 links but not usually.

Why BMR

Why BMR you may ask. Because they post your mini-articles to a network of blogs which have good page rank and which are filled with unique (non-spun, non-plagiarized, non-PLR) content. They then backlink each post to ensure it gets indexed and builds a pinch of authority so that your link actually matters. The end result is a link that actually holds a good deal of weight.

What About Post Runner

I still use PostRunner but for this experiment I’m mostly doing BMR simply because I am capable of writing more of these in a day than I am capable of writing PostRunners in a day. Also, the links are weightier so they take effect much sooner. PostRunner is hands down a must use tool but I am on a 1-month binge here so BMR is my main focus with PostRunner as a close second.

For these 10 articles I’ll be doing a few PostRunners but probably not a lot more than that unless I find I have more time and metal stamina for writing. (keep in mind I’m still building content for other sites I own). Gotta know when to say when.

Is This Really Worth My Time?

It may be tempting to ask whether this is worth your time after you’ve written 20-30 BMR’s in a single day knowing that you have a ton more to write but – I still ask myself this sometimes but I always snap myself back in place. This is doubling down on my proven winners with a tool that I know works.

I don’t expect these 240 links in 30 days to give me number one rankings but it should increase my traffic to my articles which are most efficient at earning me money. One page view on these articles is worth far more money to me than a single page view on the other 95% of my articles. I’m expecting to increase my traffic to these 10 articles and see if the earnings boost occurs in unison. It may not for every article of the 10 but it most likely will for the bunch as a whole.

So far I’ve completely backlinked 4 IB articles already – I got started in late October on this project and it’s one area where I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately. I’ve got about 6 more posts to fully backlink with BMR – that’s roughly 150 more to go. let’s see if I can get this done by the 14th (hopefully sooner) so I can focus on other things.

The posts won’t all go live at once, since I can only post about 8.5 per day it will take most of the rest of the month for them all to go live. For now they will sit in the queue waiting for their day.

Isn’t Link Building Dying?

There’s been a lot about the death of linkbuilding lately online and my take is this. I know link building is changing and maybe taking a less important role in ranking but it still counts a ton. I want to be building a business online that will last for years to come but I need money now and now link building still matters a ton so I’m going all out with BMR, PostRunner, and guest-posting when I can get to it.

The thing is I can’t be so social for everything I publish so I will do what works and adjust as I go. If you haven’t looked at BMR I have banners for it in my sidebar. Here’s another self-serving link. They give you a free trial (10 links) to see what you think. If you try it out make sure to post those links at something that is a proven money maker. make them count.

My next article will address my thoughts on one of the other two legs of my November IB plan. New Content or Media Page creation. I don’t know which one I’ll be inspired to write about next. Check back in to see.

So far this month I am not on track to hit $1000 for the month. I still have plenty of work to do. I am however on pace to surpass October’s earnings. Hopefully my pace accelerates – I have the quickly growing holiday shopping crowd to help with that so ~~I think I’ll~~ I better make it.

Good luck to you all and your efforts.

How I’m Making The Most Of What I have On InfoBarrel

2011-11-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

If you caught my last income report I made mention to the fact that I just had my best month ever on the site despite putting very little effort into it over the past 3 months.

I also noted my November goal of hitting $1000 for the month just on InfoBarrel. This post will start to outline what I’m doing to make this happen.

As always if I fail to hit my goal I will make a new goal in the future… but I don’t want to fail. My bank account needs the income. :)

How I Plan On Making More Money ON InfoBarrel

I plan on making money off of InfoBaarrel in three ways:

I Want To Build More Content On InfoBarrel – This means exactly what it sounds like. I plan on publishing more articles there.

I originally (5 days ago) planned on publishing a lot more content on the site but I have since decided to publish only a moderate amount of new articles while pushing some of my focus on the next two points.
I Want To Make More Money Off My Current IB Library – This step can be further broken down into two points:

Funnel Traffic From Articles To Media Pages – I have a lot of people landing on my articles every day. This is because I have nearly 400 articles published on the domain. Each of these articles makes me some revenue; many of them make money almost every day.

What I’ve found however is that people love clicking on pictures and the media pages on Infobarrel convert into revenue for me roughly 3 times as much as the article pages. That means if I make $1 on my article it takes a third of the traffic to make $1 on my media pages.

Put another way; if I can get one third of the traffic to my articles to click through to my media pages I should nearly double my income.

Now, I don’t believe I can get a third of my visitors to click through to my media pages but if I can get more of them to click through then I will end up with more page views, a lower bounce rate, and more earnings.

Since I already have traffic this is low hanging fruit and it’s where I’m spending a lot of my time right now.
Funnel Traffic From High Traffic Pages To Related Pages With Affiliate Links – This is another play on optimizing the traffic I already get.

On IB (and any site for that matter) we shouldn’t be looking to stuff affiliate links in every page and we shouldn’t be cluttering our affiliate sales pages with tons of links either.

I do however have many pages on IB that get good traffic and if I can funnel some of them to my other IB articles that do have related affiliate links I can incrementally increase the page views on these articles and increase the clicks on the links.

I Want To Get More Page Views On My Best Performing IB Articles – Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your articles are getting tons of visitors and only a small amount of Adsense earnings. It’s similarly easy to see which of yoru articles make the lion share of your earnings.

I have identified a number of my best performing articles on IB and I am promoting them with BuildMyRank (BMR) and with PostRunner.

BMR is a bit pricy for the average person but it is well worth it for the simplicity of the system. You write 150 words or more, insert a link back to your article, and then publish. You can post between 7-10 per domain per day. Each post gets published on a different aged domain blog full of unique and non-spun or plagerized content and as a result the links have a good effect on the page you are promoting in a pretty quick way.

I can only post about 8.5 a day of these on average so I’m only doing my best performing articles first. If I can get a bit more traffic to the articles that make the most money per visitor then I should see a notable gain in revenue for my energies spent.

There is something to be said for just writing a ton but a lot of the time it’s worth stepping back and massaging what you already have in place. I plan on massaging profits out of my existing library while slowly starting a new stream of revenue on the site.

A few days ago I thought about writing a good fifty articles on throw pillows over the next couple weeks but now I will probably stretch this publishing theme out over the next 6 weeks or so instead. This spreads myself out so that I can work on all of the three ways of building more IB income instead of just working on one leg.

More Detail On Addresing each Of The Three Legs

In future posts I’ll go over in a bit more detail each of the three legs I’m working on and provide some IB specific tips for both new writers on the InfoBarrel platform as well as experienced writers on the platform.

In the mean time I invite you to reread my article on making money on InfoBarrel using pictures. It’s a core technique that every writer should employ. Last month I made roughly 25% of my Adsense revenue just on the media pages. They are the simplest things to create; you just have to do it.

Just to illustrate in April and May of this year I added a bunch of media pages to some of my existing articles. My revenue from media pages increased from around $30/month in both April & May to around $80/month in June through Sept. Then in October I started adding more media pages to existing articles and I made $127 on those pages in October. It’s amazing what a little work on existing pages can accomplish.

In November if I keep adding media pages I can probably get to $200 a month (if not more) without publishing a single new article. Of course I will publish new articles but the power of media pages can’t be overlooked.

Good luck IB writers.

For those that aren’t with IB – please signup using my referral link – it will make me feel good about myself. If you do sign up then most of the above is pointless to you. Your first order of business is building a mass of articles on the site. Pure publication. Write, publish, repeat. In future posts I’ll discuss the writing process so check back for that.

For long term IB writers I’ll follow up with more detail on optimization and promotion. I already have a post on the topic of using PostRunner. That post is still accurate and worth reading. I’ve promised for a long time a bit more on BMR and although I’ve got a few banners for BMR on my blog I don’t have a page dedicated to discussing the system. I may (or may not) build that page in the near future.

If you want to check out BMR for free then use this link.

If you have tips to improving income on IB, please let us know in the comments below. I’m especially interested in people that have some knowledge about the tagging system there. I’ve not explored to very much.