I suppose there are a few people who will get lucky and find a topic they are strongly interested in and it makes them a lot of money. Most people however will not be so lucky with their niches.

Some will make money with their niche and eventually their traffic and income will plateau. Or they will get bored with those sites.

Some people who don’t care whether they are passionate about the niche or not, just focus on keyword research, affiliate programs and SEO and they get their enjoyment from finding and profiting from these topics.

I don’t want to say either method is right or wrong. If you did start making sites on topics you were passionate about and your earnings have hit a plateau, it can be a good idea to get into niche blogs and websites to diversify your earnings.

I used to want to just focus on one profitable website, but now I realize it can be more fun and profitable by trying to run multiple sites. I also recently have been having fun writing articles on topics, that I didn’t think anyone would be interested in.

I am just rambling now, but I hope anyone reading this can realize that there is no single answer to making money online. If your site isn’t making much money, don’t give up on it. One solution might be to split your time between making websites on topics that you are passionate about, with sites that you don’t have much interest in, but have the potential to make a lot of money.

Infobarrel goal – 50 articles – completed:50
Hubpages goal – 20 articles – completed: 1
Ezinearticles – 5 articles – completed: 1 (and it is still in review!)

As you can see, not a great result. I was concentrating mostly on Infobarrel this month. I started off really strong, doing more than one article in a day. I got a bit slack and then I thought I had written 50 articles, but it was actually only 40 and I have been trying to get to 50 over the past few days.

So how much money did I make from publishing 50 articles on Infobarrel? I made a total of $5 for September! It’s not going to make me rich obviously, but I did experience one of my best overall months with Adsense, so I have a feeling that it has helped lift my earnings. Also, I am writing on Infobarrel to get links to my own websites, so that has a positive effect also.

We sold a property through a website I recently set up, which is also going to make more money than Adsense. We are now planning on opening a shop to try and sell more properties and possibly do other business services.

I should try and get another 50 articles for October, but I think I will aim for 30 articles, which is just one a day and try to focus on my own websites and blogs.

I always wondered why Darren never launched a forum on his blogging website, as I was always sure that it would be successful, because of the popularity of his blog. Most of his posts get a lot of comments, which is a good way to see if a website can support a forum.

I joined the forum, but didn’t pay the fee (sorry Darren!) The introductory fee is $1.97 a month, so I can imagine this will likely rise when the forum is more publicly announced. I couldn’t see any of the posts, but there were around 170 people already on the forum.

I am sure he will get some criticism for charging people to join a forum, but I suppose that is a good way to keep spammers out. Personally I won’t be joining. Forums are good up to a certain extent for learning about making money online, but you can spend too much time on them, which has a negative effect on your ability to make money online.

I wonder if I could charge people for the forums I run? My feeling is that many people would just try to find another forum that they can use for free. I can imagine the forums will make a lot of money for Darren.

Perhaps he took Brian Clarke’s teaching sells course? I can see the email now when the next edition of Teaching Sells comes out, “Darren Rowse makes $1,000,000 from membership site launch”.

Do you plan on joining the forum?

I like setting new challenges, so I thought I would run a little experiment to see if I can get a new site to rank on page 1 for a two word key phrase.

I have registered the domain quite some time ago and could only get a .info. The top sites are wikipedia, which I don’t think I will be able to outrank, but it would be nice just to get on the front page.

The keyword phrase has a global search volume of 22,200 searches a month, but only 204,000 competing websites.

I am not a big fun of doing lots of scientific testing. I just want to see how much work I have to do to get this site ranked. I have added just one link from one of my own websites, so far. It is indexed and is getting a little traffic from Google.

The site just has a few pages of a few hundred words a page so far. I thought about revealing the site in the post, but on second thoughts, I don’t think it is a good idea.

I have now completed 47 articles on Infobarrel and just 3 articles away from my September goal of 50. I have lost a little interest in Hubpages and still stuck on 60 hubs. I also haven’t done any ezine articles yet.

I just came back from a short break, so I am feeling a little refreshed and hopefully will able to all of my articles done.

Hubpages is going slower. I don’t know why, but I like Infobarrel more in some ways. One advantage I think you have with Infobarrel is that it isn’t so saturated with keywords like Hubpages. Google typically only returns one result for a URL for a keyword search. Since Infobarrel doesn’t have as many articles, you are going to have more chance at getting more competitive keywords to rank with Infobarrel than Hubpages. I haven’t done a lot of testing, but this theory seems to make sense to me.

Also, the fact that Infobarrel manually approves the first 10 articles, it is bound to stop people who can’t write so well and people who only want to promote their websites like Hubpages. Infobarrel also encourages people to write longer articles. If your article is longer than 450 words, it appears on the list of recently created articles. I am sure that if you write an interesting headline, it encourages people to click through to your article. Of course you really want your traffic to come from Google, but I had at least one article “tweeted” from a member at Infobarrel, which was nice to see.

Sometimes the more time I spend writing and researching an article, the less views it gets. If I am on a roll, I can write 450 words in 10-15 minutes. If I am struggling what to write, I can spend a whole morning on something. I have quite a few unfinished articles which need more work. I think it is better to stop working on something if it is taking too long and come back to it later.

I am changing my tack a little on finding topics to write about. I suppose I can’t help but judge the success of an article based on the number of views it has. I know I am also doing this to get links to my sites, but I think it is human nature to want to see lots of views and some feedback in the comments.

Anything to do with making money online, home based business and internet marketing seems to do well. Travel type articles don’t seem worth the time unless you are just doing it just for backlinks. I think this economic downturn has definitely seen an increase in people wanting to make money online and work from home. More people seem to be working in casual or contract jobs and they are turning to the internet to help make up the difference in their income.

This is great for established internet marketers. I am sure many people have actually made a lot of money from profiting from these trends. Of course I haven’t done any research on this, but it’s just the feeling I get from reading forums and blogs.

Some people have asked how much my hubs and articles are making me and honestly it is hardly anything. I set up a channel in Adsense and the figures would be very depressing to anyone who tried to calculate an hourly rate on how I am spending my time. But, I have seen an increase in my daily Adsense earnings since I started doing this, which is what encouraged me to set my September goal.

Sorry, if anyone is looking for any magic tips or secrets. One thing I do find that works for me is getting up early and knocking out a couple of articles before you do anything like start checking emails/forums/stats etc. By the evening, I can’t bothered writing much, but I do feel a bit more creative and get ideas from randomly surfing the internet and watching television. Even if I don’t write any complete articles at night, I make notes on ideas I have and how I might be able to make money with them.

Also, I want to have 80 hubs done by the end of the month, of which I have written 59 hubs of various degrees in quality, so that leaves 21 hubs to go. Finally I want to have 10 Ezine articles done, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is getting harder to get articles published there.

I know this doesn’t sound like a lot of work. I don’t have a job, so this is my full-time business. Actually I think I worked hard on my websites when I did have a regular full-time job.

I know it’s a tough life, but there are a lot more interesting things to do here in Bali, than sitting at my computer all day! I did spend quite a bit of time today, putting together a property website. My girlfriend is getting into the property business here in Bali and I helped get a website up online, listing properties in Lovina.

It is the first time I have used Open Realty on a website and it was pretty simple to get going. There were a couple of bugs in it, but I found the solution just by searching Google for a fix.

When I started this blog, I wrote more about property investing than making money online. So if things go well, hopefully I will be also writing about this new business venture. I love looking at land and houses and trying to get a handle on a particular market. I am also following the build of one of my friend’s here in Lovina, Bali. You can see the pictures here: Lovina villa for sale.

I have been using the links (maximum of two) to link to my own sites, my hubs on Hubpages or other Infobarrel articles. I have really been following any particular formula. I have seen some people writing an article on Infobarrel and then linking it to a similar article on Hubpages. I think it is better to continually mix it up with different things and find out what is best.

Another point is that I see too many people using keyword tools, getting ranked for those keywords and then being disappointed when they don’t get the search traffic (and income) that they expected. The keyword tools are really only a guide. Hubpages is a great place to experiment. I have been surprised how some articles have done really well, while others have been pretty lack luster.

I remember hearing some time ago a tip from a stock investor – keep buying more stock that is going up in value and sell off anything that is going down. I think the same advice can be applied to the internet. Write articles on hubpages, doing some keyword research. Throw a lot out there and then see which ones stick.

If you find something doing well, write some related articles on Infobarrel. If it keeps bringing in money, promote it more by getting links – writing an ezine article, start a blogger blog or even buy a domain for the niche. Next find some affiliate programs that are relevant to that topic. Rinse and repeat and of course experiment with different topics. Try to think outside the box a little and not follow everyone else’s ideas for articles and niches.

Anyone reading this blog over the past couple of weeks will have seen that I have been spending time writing articles for Hubpages and Infobarrel. To keep up the pace and not lose interest, I have decided to set myself the challenge of having 50 articles published on Infobarrel by the end of the month. This includes the eight I have already done and if I start now, it is only one article a day.

I thought about going for 100 articles, but I think that the articles would get progressively worse in quality and I would start to go crazy. I still need to monitor and keep adding articles to my existing websites. Since you can have two self-promotional links in each Infobarrel article, I have been writing articles that will actually make me money to link to. The article writing experiment has also motivated me to start working on the domains that I have been holding onto for years and creating mini-sites on them.

I now have 50 hubs published on Hubpages and again it would be nice to go for 100 articles there, but I think I will be busy enough with my Infobarrel goal, so I think I will just try to complete another 30 hubs on Hubpages.

Finally, I currently have 4 published articles on Ezine articles and I want to set a goal of having 10 published articles there by the end of the month. It can take more than a week there to get an article reviewed. I think once you have 10 articles published, the review process becomes a little quicker. One article I wrote there last week still hadn’t been reviewed, so I sent their support an email and they approved it straight away. They said they have a huge backlog of articles there recently to be reviewed.

I have noticed however, when I have been doing certain keyword searches, I have found ezine ranking for so many different phrases. So I think it is not surprising that SEOs are really targeting the site for links.

So by the end of the month my goal is to have:
50 articles complete on Infobarrel - all at least 450 words – current about 8 articles published
80 articles on hubpages – currently 50 hubs
10 articles on Ezinearticles – currently 3 articles published and one in review

Anyone want to join me in the September article challenge?

Undoubtedly, Joomla has its quirks, but I can get sites set up pretty quickly now with the software and the sites look professional enough with a free or commercial template.

Here is a list of some of my favorite Joomla resources:

SEF Advanced: One of the annoying things about Joomla is that it doesn’t create “clean” URLs right out of the box. I thought they were going to fix this in Joomla 1.5, and while the default URLs are better, I still like installing this product if I am serious enough about the site. You do need to have Ioncube installed on your site to get this working. Eric also has some other useful components on his site worth checking out. Whenever I have ever had a problem with one of his components, Eric has gotten back to me very quickly.

Reviews for Joomla: Reviews for Joomla is a fantastic script that enables you build a professional and easy to use product review website, like Amazon. You can see it installed here on my Japan Hostels website.

Hot property: Hot Property is the best property component that I have tried for Joomla. It is easy to set up and easy for users or companies to add properties to your website. If you want to charge people to list their property or product, you need another component, but for free listings, it works great out of the box. It is also easy to set up and change it so people can list any product or service, like jobs, hotels etc. Mosets would be great if they updated their product more frequently, but I haven’t ever had any major problems with it.

Joomla Templates: I am not a designer, nor do a enjoy designing websites. I do enjoy putting websites together and getting the look I want for a website. Fortunately there are some great free and premium templates available for Joomla. I recommend and use Joomla Shack and Joomlart for most of my Joomla templates.

I wrote 1 article for Ezine which is still waiting to be approved. I wrote 12 articles on Hubpages and 5 articles on Infobarrel, with 1 article still waiting to be approved. Articles on Infobarrel can take from a few hours to 1 day to get approved. It has been exactly one week since I wrote the Ezine article and it is still in moderation.

Ezine might have the most authority, but they don’t have any revenue sharing options. With Infobarrel you keep 70 per cent of the Adsense earnings and they supposedly have good authority. Making money with SEO suggests writing an article on Infobarrel with links to a hub on Hubpages.

Something which I have kind of been following, but also adding links to my own sites. Since I get to keep 100% of the revenue from my own sites, this seems to make sense to me.

I have a whole bunch of unfinished articles saved on my computer, which I will be able to use for future pieces. Whenever I have an idea for an article, I make a note of it. Sometimes that hardest times to think of an article is when you sit down at your computer to do some writing.

If I am not in the mood to actually write the article, I do some research and save it all in a document. This makes it easy to go back and write when you are feeling more motivated.

I have set up email lists on four of my sites now and I have over 100 subscribers. I have been writing an email follow up series on one of my sites. The follow up feature in Aweber is pretty good and is a great way to get people interested in your site/product and you get further opportunities to sell them your product. Without a list you almost limit yourself to just one time to sell your product, when someone visits your site.

I have forgotten temporarily about twitter and really cut down down the time I have spent visiting my favorite forums. This has really helped with my online productivity.

I haven’t set up channels for all of my hubs and articles, but so far the results have been promising with some nice improvement in my Adsense earnings. It is very motivating to put in some hard work and see immediately the results of your efforts.