Year: 2008

Categories
Online Business

Some New Year’s Resolutions!

It must be Christmas , I am tired, frazzled, stressed  and I don’t do Christmas and I don’t have kids! Its not a good place to be quite at the moment – and for a least a week I have been trying to get to this blog to update it!

Lis stiding into the future, or at least the end of Busselton's jetty
Lis striding into the future, or at least the end of Busselton's jetty

It is, as usual, my own fault. I forgot the rest of the world doesn’t take a three weeks at Christmas and we just had week away so out of 5 weeks I only have 1 week at home! So I am frantically scheduling posts in advance for the paying blogs! Well to be honest I am lucky to have the paying blogs so thanks Mark Knowles for your faith in me.  Mark is funny writer with an eye for a funny photo: he is a self-confessed atheist and seems to like semi-naked women – check out his blog but you have been warned LOL!

Needless to say I have done very little work on my actual passive income sites and I am definitely going to be doing something about that in the new year. In fact I took Monika’s advice over at The Freelance Writer and bought a (paper) moleskine diary to manage my time.

That’s as far as I have got so far but I am going on our road trip across the Nullarbor with the knowledge that I will have around 3000km of thinking time to work out my to do list for 2009 – if I find a solar-powered, wind-up satellite-phone Internet connection which costs less than $10/minute I might even update this blog sometime in the next few weeks!

Categories
Article Marketing Back Links

Article Marketing Submission Software: Update

What’s the future of article submission software? When I was originally looking for a solution to the bulk article submission problem and I wasn’t impressed by the results I saw.

Internet is a series of tubes
photo credit: eirikso

I used to be a Business Analyst and I one thing I find on the internet that some of the standards of software and services offered are, quite frankly, amateurish. I am actually quite happy to pay for software as I know enough to know it takes a lot more time and effort to develop reliable software.

The hardest software of all to develop is software which needs to interact with a 3rd party that the developer has no control over.

This is the reason that software for article submission is particularly difficult. Every directory is slightly different and even the smallest change to the submission process means that the submission software will An alternative to automating submission is creating a service which employs people, presumably in lower wage countries, to do the work itself. This approach has issues too, anyone who has run a business with staff knows that management is no easy job – and of course even more difficult if the workforce is in another country..

One of the reasons I started with a service that submits to blogs I knew that is was fundamentally an easier piece of software which only had to interface with one other piece of software – WordPress – and that software is open source so that the inner workings are available who can understand what they are reading – which certainly isn’t me!

I noticed over at The Keyword Academy, Court is also interested in the concept in his recent Article Marketing Update post and is having problems with the service with the submission service he has been using. I’m afraid I am not terribly surprised because I think managing a workforce long-term really is beyond 99% of internet businesses.

Categories
Freelance Writing Online Business

On-Line Income Cash Flow is King

Since February I have been working 3 days a week for a small mineral exploration company. They have some great prospects but as of about a month ago we had to cancel drilling because of the inability to raise money anywhere off or on the stock exchange. My hours were cut from 3 to 2 days a week.

Freedom!
Freedom!

You know what my reaction was? I was pleased that I have more time to work on-line – I’d rather be building my business than trying to look busy at a company who is in trouble for reasons that neither I nor the directors can do a lot about at the moment.

Sure the loss of income just before Xmas when we are about to go on an expensive income and my partner won’t get holiday pay is inconvenient. But I immediately turned around and started replacing that cash flow with freelance writing.

It made me realise that I have so many more options than I had a year ago. I have finally learnt not to be dependent on a employer but discovered, at least to a small degree, how to make money online in a recession.

The trouble with building an online business: it takes time and quite a few skills – its not going to pay the mortgage this month- and maybe not even in 6 months.

So what are the quickest ways to make money in a recession?  Now these aren’t about building a business – this is about money NOW!

  • If you can write you can write articles: and developing this skill will help your online business anyway. Check out Monika’s list of on-line writing resources to get you started;
  • If you have web design or other technical skills you can also get paying work.
  • Sell stuff! Selling on eBay or other online auction sites is a full-time business for many whether you sell the junk in the spare room, haunt the local garage sales, or even drop-ship.

None of  these approaches will build your passive on-line income, you are effectively getting paid for your time but it will give you predictable cash flow NOW rather than in 6 months time – and that can be a very good thing!

BTW the image I loved – but it came via one of those email chains – if anyone can give me a source I’d gladly acknowledge it!

Categories
Freelance Writing

Freelance Writing Really Taking Off

Is it just me or are there are freelancing writing jobs all over the place at the moment? I just picked up another on-going writing gig. In fact its my first as a “normal” ghost writer ie. I am given that article’s title and write a piece based on the title.

Writers Block
Writers Block

Its a lot easier than coming up with new blog posts all the time and making sure I am not repeating myself or neglecting part of the topic area of the blog!

Again this was a job I got not from advertising or via my under-developed portfolio site. It was someone looking for writers at HubPages. The initial job wasn’t that exciting pay wise but I have since got better paying work from the same person.

Getting paid to produce a service be it writing or something else on the internet is the same as in the real world. If you can prove your ability (in my case I have nearly 100 hubs at HubPages) but possibly even more important prove that you can communicate and deliver then you will get work and you do NOT have to work for 1c/word on the crappy freelance bidding sites.

How do you prove you can deliver:

  • respond promptly and clearly to emails;
  • either accept the job as given or negotiate the price;
  • communicate clearly as to the turn around times and meet them;
  • if there is a problem – let the agency or buyer know – don’t go into your hole and not communicate.

Its not rocket science but I suspect that its done often very badly on the internet. It seems that a lot of writers really have poorly developed business and social skills. You don’t have to be a fantastic Writer to make money freelancing – I am proof of that. You do need to know how to write for your audience and behave professionally and it seems to be paying off for me!

Photo Credit

Categories
Online Business

Yes: We moved! Welcome to the new url

Now I think I have brought everyone with me – I hope! There is a redirect on the old blogspot site which should bring you straight here – but you may want to update your bookmarks anyway: Journey of 100 Sites is now at https://lissowerbutts.com All the posts and comments came across easily, the WP import feature really does work! The RSS was find too as I already was using feedburner so you RSS Readers won’t see anything different.  The redirecting the individual posts and of the high level domain is all thanks to Blogger Bloke’s excellent tutorial on how to move from blogger to WordPress

Why did I leaver blogger? Well they annoyed me and broke the comment feature on the theme I was using. There just isn’t the depth of independent developers for blogger: and its probably because blogger (Google) can change anything they like on a pretty random basis and it leaves the developers scrambling. Even finding how to redirect the posts was hard because that seems to have changed completely in the last few months: Blogger Bloke’s code works because he uses .htaccess rather than mucking with Google’s code.

Also I am kinda feeling the need for a flagship blog – and I guess this must be it because some people actually seem to stop by and read it LOL, and even odder subscribe to it! I had the domain lying around doing nothing so this seemed the logical thing to do with it!

I know it doesn’t look very pretty around here at the moment but I am tired with fiddling and need to get some work done: this is a very cool theme – but it has a whole lot of options which I don’t know how to use yet!

Categories
Blogging

Technical problems: comments

Its seems that the comments function isn’t working – thanks for Mike at Retire Young and Wealthy for pointing this out to me! It seems blogger has changed something that’s broken the theme – I like the theme so I am going to give it 24 hours to see if someone knows more than me can fix it. In fact the site I got theme from Blogger Buster has the same problem – I can’t comment there either – I had to send them an email!

I am using firefox – so if anyone CAN comment please leave comment saying what operating sysem (Widnows etc ) and what browser you are using! That will help the techies narrow it down.

At least now I know why no one was talking back for once LOL! Meanwhile if anyone want to follow I have got myself into using twitter

Categories
Blogging Making Money Online

Today Works Well for Trends Blogging

IMPORTANT: Read this update on blogging at today dot com – it still works well for trends though.

Well I am enjoying blogging at today.com more and more. Mainly because I am finding it pretty easy to get my posts indexed and then get search traffic to them. What I am doing is something that is called “trends blogging”. Google has an appetite and the appetite is for whatever people are searching for at the moment. To check out the top 100 queries at Google trends – trust me it usually makes for pretty depressing reading!

I’ve tried using Google trends to blog directly – but to be honest lacking real-time access to US TV is a huge disadvantage – and not caring even less about US popular “culture” is a show-stopper!

So instead I am doing my own version: which is currently around a film which is about to be released. I suspect it might be popular because the sexy photos of Nicole Kidman in Australia hub does pretty well. And the movie isn’t out yet – which is the point – the premier is tonight so I wrote about the Australia Movie premier and the post was indexed with 40 minutes – probably less I wasn’t looking. I was already getting some traffic to an earlier post on the same topic so I checked my stats and made sure I answered the questions to searches I’d had traffic from – some of which weren’t answered in the original post which kinda gave me the hint that I might be onto something. I am now sitting in position 2 and 3 for my keywords in Australia anyway – and of course its not yet today in most of the US – I LOVE the time difference game sometimes (its almost as good as the curency game at the moment for those of us whose currencies have dropped against the US$ ). Now the nice thing about today is that I get paid on traffic not directly on clicks -that’s lucky because entertainment is notoriously BAD for Adsense payouts! But I am definitly getting traffic!

Categories
Marketing Search Engines

Google Reveals SEO Secrets

Google has just released their Search Engine Optimization Guide. Yes the big G itself is finally prepared to answer the most FAQ out there ” How do I get my site to rank in Google?”

Its a pretty scary document: well scary if you are in the business of scamming people out of good money by pretending that SEO is hard to do – its anything but. In fact I suspect none of what is in this guide is new. Its just been finally collected all together in one place so that people can actually find it – now that’s an idea!

The report is fairly simple to understand for anyone who has the rudiments of how a website is setup. The bottom line is excellent for anyone who wants to make money as an online writer because as usual the bottom line is that a website which is attractive and useful for readers will also attract the search engines. Get your headings right and make sure you correctly anchor your backlinks and Google will notice.

I wrote an extended review of Googles SEO Guide an how it applies to HubPages here: SEO How to Do It by Google

One item the Google SEO Guide mentions in passing is that blogging about newsworthy or unique content will get you ranked. That certainly seems to be happening to me on my Australia News blog

Categories
Article Marketing Blogging Search Engines

Getting Paid to Blog

I have been having fun over at a newish website which is offering free WordPress blogs – a bit like the free wordpress.com site really.

But not. WordPress.com you aren’t allowed to make money so you can’t link to evil, wicked money making sites, which means that when you do blogs often get shutdown. But of course some of us crazed money making types are always looking for new place to develop my own backlinks.

So when I heard that a new site was offering not only free blogs but also offering a $1/post I got interested – the rather long review is my blogging for $1/day hub but the short version is:

  • get approved (live in the right country the usual suspects plus Australia/NZ/Western Europe/India),
  • write a post 100 words minimum, original content, not illiterate,
  • get paid.
  • Get second blog, repeat, get paid a total of $2/day. I

It won’t last for ever, eventually you will have to get some traffic to continue being paid but its a nice little business model – from my point of view anyway!

Now $2 is hardly a massive income: but the cool thing is this: the links are do-follow and you can of course anchor them. So far I have not had any posts rejected and have placed up to 3 “self-serving” links in them!

Slight caveat once the post is approved for payment its locked and you can neither edit it or delete it, you loose the rights to your content. If however you post an image they don’t take the rights: only on the words.

As a freelance writer I can trade 100 words for a free backlink and $1 – hell I can even trade 250 words because those tend to get indexed in the big G!

Another thing that is rather cool is that your blog is a subdomain and there are some nice name still available: one of my blogs is Australia Today (check the url).

In the interests of fair play: they do pay for referrals so if you sign up via the flashing thingy on the right or via one of my today blogs (click on the “get paid to blog” on the right) I get paid – well actually I won’t unless you actually put some effort in and do 10 posts – its not hard – that’s a total of 1000 words for goodness sake – I can do that before breakfast! And you have 3 months to do it in. And then I get paid and you get paid – and you get a blog and backlinks and you can do with it what you want. It really isn’t a bad deal.

Of course if you don’t want me to get the commission that’s cool too – I’ll get over it eventually – probably ….. 🙂

Categories
Article Marketing Paid Tools Tools

Article Marketing Automation: After a Month

Well its been month and so will I be cancelling the subscription on Article Marketing Automation which is just about to cost me another $47 ? Hell no!


NYC: Hilton Times Square – “Time and Money”
Originally uploaded by wallyg

As I reported after 2 weeks with AMA I have had a significant jump in the search engine rankings for both a hubpage and a niche blog of mine. Well after another two weeks, nothing has changed: both are still holding their new improved ratings. The count of the times that the relevant articles have been published is now up to 77 and 72 respectively. Is that as far as those sites are going to go the hubpage is ranking #5 the blog #8 for the keywords I targeted for this test.

Why hasn’t the extra published articles pushed me higher? That I have a theory about: I think most of the sites that articles are being published are very new, most people didn’t commit their existing sites to this new service. Now those sites are at most maybe 2 months old a lot of them will start to be getting sandboxed. I expect they will pop out sometime; so all I can see is an upside as my backlinks start to be counted by Google. In fact a number of the sites aren’t indexed at all I suspect because few of the links are actually showing up for either Yahoo or Google yet. So its only a fraction of the potential 70+ links which have actually got me pushed up the rankings thus far, there does seem to be a lot of potential upside still.

The only downside to date: I wish I had written more articles and submitted them! Time to really focus on that side of things I think. For those writing articles for submission to AMA here are a couple of hints which will make sure that you don’t get rejected from MY sites :

  • don’t submit a dozen similar but different articles on the same topic all at the same time. I then get presented wtih the option of 6 very similar articles I tend to pick one or two at most
  • spin the articles: I won’t consider publishing an article which is less than 30% unique

Those links again:

  • for the free version of Article Marketing Automation: allows a limited number of articles to be submitted and an unlimited number of sites to be added.
  • for the paid version of Article Marketing Automation which allows unlimited article to be submitted and sites to be added and costs $47/month

Its all about time and money for me: AMA is saving me more than its costing me, I will be a subscriber for a while longer!

Categories
HubPages Online Business

HubPages is NOT a Waste of Time!

I occasionally get the comment that I shouldn’t publish all my better content on sites I don’t own or control. The comment came up again on HubPages where I was told again that I was basically wasting my time publishing there.

Well its true at one level: the actual direct income I make from Adsense/Kontera/eBay/Amazon revenue sharing pays for my hosting: but that’s about it!. No the effect of Hubpages is more subtle than that. I have readers who actually read what I post there.

That said my best ever hub in terms of views by hubpages readers is this one high-lighting some sexy pictures of Nicole Kidman. I have a theory on this. As an exclusively English language site HubPages has a quite a number of Indian authors. India still has tight censorship laws which probably block most of the X-rated sites which are prevelent across the internet. HubPages bans “adult” hubs but their interpretation is the same as Adsense’s that is the odd American view of sex which bans (female) nipples but wet transparent clothing is fine. I don’t know for sure but I know that I have had over 200 views a day for weeks at a time, and then the views drop to a tenth of that: probably because the hub is no longer featured on the front page of “hot” hubs! So I am guessing that I will get quite good PR on that hub on the next update. BTW people looking for pictures do NOT buy anything!

My other success recently on Hubpages has been a serious of hubs I have done around the “make money online” niche.

Consistently the most commented and popular pieces are the ones which either relate to Internet Marketing, HubPages and personal experience in those areas. People seem to love to read about people’s success’s or otherwise with making money on-line. My all time comment record is the HubPages for Internet Marketing 251 approved comments: that’s not counting the comments I have spammed; anything with “marketing” in the title seems to get a lot of spam!