UPDATE Please read this more recent post: Is Today Blog a Scam Getting paid to blog seems to be every writer’s dream and the dream of many who just want to make, what they think is a little passive income online. To be honest making anything more than a few cents with most programs is as likely as just losing a few kilos in your sleep or just getting fit my meditation – it ain’t gonna happen people! So sorry if you are looking to make $100/day blogging with no experience and not much effort – that money tree doesn’t exist! That said I do directly get paid to blog over at today.com both my blogs: Australia News and Travel Over 30s are still paid – the huge sum of $1/post (usually I’ll get to that) plus $2/1000 views. I’ve stopped directly promoting their ad on this blog though because they tightened up the criteria for payment so I figured most people wouldn’t actually get paid to blog there – let me explain. When I joined in Nov 2008 I got paid $1 from day one and I could have 2 blogs from day one: so by the end of [...] Read more »
Using Twitter for BackLinks
Not sure what a backlink is and why you need them? Check my earlier post on why backlinks are important. Check here for an update on using twitter for backlinks. I haven’t been convinced yet of the value of Twitter for building my passive income online business. I have however just found a twitter ap which may be about to change all that. I only started using Twitter to follow Vic @ Bloggerunleashed random live chats – he twits before a chat. A couple of months ago I started following people I knew from other forums or whose blogs I liked. I still wasn’t that impressed. Twitter For Breaking News Then I started doing some trends blogging with my Australia News blog. Then I found a use for twitter – I knew about the airplane that ditched in the Hudson about 3 minutes after it happened – it was a tweet. I saw a tweet about a $100k job to work on a Queensland Island job The first post I wrote on the subject got 200 visitors in one day. The job applications don’t close until the end of February so I am expecting long-tail traffic on this one for [...] Read more »
Self-promotional backlinks – which don’t annoy
For important new developments at todaydotcom check out my update : is today a scam? The importance of backlinks we have discussed before. Many sites allow you to link to your own sites – two that I use are hubpages and today.com which are sites which pay you to blog. Today particularly require that to earn their payment per post the content must be original and not self-promotional. This appears to confuse people – and yet although many of my posts promote other sites I have none have them been flagged. 1-Feb-09 Update – today has now tightened up and will not pay the per post fee if you have a link to any site you own or to any article on hubpages , AC and similar sites. You still get the traffic payment. What’s the secret – write an original article, related to the same topic – add a link somewhere – not an obvious one – just a link with the text that you are are trying to rank for in Google. There’s a link in this paragraph which is relevant to the broad topic of making money blogging but this post would get approved if I had [...] Read more »
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 [...] Read more »
Article Marketing Automation: After a Week
Well my last post I raved about my initial experience with Article Marketing Automation so this is the update on my first week’s experience. Just to recap what AMA will do for you: the free version of AMA will allow you to add your blogs to the network. Add your blog, select the categories and/ or keywords you want and articles from the network want posted on your blog and voila: if you allow it relevant articles will appear automatically (or wait patiently for you to approve them). This is great to build some new sites: but for me the real power AMA is the paid version. With the paid subscription you can create articles: add them to the system; spinning it to minimize duplicate content if you want and the article is available to add to the network. You can add up to 3 keyword anchored links – anywhere in the text not stuck at the bottom in a resource box. And the keyword link can be spun too: from their own statistics says it all: “Your articles are promoting 9 links via 55 anchor text options.” The articles I added a week ago have been presented between 20 [...] Read more »
A New Article Distribution Tool: Very Cool!
I have been planning on discussing on this blog which tools I use and why, but have been holding off until I was making a bit more money – so I had more credibility – at least in my mind! There’s a new player in the game though and I am so excited that I am throwing caution to the wind and reviewing Article Marketing Automation my latest investment, and yes this one really is worth the price, although there is a free version too, read on. Many of you will have heard of Article Marketing where you write a short article which includes a link back to your site. People use article marketing to develop backlinks for their site and sometimes for traffic too. Now you can choose to submit your article to a few directories: of which EzineArticles is one of the best, or you can submit your article to literally thousands of other directories. Many people want to submit to many directories, again to develop the backlinks, rather than the traffic. I have been wanting to do this for some time: but I haven’t moved further on with this for one main reason: I couldn’t find the [...] Read more »