OK so not a day after I write about diversifying to other Web 2.0 article sites and review InfoBarrel the great Hubpage challenge blows up all over the Internet. If you have been asleep under a rock and not paying attention it went like the: Court decided to have a new money making experiment: 100 hubs in 30 days. Well Hubpage’s marketing guy Ryan Hupfer noticed this (btw if you are wondering how this sort of thing happens – I have 2 words for you “google alerts” a great way to know what people are saying about you!). Long story short we now have The Great Hub Challenge: Read more »
Get Paid to Blog: Is it a Scam?
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 »
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 »
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. 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 [...] Read more »
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 [...] Read more »
Making Money On-line for Beginners
Sometimes I struggle as to where I should publish. I guess I am not a pure internet marketer because sometimes I just have to write about a topic! This weekend its been around the subject of making money on-line. Yes I know its idiotic to try and rank for that term. Yes I know I run the risk of just repeating the same old. I still had to try. So I did and you know I think it came out all right. There is nothing original per se. I am following the big three as usual as detailed in my original Internet Marketing and Hubpages article. In the end I ended up publishing not one but two hubs, over 3600 words for goodness sake! On a revenue site that I only get 60% of the Adsense, Amazon, eBay, Kontera impressions – why did I do that. Well two simple reasons really: I’m starting to see more and more new people arriving at HubPages, publishing a couple of hubs and then going to the forums and asking what’s wrong I only made 5c in Adsense! I can see this trend continuing. HubPages seems to be winning the race with Squidoo and [...] Read more »
Freelance Writing PAYS! Me Even!
Well its a curious thing when sometimes something you aren’t looking for suddenly starts working! After months of getting increasingly frustrated with the whole online marketing game an opportunity appeared from left field! Origami dollar t-shirt Originally uploaded by Vaguely Artistic I am on record for saying that content isn’t king but oddly enough I now have people wanting to pay me for it! Its all Mark Knowles’s fault, he employed me to post regularly on a couple of blogs about luxury destinations and Australasian Property Investment On the back of finally getting a positive balance in my paypal account I looked again at freelance writing opportunities. I’d initially thought about making money as a writer online but figured out that in Australia I could make more money cleaning than I could by writing for 1c/word which seemed to be the going rate on the well-known freelance writing sites. I kept looking though and found some other options. I’ve now sold a couple of articles at Constant Content and today had an article accepted at a travel site: so if anyone wants to hire me as a writer please drop me a line! Read more »
How did I start Blogging
Sharon over at Get Paid to Write Online asked how I started blogging: here’s how. I started blogging on blogger – then I moved everything over to my own site continuing adventures and now I am back writing on blogger -why you may well ask? Well Continuing Adventures was started when I was trying to figure out how to escape my corporate IT career and planning a camping trip around Australia. I started blogging in August 2006 and from March to September 2007 we were on the road around Australia. I already had my own static site: Midlife Travel but of course found that blogging was so much easier to keep updated. These sites were of course supposed to make me money and keep us travelling – well it didn’t quite work out that way – first off we got tired of camping before we could afford the $200,000 motorhome to make it comfortable. Oh and of course my sites never made me any money either – not even enough to keep us travelling in Asia never mind Australia. Continuing Adventures was basically a journal with photos – don’t bother looking the photos are MIA since I moved hosts – [...] Read more »
Knol: Competition for Squidoo and HubPages
Today Google launched their new service Knol. Speculation has been that Knol is an attempt of Google to take on Wikipedia at first glance I think Knol is actually closer to Squidoo or Hubpages. Knol appears to be ambivalent on the commercial appeal of the site. Wikipedia has been robustly and adamantly non-commercial- deleting any page which is “commercial” in even the broadest terms. Knol of the other hand specifically allows knols that are about a commercial subject. Knol even has Adsense and allows authors to keep 100% of Adsense revenues: but the placement of the single Adsense block is far right and below the fold, about as bad as you can get. Knol seems to have a bit a flawed launch too. Some features appear to be glaringly missing: you can tell exactly how many versions of your knol that you have saved but there is no statistics and no way to link to Google’s Analytics. Although they claim to want international authors: the only way to become a verified author is to have a US address associated with your credit card or phone number. I have a verified Adsense account – why is that not good enough for [...] Read more »
Where to publish your best content
I’ve been focusing very much on learning a whole lot more about SEO and winning the Google game to get myself ranked. One of the “light-bulb” moments I had as that content isn’t king and writing good content is not, in its self, enough to make you money from your own sites. Another of those “oh God its obvious now” is that content is important: but not so much own your own site or your target money maker. Instead your best content should actually be in guest blogs, or articles or hubs or lenses that you write elsewhere. Why? Because these backlinks sites serve too purposes: to get backlinks; to drive targeted traffic to your site. Now sites such as Quassia basically provide just a backlink, no traffic. However sites such as ezinearticles or hubpages can provide qualified traffic looking for whatever you are selling. Read more »
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