Tag: Google ranking

Categories
Back Links Blogging

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.

$2 for 1000 views
$2 for 1000 views

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 the first month I could earn $60 and get paid out – their minimum payout is $50.

Then they restricted the second blog to people who had a track record of 30 days with their first blog.

Then the changed the program so you didn’t get the $1/post for the first 30 days but you might be reviewed and promoted to the ppp program after 30 days,  you did however get the traffic payments.

Then come early January they denied for payment my posts which were obviously self-promotional  i.e. linked to my own hubpages, other sites I wrote for etc.  Again I still get the traffic bonus for them but I didn’t actually get paid for backlinks anymore!

At the same time they dropped a lot of people from the $1/day program – there was lots of angst about this in the forum – but this had always been a possiblity if you read their Terms of Service.

So today.com will probably not pay the average newbie blogger anything but pennies  – and they probably won’t make the $50 payout. Why do I say that – the answer is in the traffic stats and the “hot list” which tells you for each blog at today you have where you sit in relation to the top 10. This makes for some interesting reading.

My australia blog has done quite well getting traffic from those downunder worried about when/if they will get the cash the Federal government is handing out. At one point I was averaging 300 views/day – that put me at #34 out of all today blogs. Good ?

Not really the figures for the top 10 at the same time was

#10 position  602 views – ie double what position 34 was getting

#3  position 1390 views – double again

#1  position 4534 views – double again

To be honest I don’t think a blog about Australia would ever make those figures – the top 10 positions are usually dominated by entertainment, celebs and fandom type blogs.

On the other side I appear to have readers and fans for my travel blog – but I haven’t done any good getting it ranked for the search engine traffic, except for the photos – they bring me more searchers than the words 🙁 I bounce around 50-70 uniques a day and at the high end of the range sit at position 200 or so out of all today blogs. I suspect I am only just hanging onto the payment for this one!

The point is that I am in the top 200 which means thousands and thousands of blogs don’t even have 50 visitors a day – at 50 visitors you are earning 10cents/day for the traffic.  Sorry but I don’t know anywhere in the world where you are likely to have reliable Internet that will make that profitable.

Which is not to say that today.com is not worth it for me – because Google love’s the site and my blogs get indexed within hours,sometimes less. I have PR all over the place too! (Trick if you want to know what sort of authority a site has: put a google alert on some unique text in the post  – I normally use my name – and note how long it takes to show up as an alert!). So yes I don’t get paid for my obvious backlinks anyone more – but they are nice backlinks 🙂

DISCLAIMER: the links to today.com in this post are affiliate links and I will get paid $5 if you sign up and post 10 approved posts within 3 months. If you want to deny me my beer money – that’s cool -strip the affiliate code from the link – am I going to tell you how to this – no 🙂

Photo Credit

Categories
Back Links

Entrecard Will Kill Your Search Traffic

OK I have been doing some Web2.0 stuff over the last few weeks and have looking for  sources of backlinks which will a) work for the search engines i.e. give me a do-follow backlink and b) might even get you some focused traffic. Getting my sites to the point their earn me passive income is all about increasing my backlinks

Entrecard Sucks!
Entrecard Sucks!

I don’t know if you count Entrecard as 2.0 as really its just a fancy banner exchange which as been around forever (ie like 10 years – a LONG time on the Internet).

I never took much notice of Entrecard but people over at the Today forums were singing its praises so I signed up (free) and installed it on my Travel Over 30s blog.   And I dropped my entrecards – almost always on relevant blogs in the travel and expat sector. You can drop a maximum of 300 cards a day – with a little distraction – ie. actually reading some of the blogs this can take several hours – most of the blogs have every widge under the sun and take FOREVER to load.

And sure enough the traffic came – maybe 50% of people I dropped on dropped back within the next day or so – to be honest this was better than I had thought. I got a bit of traffic from them.

Then I stopped  dropping – and my after a day or so my Entrecard traffic went down to a handful a day. Which again was to be expected. This was not passive income – if I didn’t drop no one was going to drop back or even visit.

So Entrecard wasn’t building me an ongoing audience – it was just getting me a reciprocal “drop and run” response. So if I didn’t drop I didn’t get traffic.

Which in its self is not so bad – but it got worse, a lot worse. My Google search engine traffic disappeared. I was getting a steady flow of queries from Google to a number of different posts – I had had this traffic for around a month.

After a week or so of serious Entrecard activity -my search engine traffic had gone. Why?

Well I don’t know for sure- as you never do with search engines, but I am almost certain it is because my Entrecard traffic was low quality – it was hit and run – they came found the Entrecard widget – dropped and left.

Google rates pages for a number of reasons – but a lot of very short term visitors who click in and out – seems to get you marked down. And I think this is what has happened to my blog.

Meanwhile my other Today blog, which I never had Entrecard on has gone from strength to strength on search traffic.

So not only will your Entrecard traffic not convert to sales, Adsense clicks or even readers – it will also have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.

Entrecard is off my blog as soon as my current backlog of adveritsers are through.

Categories
Online Business

2009: The Year I Make it?

balls_prioritesWell this is my New Year’s post – we had a great holiday and no  I didn’t run out of things to do or find any stunningly cheap internet – so no work got done.  Time to take stock:  the back story is here if you care from when I started this blog in April. What have a learnt in the last year.

Biggest challenges of the year:

  • “getting” the marketers mindset.  Understanding that I am in the business of selling things – but reconcilling that with not wanting to rip someone off. BTW I just noticed someone bought a Asus eeePC from one of netbook review hubs – that made me smile – because I love that little notebook!
  • focus – I keep on getting distracted and I need to balance where I want to get to and new ideas which keep on coming from left field!

Biggest Wins of the Year:

  • managing to make some affiliate sales and being able to sleep at night. I have decided that   I will only promote on this blog what I use myself and find useful and explain why  I use it and why. This does seem to convince the occasional person to buy from me – I thank you 🙂
  • finally being able to rank a site based on the keywords I wanted to rank for – it doesn’t sound like much – but trust me it was the “proof of concept” I really needed  – sometimes you just have to do it yourself to understand that it will work for you – dumb but human I think.

So 2009: what is happening going forward.  I am torn, and have been for 6 months, between being an internet marketer, a freelance writer, and more recently a blogger. Unfortunately I am instinctively more comfortable in the social role of blogging or the contractor/employee role of writer  – but where  I need to be is an internet marketer.

Internet Marketer

I have learnt a few things over the year  and now have several sites developed and slowly starting to make me money.  There is money to be made, though at the end of the day its not content which is King, but links and search engine rankings.  That said I still try to make my sites to have some useful content in them, and so far  I have not had any issues with them being taking down as spam so  I think I am doing OK there.

Freelance Writer

Ironically I have made around 60% of my online  income by writing for other people. This was an unexpected development as I never thought of myself as a writer  but like any skill the more the do you the better  I get, and understanding something of how search engine works is definitely an advantage in this area. At the end of the day  Freelance writing is hardly passive income   – as any writer will tell you. Instead I am using it as a way to buy leverage for my main business that is sites and yes content too.

Blogger

I got involved with today.com, initially anyway, because I thought that I could get some easy backlinks to other sites and make some money on the referrals.  I was right on both counts  – but also found that I quite enjoyed the interaction and given that  I was being paid for traffic directly  I could play with some of the social networking stuff such as Entrecard.  Both blogs  I started in November are now PR3 Australia News is more a trends blog while Travel Over 30s is turning into a general travel flagship/social blog.  Basically the idea with both of them is to use them to not just get backlinks but maybe attract a few would be entrepreneurs over to this site or to my hubpages cotent.

Goals for the first 1/2 2009

  1. Get more organised and focussed on the important stuff so that I can achieve the following:
  2. Develop at least 10 more niche sites developed and promoted and ranking in the top 10 for my keywords
  3. Develop at least 1 e-book out a month  – to be also promoted via my own website which involves learning a few technical bits and a hard thing – how to write a sales letter!
  4. Maintain this blog, Passive Income on a regular basis – sorry can’t promise better than that –  I try not to post unless I have something to say – or a question to answer – so if you want more posts ask more questions 🙂
  5. Maintain my two today.com blogs – trying to blend social blog with trends to get a lot more search traffic to them – and do some entrecard dropping at least in the short-term.
  6. Uses AMA more frequently to support my money sites and other blogs.
  7. Maintain and diversify my freelance writing income – probably to replace the part-time, real-world job I have, which is looking very shaky at the moment – mineral exploration anyone?

Hell that’s rather a long list!  The bottom line is though –  I need to start making a decent income – which around here is at least A$1000/week and I am not close yet! But  I will be!

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
Paid Tools Tools

AMA After 2 Weeks

Wow I am really impressed. I have been tracking the sites/pages I am promoting using Article Marketing Automation. Today I had a quick look – expecting the usual list of “not found” mean I’m not ranking in the first 1000 results and just about dropped the laptop – I am ranking wow!


Success
Originally uploaded by kevinthoule

I am promoting a hubpage I wrote a while back. The page is nearly a year old but wasn’t ranking at all well on the SERPS. I posted an article with a variety of 3 word keyword phrases on 21 September (which has now been published 53 times): almost immediately my Google traffic jumped – that could have been coincidence – I’ve seen this size jump before. But today I noticed that I was ranked for some of the 3-word KW phrases I had never promoted anywhere but via AMA – in fact sometime in the last couple of days I jumped from not in the top 1000 – to position #2 (for 2 phrases) and #6 for another!

Now hubpages may not be a fair test: I generally find I can get hubpages to rank easier than anything else I write. But I also have been pushing a niche blog of mine. Its been around about 3 months, is a .info and is bouncing around – it got to first page and then dropped out of sight to sit around the 100-300 rank mark for various long-tails, for the last 2 months. Now today its back, and boy is it back -the gain in the last couple of days is around 200-400 places so that I am now sitting position 10 and 20 for quite a number of my keyword phrases I. I submitted one article to AMA on the Sept 19 – and its been published 59 times.

People this seems to be working – I’ll let you know in another week whether the positions hold up. Those links again: AMA free version with a trial of the article submission
Or if you want to go straight for the money version – click the pretty banner on the right!

Categories
Back Links Marketing Search Engines

Backlinks are Everything.

I guess I am only just starting to learn the fine art of earning passive income online. One of the blind spots I had for a long time was that “content is king” – “write good stuff and they will come”. Well actually: they won’t, and in fact even when they do they may only make you 7c / day which is not going to see you retire in style any time soon.

There is only one  way for the bulk of your potential audience to find you: that is Google. Yes there are other search engines Yahoo probably sends me 5% of what Google does and MSN about 5 (no not % just 5 🙂 ). But Google is king of the search engines

You see Google don’t find your wonderful hub or article or website or blog by accident. It certainly doesn’t decide to put your site on the first page of results except for some very specific reasons.

  1. Google needs your content. Try this type “lis sowerbutts” – without the quotes into Google what comes back – this site normally ranks #1. At the moment in the Australian data centre of Google I rank #1 and #2 of 493,000 results: cool eh? Well no not really – lets face it “lis sowerbutts” isn’t exactly a high competition set of words – there aren’t that many sites around so I end up at the top because a) the name is in my url of this blog and b) and often comment and link to Lis Sowerbutts – an anchored link on the name of the blog
  2. Google thinks you have “authority”. Think about it if you have a problem with your car who do you call a: qualified mechanic or Uncle Ed who mucks around with motors –  OK, if they were both the same price you would call the “authority”. If you want the perfect smoked fish recipe do you check out Hub Pages or some site you never heard of: you go to Hub Pages because you know there is some great recipes there but even if I didn’t if I search via Google I will find hubpages often on the first page Why? Because Google “likes” Hub Pages. Which actually means that the Google algorithm basically gives Hub Pages the benefit of the doubt and indexes and ranks hubs quickly. Look carefully at what shows up most often on the first page of Google when you search for generic information: about.com, hubpages.com squidoo.com and almost always 1st or 2nd wikipedia.com. These sites have authority: just like you should listen to your Mum you should also probably listen to wikipedia or hubpages!

So how do you get that “authority” from Google? Well that is how

Backlinks are King

Try this: go to Google and type in

link:http://mywebsite.com

this will give you a list of all the sites which link back to your site.Well all the ones that google have got around to counting anyway, which can take anywhere from hours to months.

If you don’t have a profile or a website which has been around a few months try mine as an example link:http://hubpages.com/profile/Lissie
at the moment about 125 links. But look at those links: tags some of my hubs have, people I am a fan of, comments I have paid of hubs (my own or others), posts I have made in the forums. Being active on HubPages creates lots of backlinks to your profile and you can see the effect that my profile now has a Page Rank (PR) of 4. Basically the more links you have pointing at a page the more important Google considers it and the more likely you are to rank well in a search for that term.