I am pumped!

Ever since I started this article writing experiment, my Adsense has only been going up and up. It’s really encouraging for me to keep pumping out the articles. I am up to 14 articles now on Infobarrel with another one waiting to be approved. The goal of 50 by the end of September still seems a long way away!

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.

September article challenge

One of the best ways I have found to get motivated with making money online is to set goals and write about it here on my blog.

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?

My favorite Joomla resources

I am now basically using either Joomla or Wordpress for all of my websites now and sometimes both on a single site. Wordpress is simply the best blogging software available. Joomla, especially the add-on components is a great content management and user management piece of software.

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.

Update on my article writing experiment

It have been a week since I started trying to pump out articles on Hubpages, Infobarrel and Ezine articles.

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.

Interview with internet marketer – Lis Sowerbutts

Since Liz’s blog has been the source of inspiration for me to start doing “real work” on the internet and not just playing around on twitter and facebook, I decided to ask here a few questions on her recent success at making money online.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate you on the success you have been having with your websites. I remember when you started and were struggling and thinking about giving up. What was the closest you came to giving up and what was the turning point that made you want to continue?

Which time? Seriously I think I got to the point of giving up at least three times. The last and worst was late February – my part-time “real” job had disappeared in the Global Financial Crises about a month earlier – and I was still making very little. Basically I took a long hard look at myself, had a huge argument on a private forum and finally decided to believe that I could make money, before I actually achieved it – my income has gone up every month since then! I think finally I got the key skill that an entrepreneur has – and this is the same for an off-line business as well, you need some self-belief as well as a lot of hard work.

I remember reading your post on the Site Build It! (TM) controversy and how much attention it drew to your blog, how much did that help the traffic and income to your blog?

It gave me a huge kick in reader and subscribers – and that is the basis of making money online – getting the traffic is key. And the post refuses to die because 5 months later I still get regular comments on it – up to nearly 500 now. At the time I wrote it I didn’t have a way to monetize the traffic – but have been doing OK from it since.

The post on how you made $2000 online has attracted a lot of comments on your blog and I am sure it will be an inspiration to many. If there any so called secrets to making money online, I guess the answer is just “a lot of hard work”, do you agree?

Hard work sure, but not giving up is a big one – as I said above – I could easily have given up a few months earlier. Its about being smart too -diversification is critical making all your money from one site or one main affiliate is just to risky for me.

I started off on Hubpages around the same time as you, but I didn’t continue there for very long. I just went back to the site recently and it looks like it has really grown in usefulness and as a community. How much of a role did Hubpages play in your rise in income?

I remember you telling me I would never make real money on a revenue-sharing site

At one level hubpages kept me going – I like the community there – I managed to consistently make a few 10’s of dollars each month – it was better than nothing. I never saw it as a serious player though until Court at the KeyWordAcademy issued the 100 hubs challenge. As part of that I started a new author there and focused on niches where people really wanted an answer and wanted it now. Well much to my surprise I tripled my income from the site inside 100 hubs and a few weeks work.

You mentioned you have been outsourcing content creation, where do you find people to do your writing and do you think you will be increasing the amount of outsourcing you do in the future?

Yes I will – I haven’t yet figured out what percentage of my income I should be reinvesting. I am currently best pleased with results from textbroker.com. I should probably try and get some regular writers from elance or odesk – but I’m not yet at that level of orgainsation.

I believe your partner isn’t interested in Internet Marketing and I think one of the hardest things about making money online is that generally you don’t make much, if any money in the beginning. What advice would you give to people who are interested in making money online and just starting out, but their partner is convinced it is a scam/waste of time?

Its a very personal thing. Personally if my partner hadn’t been prepared to bankroll our lifestyle with his job I would have cashed in some investments I have to pay the bills. My partner knew it wasn’t a scam – he’s in IT – he understood the concept of what I was attempting – he just didn’t believe that I could pull it off. That was fair enough neither did I! Fortunately once I started making it happened he has no problem understanding the dollars in my PayPal account At the end of the day the only way to prove working online is not a waste of time or a scam is to have the pay checks right?

You mentioned a keyword building tool that you use, which I imagine you have to pay to use, how do you decide on which services/tools to use to make money online?

I’ll generally only buy something if its recommended by someone I trust. Though I do try the odd other thing – but only if there is a money back period – which is very common in the field. I don’t hesitate to return the crap! I generally go on recommendations from a few marketers whom I trust. I know them well enough. You can actually do all of this without any paid tools and without buying any ebooks. But I use tools which save me time – because time is the one thing you can’t get back and buy the odd e-book because a good one is a short cut to knowledge.

Many people teaching making money online seem to follow a similar method, find keywords that have a high search volume and low competition and then set up a mini-site based on that topic. Do you think that is a good way to make money?

Well mini-sites work for me As I said above I prefer diversification and that’s what mini-sites provide me with. That said people get hung up on the search vol – all of the tools – including google’s are only wild estimates, and I rather have 10 desperate buyers rather than 1000 window shoppers! A small focused site can provide the searcher with the answer they are looking for – and I get paid – seems like a win/win to me.

What are your goals and plans for the rest of 2009?

We are planning on returning to New Zealand in the first quarter fof 2010 – I hope to have a full-time income of around US$4000/month by then – giving my partner the luxury of retiring if he wants to. So the rest of 2009 is going to be an awful lot of work setting up a whole lot of new sites!

Thanks for interview, Lis. I wish you all the best for the rest of 2009.

Make sure you check out Lis’s blog and some of her articles on Hubpages.

Getting more motivated and making money with InfoBarrel

I only heard about Infobarrel through Liz’s blog and reading MMO with SEO.

I have used Hubpages for a while and I have to say, I don’t like the interface of Infobarrel. Until you write 10 articles and get approved by an Infobarrel manager, every article needs to be approved by a human reader. I don’t mind this, but I just had a problem with seeing if the article had been entered into the system successfully or not. To be safe I re-pasted it into a new article and it looks as though my first attempt at saving an article with InfoBarrel failed. Fortunately I wrote and saved my article in OpenOffice, which I recommend doing.

Since articles need to be approved by editors on Infobarrel, Google apparently places more trust on the site. The effect is that you are supposed to get the equivalent link juice as that of ezinearticles.

I feel so motivated the past couple of days, producing actual content on my sites and on sites like Hubpages. I think I have been kidding myself that I was working by reading forums, using facebook and twitter. While I think I still think this is important, it shouldn’t be how you spend the majority of your time.

I am going to try and make a conscience effort from now on at creating content on my own sites and income sharing sites like Hubpages and Infobarrel and rather than using forums and commentating on other blogs to try and get traffic. I also want to try and write more articles on ezinearticles to get traffic and backlinks.

I will updated my progress on my new little experiment.

A wake up call and why ignoring A-list bloggers might be a good idea

I love making money online. I love trying and researching new methods of making money. Once you start to make enough money to have a comfortable life, it is very easy to become complacent with it all and get a little lazy. Taking some time off to do the things you enjoy, like travel for me, is important though, otherwise what’s the point of making money if you don’t take the time occasionally to sit back and enjoy it!

While I have been taking some time off (and neglecting this blog) at least one of my online friends has jumped from making almost nothing to over $2000 a month. I think these kinds of stories are very inspiring and you can learn a lot by looking at how someone went from almost nothing to $2000 a month.

It seems like Liz has been working hard on making niche sites in profitable areas with high search volume. She has also been successful on Hubpages, something I worked on for a while, but have since neglected. She has also been using Ezinearticles to get backlinks for her hubs. I had an account on Ezine and have previously written just 2 articles. This week I wrote another one, but it’s definitely something I think I will keep working in the future.

Hubpages is great for testing new niches. It gives some nice statistics on your traffic and you can include any links to your sites or affiliate links.

Liz’s latest blog post contained a link to this interesting article: Be a better blogger? WTF? responding to Problogger’s article Forget the fatal flaws of blogging.

I love Problogger, but I also have to admit that even though I subscribe to the blog in my reader, I rarely read the article beyond the headline. I think the top A list bloggers really are victims of their own success. While you might get some great tips for making a very “nice” blog reading Problogger, you will get few ideas for making serious cash.

Problogger has been featured on television and been mentioned in a number of high profile magazines and newspapers. Darren Rowse through the blog has built an excellent reputation, so there is no way he is going to tarnish this by promoting a cutting edge method or technique for getting traffic or making money online, that might be a little “creative”.

So if you want to learn some interesting ways to make money online, you might want to check out some of these blogs.

Make money for beginners

How to Make Money Online with SEO
Blogger Unleased

List building -why didn’t I start earlier?

I just joined Aweber to build an email list for a new website I just started. I had read about creating lists ever since I started making websites. I messed around with some free newsletter programs, but never took it too seriously.

I have just created a couple of new lists for a couple of different websites. After adding the sign-up form to my site, within hours, I had people signing up.

Aweber has an RSS to mail feature so you can put in your RSS feed for your website and create a newsletter automatically, which should work well on my Japan job site. I also finally completed a guide to living in Japan which I am planning to sell on the site and put some links into the newsletter to promote it.

I don’t know why I didn’t implement it earlier! I guess one of the reasons was the perceived expense of around $20 a month. I thought I could do it all for free. If I had of implemented it earlier, I would probably have thousands of subscribers now. I have been so reliant on money from Adsense for such a long time, and while it is one of the easiest ways to make money online, it is perhaps one of the least effective. I am sure you have read all of the reasons before – people need to click away from your site to make money.

Aweber has some good tracking and reporting functions, allowing you to do split testing on the different styles of forms. It also feels good to see that people want to receive more information from you and they are happy to give you their details.

The next step of course is creating or finding a product that your list is interested in.

Downsizing to village life

I have just rented and moved into a small house in Lovina, Bali. Lovina is in the north of Bali and is much quieter than the southern the areas of Kuta and Seminyak.

I visited Lovina on my first trip to Indonesia around 18 years ago. At that time it was a bustling little tourist resort. The area took a hit after the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings and while tourism to southern Bali has recovered, Lovina is still pretty quiet.

The beach isn’t so great with black sand, but the water is calm and fairly clean. Some hotels and restaurants have closed down and only central Lovina is popular with tourists.

Some people might see this as an area to avoid, but I have met several people who are optimistic about the area, especially with retirees rather than the party animals and surfers that prefer the south of Bali.

I am renting a small house just outside of central Lovina in a small village. It’s away from the beach, but set amongst banana and coconut trees. The house is owned by a westerner, so it has all of the modern conveniences. The nearby houses are very basic, sometimes with just a small room for sleeping and cooking is done with a fire outside. People raise chickens and pigs. We have to wake up early to visit the market. A big bag of vegetables and meat cost just US$2.

Our neighbors are extremely friendly and have been very helpful. You can get almost anything you need for a simple life. The nearest McDonalds and Starbucks in Kuta are more than 3 hours away.

Land is still very cheap, so if the area does continue to grow, I am sure you could make some good money by buying up land now.

We don’t have a telephone line, but fortunately can still get internet. The internet is a little expensive but works well enough. If you want more info on living in Bali, check out my free ebook.

Here are some pictures of our house:

Just started creating a list with Aweber

I don’t know why, but I have just got around to joining Aweber and creating my own email list. I will be adding it to this site soon, but I really wanted to get a list going on my new Bali Expat website.

I have written a free guide to living and making money in Bali and so far I have already had a few sign-ups, which is encouraging. I want to use it to produce a newsletter and eventually a paid product.

Aweber is very easy to set up on your site. You follow various wizards to get it set up. I even added the opt-in box on my Bali Expat fan page on facebook. You can see it by clicking on the “Free ebook” tab.

Aweber have good instructions on their website on how you can do this.

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