Problogger launches paid membership forum

I don’t read Darren Rowse’s Problogger so much any more, but I just got an email notification that he is launching a new blogging forum on the .com version of his website.

I always wondered why Darren never launched a forum on his blogging website, as I was always sure that it would be successful, because of the popularity of his blog. Most of his posts get a lot of comments, which is a good way to see if a website can support a forum.

I joined the forum, but didn’t pay the fee (sorry Darren!) The introductory fee is $1.97 a month, so I can imagine this will likely rise when the forum is more publicly announced. I couldn’t see any of the posts, but there were around 170 people already on the forum.

I am sure he will get some criticism for charging people to join a forum, but I suppose that is a good way to keep spammers out. Personally I won’t be joining. Forums are good up to a certain extent for learning about making money online, but you can spend too much time on them, which has a negative effect on your ability to make money online.

I wonder if I could charge people for the forums I run? My feeling is that many people would just try to find another forum that they can use for free. I can imagine the forums will make a lot of money for Darren.

Perhaps he took Brian Clarke’s teaching sells course? I can see the email now when the next edition of Teaching Sells comes out, “Darren Rowse makes $1,000,000 from membership site launch”.

Do you plan on joining the forum?

New SEO challenge

I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to SEO. Of course I follow all of the basics and do whatever I can to build links, but I don’t go much beyond that.

I like setting new challenges, so I thought I would run a little experiment to see if I can get a new site to rank on page 1 for a two word key phrase.

I have registered the domain quite some time ago and could only get a .info. The top sites are wikipedia, which I don’t think I will be able to outrank, but it would be nice just to get on the front page.

The keyword phrase has a global search volume of 22,200 searches a month, but only 204,000 competing websites.

I am not a big fun of doing lots of scientific testing. I just want to see how much work I have to do to get this site ranked. I have added just one link from one of my own websites, so far. It is indexed and is getting a little traffic from Google.

The site just has a few pages of a few hundred words a page so far. I thought about revealing the site in the post, but on second thoughts, I don’t think it is a good idea.

I have now completed 47 articles on Infobarrel and just 3 articles away from my September goal of 50. I have lost a little interest in Hubpages and still stuck on 60 hubs. I also haven’t done any ezine articles yet.

I just came back from a short break, so I am feeling a little refreshed and hopefully will able to all of my articles done.

Sunday article marketing update

I have been pretty busy this week writing articles, mostly for Infobarrel. I am up to a total of 27 articles, which I think is a pretty good effort since one day I didn’t feel so well and I had some trouble with the internet here on one day.

Hubpages is going slower. I don’t know why, but I like Infobarrel more in some ways. One advantage I think you have with Infobarrel is that it isn’t so saturated with keywords like Hubpages. Google typically only returns one result for a URL for a keyword search. Since Infobarrel doesn’t have as many articles, you are going to have more chance at getting more competitive keywords to rank with Infobarrel than Hubpages. I haven’t done a lot of testing, but this theory seems to make sense to me.

Also, the fact that Infobarrel manually approves the first 10 articles, it is bound to stop people who can’t write so well and people who only want to promote their websites like Hubpages. Infobarrel also encourages people to write longer articles. If your article is longer than 450 words, it appears on the list of recently created articles. I am sure that if you write an interesting headline, it encourages people to click through to your article. Of course you really want your traffic to come from Google, but I had at least one article “tweeted” from a member at Infobarrel, which was nice to see.

Sometimes the more time I spend writing and researching an article, the less views it gets. If I am on a roll, I can write 450 words in 10-15 minutes. If I am struggling what to write, I can spend a whole morning on something. I have quite a few unfinished articles which need more work. I think it is better to stop working on something if it is taking too long and come back to it later.

I am changing my tack a little on finding topics to write about. I suppose I can’t help but judge the success of an article based on the number of views it has. I know I am also doing this to get links to my sites, but I think it is human nature to want to see lots of views and some feedback in the comments.

Anything to do with making money online, home based business and internet marketing seems to do well. Travel type articles don’t seem worth the time unless you are just doing it just for backlinks. I think this economic downturn has definitely seen an increase in people wanting to make money online and work from home. More people seem to be working in casual or contract jobs and they are turning to the internet to help make up the difference in their income.

This is great for established internet marketers. I am sure many people have actually made a lot of money from profiting from these trends. Of course I haven’t done any research on this, but it’s just the feeling I get from reading forums and blogs.

Some people have asked how much my hubs and articles are making me and honestly it is hardly anything. I set up a channel in Adsense and the figures would be very depressing to anyone who tried to calculate an hourly rate on how I am spending my time. But, I have seen an increase in my daily Adsense earnings since I started doing this, which is what encouraged me to set my September goal.

Sorry, if anyone is looking for any magic tips or secrets. One thing I do find that works for me is getting up early and knocking out a couple of articles before you do anything like start checking emails/forums/stats etc. By the evening, I can’t bothered writing much, but I do feel a bit more creative and get ideas from randomly surfing the internet and watching television. Even if I don’t write any complete articles at night, I make notes on ideas I have and how I might be able to make money with them.

September goal update and new site launch

It’s the first of September, so I just wanted to take stock of what I have left to do for the rest of the month. My goal is to have 50 Infobarrel articles written of at least 450 words in length by the end of September. I have already done 19, so that leaves 31. Just over one a day.

Also, I want to have 80 hubs done by the end of the month, of which I have written 59 hubs of various degrees in quality, so that leaves 21 hubs to go. Finally I want to have 10 Ezine articles done, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is getting harder to get articles published there.

I know this doesn’t sound like a lot of work. I don’t have a job, so this is my full-time business. Actually I think I worked hard on my websites when I did have a regular full-time job.

I know it’s a tough life, but there are a lot more interesting things to do here in Bali, than sitting at my computer all day! I did spend quite a bit of time today, putting together a property website. My girlfriend is getting into the property business here in Bali and I helped get a website up online, listing properties in Lovina.

It is the first time I have used Open Realty on a website and it was pretty simple to get going. There were a couple of bugs in it, but I found the solution just by searching Google for a fix.

When I started this blog, I wrote more about property investing than making money online. So if things go well, hopefully I will be also writing about this new business venture. I love looking at land and houses and trying to get a handle on a particular market. I am also following the build of one of my friend’s here in Lovina, Bali. You can see the pictures here: Lovina villa for sale.