I have currently published 74 articles so far with one pending. Last year I had a couple of months where I was writing an article a day. I got busy after that however with other projects, including writing an ebook, so I have only started using the site again.

The site has grown nicely since I joined, adding new features like a forum and more revenue options. One thing I really enjoy with the site is their ‘points’ system. You earn points for writing more articles, referring people to the site, posting comments etc. When you reach a certain number, Infobarrel refers this to unlocking an ‘achievement’.

It’s not like you get any money earning more points, but it does give you a warm and fuzzy feeling! It would be nice if maybe later they decided that you could actually do something with those points.

They do have contests however, with some good prizes. It’s not easy to win them however, because there are some very dedicated writers on Infobarrel.

Your first 10 articles on Infobarrel are manually approved, which seems to cut out most spammers. People also generally write well written and researched articles, which I think is contributing to the success of Infobarrel as it is not being used purely for marketing purposes.

Infobarrel gives you a choice of four formats for your article, Blank Article, Video Article, How-To Article and Review Article. I have never tried the video article or a review article. Personally I don’t like the how to style format and it seems a bit of a copy of the ehow format.

That is not saying I don’t write, how to type articles, for me they have been the best performing articles on the site. So even if I write a how-to type of article, I use the Blank Article format.

If you are stuck for a topic, you can visit the Things to Do, section where you can find a number of article topics and overviews, which you can write about. I have done a few overviews and articles from the list, but in terms of page views, they haven’t done as well as some of the topics that I have come up with myself.

Infobarrel is a great place for people starting out making money on the internet. Rather than wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars on internet marketing courses, anyone who can string a sentence or two together can join Infobarrel and start making money straight away.

Invariably people who are starting out don’t know what kinds of articles will perform well, or how they can get more traffic. You can see how many page views an article has received, so you can get a good idea as to what kind of articles will get traffic. Rather than paying for someone to tell you what to do, you can find out what works for you by experimenting with different styles and topics.

Probably one of the only things I don’t like about Infobarrel is the text editor they are using on the site. For some reason I often have problems with it. Usually I write the article on my computer first and then just copy and paste it into the article once I have completed it. I would suggest they create something like what WordPress uses.

I would have to say however, the support is fantastic and the few times I have sent an email to them with a problem, I have gotten a fairly quick response.

The forum is also a great place for sharing ideas on how to get more traffic to your articles and how in general you can make money online. I have only just started posting there, but have found it to be a friendly forum with a mixture of experienced writers and people just starting out.

In conclusion, Infobarrel is a great site for people who just starting to learn about making money on the internet, aspiring writers or established internet marketers who are looking to diversify their income streams.

I have mainly been using Hubpages to do some SEO experiments and try and get a couple of extra links to my websites. I did one product review type hub, where the products are around $450, but didn’t expect to make any sales.

I was checking my Amazon earnings and I found I had made a $450 sale, which I get about 5-6% of. The hub didn’t take long to write and I have zero knowledge of the actual products.

Although you might not see immediate results, doing keyword research, writing articles and knowing some basic SEO, like how to get links, can make you some decent money.

I suggest signing up with Hubpages and giving them a try.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

This is the best idea I have had lately to increase links to my sites. There shouldn’t be any reason why I cannot submit a new article each week. To become a platinum author, you need to submit and get ten articles approved to the site.

If I can make it through February’s challenge, I am thinking I will try to make it a goal to get 10 articles submitted by the end of March.