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 would say the interview is worth listening to for any internet marketer even if you don’t use WordPress. The interview is more of a general nature on blogging and SEO and is not so technical.

Matt answers many misconceptions about creating a website, like issues with duplicate content, the value of links from social media sites, meta tags and plugins like the “all in one SEO” plugin, which he says isn’t really required anymore.

If you spend a lot time on more advanced SEO techniques, like “pagerank sculpting” this interview could help you to bring it back to the basics of creating solid content and marketing.

I wasn’t half surprised when I searched on “Groupon clone” to find several companies selling website clones of the popular site.

A company called Agriya have a script that looks promising. I emailed the company for a quote and they said it would cost around $1200. A little out of my budget for what I would want to spend.

Grouponclone.biz has a script for just $200 and the site has an online demo, although it is difficult to know if the script operates as expected. When buying these kinds of scripts, I like to see if the site has a support forum, which gives you some idea of the install base and the level of support from the programmers. In this case there is no forum.

Grouponclone.com looks like another promising script. It still looks fairly new and is priced at $399.

If you aren’t familiar with how Groupon works, they have some good videos on their website explaining in detail how their website helps businesses.

One of the problems of launching such a site, is the classic chicken before the egg dilemma. How can you convince companies to use your service if you don’t have traffic going to the site and how to get people to subscribe to your site if you don’t have some great deals already going.

Groupon collects the money when people buy an offer and then distributes it to the company if the offer becomes valid. It’s something that I think would be difficult to get going without having some kind of trust happening already between your customers and advertisers.

My thought to get a site going was to just set up a site where companies could create printable coupons and you could make it free initially and then charge later if the site became successful. At the same time you could also build up an email list where people would get automatic emails of new coupons available.

I thought it would be easy to find such a script, but most of the scripts seem to be suited for online coupons. I wanted to create something that people would print out and take to a store as I would be operating a site where internet is not so widely used in business.

After spending a few hours searching, Coupon Press which works with WordPress seems to offer one of the better valued solutions. It’s $79 and it looks to have a good install base and support, judging from the activity on their forum.

There is a free extension available for Joomla which I did try, but it just looks too basic.

So while it might seem fairly easy to set up your own group on type business, you still have to think how you plan to get traffic and people to actually using your service.

The other “tribe” of course is into keyword research, SEO and affiliate/product sales. I swing from one to the other and can see both viewpoints have their strengths and weaknesses.

Promoting your website can work well for brands and community building. Of course not doing keyword research and SEO for your business could also cost you money in lost sales.

Google have also been experimenting with “real time search”. I was having a problem with a blog of mine and after I fixed it up, I did a keyword search for one of the main keywords and I was ranked number one.

There could be a few different explanations for this, but it seemed like it was because I had just updated the site. It’s not something that makes much money so, I didn’t bother looking into it further.

I also heard that in Google’s real time search experiments, they pulled data from twitter and ranked it based on factors like number of followers etc. I haven’t been much of a fan of twitter, but it made me realize, that if you have at least one niche that care about, you need to be on it.

I also installed a vbulletin mod yesterday on a forum I run, that automatically tweets every new post. I was doing something manually anyway, so it is going to be a real time saver.

Of course you can do the same thing for blogs. You can also create Facebook fan page and import your blog’s feed to it. Hubpages also allows you to add RSS feeds to a related Hub.

I am not saying you should do everything automatically, but if you can use a combination of real and automated messages, it can be a real time saver. You should also link your twitter account to bit.ly, because I have heard a number of times now that Google is also doing something(?) with those links. Bit.ly also provides some nice reports, like how many times your links have been clicked on.

Google came under a lot of criticism with their new Buzz application, which is linked to your gmail account. If you use gmail and have a problem with it, turn it off and create a new gmail account, just for Buzz. Create a nice avatar and start connecting to people in your niche.

While I don’t think people should spend all of their time trying to promote their sites on social media as it has been proven time and again that generally the traffic doesn’t convert well, I don’t think it is something that internet marketers can completely ignore.

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.

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.

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

Details and download links can be found here.

When you have something as popular as Facebook, you really need to learn how you might be able to leverage its popularity. I have some ideas as to how I could promote an ebook I have written.

One thing I didn’t know about was Facebook pages. You can create a page for free to promote your business. Here is one I just started to promote my Beijing Olympic site.