InfoBarrel for residual income update:

Pennies are still trickling in for me on InfoBarrel and I have opted to put up a little more content than I had originally intended to, just in case this site does go big, as I suspect it may. I still believe the potential is there. This way I do not miss out on a good source of residual income.

I have had blogs for years loaded up with Google Adsense, in hopes of even making a little bit of residual income, and in that course of time have only earned a few pennies here and there. In comparing these meager earnings with the little I have now accrued at InfoBarrel I have already tripled my Adsense revenue in this short time on InfoBarrel.

Update and Tip to maximize your potential residual income on IB:

I just recently (today) learned that this site does not utilize “no follow” tags. This means that when a Google bot crawls the site it reads the entire page not just your articles. So, if you do sign up (which I encourage you to do – if you sign up under my link I will subscribe to your feed, so I can read your articles) make sure to make your keyword density a little higher than you would have it if you were simply writing articles on a site that only displayed your content on the page and no other information.

I like to keep my regular content between 3 and 4% but on this particular residual income site I like to bump up my keyword density to around 5 or 6%. I am still playing around with it to find out what works best but the good part about that is, that you are free to edit your articles after submission.

This will give you the opportunity to go in after a few weeks or even a few months if you should choose to and re-optimize your articles, switch up your keyword density or even completely change the keywords, if your articles are not bringing in any traffic or if you are only seeing meager earnings.
Should you choose to sign up and have any tips or tricks to share or would just like to share your experience I would love to hear about it. In the mean time, if I stumble across a technique or any method in particular that seems to be beneficial in this trek to bring in some residual income, I will be back to share it.

Earning Residual Income with InfoBarrel

So, I mentioned last time that I started up with a new site that I am hoping is a good addition to my other sources of residual income. InfoBarrel is the new site (new to me at least) that I believe has some potential. This site offers very detailed guidelines and your first 10 written articles are double checked by editors before publishing, just to verify that you are submitting quality content. Their pay is 75% of your earned ad revenue and anyone you sign up you can receive an additional 2% of their ad revenue (out of IB’s cut not your sign ups). You use your own Google Adsense account and can track your views and clicks via Google Channels through your account.

The site right now does not rank so well, so any article you submit you will want to promote via the regular promotional methods you use on any article site you write for, especially if you earn a residual income off of those articles – Digg, StumbleUpon, YahooBuzz etc.

Another couple of neat things about this site, aside from the residual income, are: the contests that they hold, which gives you the opportunity to earn a higher percent of your ad revenue for a month; the open writing formats that include the following templates – Blank-Review-How To and video; and also the fact that your views are updated instantly.

I have only been with InfoBarrel for a short while (under 4 weeks) I’ve earned maybe $1.00 but considering that these are based on views and ads on articles that are under 2 weeks old and featured on a lower ranking site – it’s actually not so bad. It gives me hope that with some time it could prove to be a prosperous source of residual income.

I don’t have enough information to show that it will be an amazing residual income source, so I have opted to only throw up a dozen or so articles just to see how things progress. I will definitely be updating just to let everyone know how it goes, in the meantime though if you are interested it sure can’t hurt to throw on a few articles so check them out, sign up and start writing!

Writing for eHow – The frustrations

It has been an extremely frustrating few weeks for writers on eHow. My writing has taken a nose dive because of the many glitches, delays and not to mention their new site “clean-up.” The original draw eHow had on me was that they offered a chance for everyone to write and their guidelines seemed lax, not to the point of allowing crap but to the point where one expected that there was a lot of flexibility for subject and writing levels. The second draw was earning residual income. Lately, earning residual income has come to be the only draw eHow has on most writers. It is sad because I could honestly say last month I LOVED eHow and all that it was about, even how it functioned. Now, I like eHow, I like earning my residual income but I have days where it is hard to want to even visit the site.

This site cleanup has consisted of eHow going in and deleting anywhere from 1 to hundreds of articles listed in writers accounts. These deletions are said to be a part of cleaning up their site. That is all fine except that we had no warning, were not told which articles were deleted, nor were we told why they were deleted. Some writers even had their entire accounts closed and lost everything: articles and earnings.

Some writer’s did receive a very generic deletion email that notified them that so many articles had already been removed from their pages, though they were not considerate enough to take the time to include which ones or why. They were thorough enough to say that no article that was deleted could be re-written. Their logic behind that was if the writer could not do it right the first time they probably couldn’t do it right this time. Now, I don’t know about you but if that does not put you off writing on eHow I don’t know what would.

I still stand by the fact that eHow is a great resource for writers wanting to earn a residual income through their articles, because it is. I personally lost 20 articles, some deserved deletion as there were a lot of missed errors but the reason for some that were taken was baffling and still has me and many other writers confused.

During this clean up process though it came to our attention that articles that were deleted that had decent traffic or were earning articles, though the articles were removed, the built up and promoted URL’s were not. These decent performing URLs were now being directed to editor articles (which eHow receives 100% of the earnings for) that were, way to often, shoddier than the article that was deleted. – This was a slap in the face to some writers and the forums lit up like a wildfire.

As a writer you expect a certain level of clarity on what is expected and unfortunately eHow is lacking in that department. Writers have fired back after this clean up and have demanded clear guidelines and actual examples of what eHow standards are for the writers.

Ehow has vowed to work on this issue and many of us have faith that they will follow through, though the timeliness of this fix is what we don’t have faith in. In the last few weeks, us writers have experienced site crashes, viruses when accessing the site, spur of the moment article deletions, days with no view or earning updates, some issues receive little to no communication (at least not usually timely communication), issues leaving comments, problems publishing, issues editing, we’ve lost our drafts and the list goes on. They have fixed some of these issues that have plagued their online writers but I fear the wave of frustration has just begun.

I have no intention of leaving eHow, though I find my frustrations with them lately to be high I do know that they have the potential to be one of the best sites online for a writer interested in earning residual income. They don’t cheat you like the sites that pay you based on page views – I say cheat because I have many times earned over 6 dollars on an article with less than 600 views and many sites that pay for page views offer you $1.50 for 1000 page views. I imagine you can see how that doesn’t pay off for the writer.

I still say if you are interested in earning a residual income online with your articles and writing then eHow is the place for you. Just sit tight and pray with me that they get their issues fixed soon and are soon back on the path where their writers are happy and the residual income far out-weighs the issues!

This Friday – I will be posting about a new site that I am writing on that looks like it may have some great potential. It isn’t where eHow is yet, pay is different, but with time and more content….you just never know. So, check back and find out what changes eHow has made and what this new site is all about!