Experimental Blogging

In addition to writing for eHow and Infobarrel, I have been toying with the idea of creating a few ‘true’ niche sites. What I mean by being a ‘true’ niche site is that they are sites that stand on their own merits. Each site will basically be its own campaign, having its own links, monetization strategy, email address, etc.

Since this is a process that has just begun, I have decided to outline my goals for June 2009:

• Complete 2 niche sites, which each site consisting of at least 5 articles of 350 - 500 words. Each site will target only 2 long-tail keywords
• Publish 1 article for each keyword on Ezinearticles.
• Create at least 30 backlinks to the home page and 10 links to each of the inner pages.
• Get ranked in the top 50 for each of my keywords.
• Earn $5 from each niche site created.

As you can see these goals should be attainable within the first month. My overall plan is to monetize each of these sites with either Adsense, Yahoo Ads, Clickbank products, Amazon products or a combination of all of these. The key will be to actually follow through on my plans. I tend to get distracted easily.

What about you? What are your goals for June?

I have always wanted to join Wealthy Affiliate. So many amazing marketers have recommended that I give it a try but the cost has always been a MAJOR problem. I hate spending money when I don’t know if it will be worth it or not.

Luckily, for the next few days, you can try it out for $1.

Yep. 100 pennies gives you access to a great teaching tool.

I figured what the heck. For $1, I will try most anything that will help me make money.

JOIN WEALTHY AFFILIATE FOR ONLY $1

While not a purely passive income streams, I must admit that I still love SwagBucks. Yeah, I know that they get paid every time I use their search bar instead of Google’s, but why shouldn’t I get something for my time.

I typically make about 20 searches everyday. In doing so, I usually win 4 to 5 swagbucks in any given day which I save up to get Amazon gift cards (they cost 45 swagbucks currently). Today I just cashed in enough for a $30 gift card. Since I would spend money on books anyways, I think of this as found money. Pretty cool, eh?

If you get a chance, check out SwagBucks. It is FREE, easy and involves NO additional effort on your part.

Yesterday, I joined Twitter. I am not sure why I waited so long, but it seemed one of those things that I would be terrible at. You know the kind I am talking about….ANYTHING to do with technology.

Surprisingly though, it was real easy to set up and get started. I started ‘following’ a few of my favorite bloggers and friends, such as Passive Family Income and Smart Passive Income. I also searched through a few of their friends and elected to follow those people that I have read and enjoyed during the past 3 months.

Since I like it when the tweets are posted immediately for me to read, I installed twhirl, which is really pretty cool. It is basically an instant messenger that I keep running in the background. I have no idea why I was so afraid to join.

You can follow my at http://twitter.com/_chasingthebull. I am not going to open a second account and have elected to use my CTB account as my twitter account.

Are you on Twitter? Have you found that it helps to increase your traffic at all?

It is no secret that I am pretty disappointed with the path my online earnings have taken. The fact that Today dot com decided to screw the people that made them successful is beyond my comprehension. While I am pretty disappointed with eHow lately, I still think that they are a viable place for writers to make money online.

As these two sites were two of the cornerstones to my freelance career, I have had to take a second look at what it will take to reach my goal of making $1,000 per month online.

In order to force myself to take action, I purchased One Week Marketing, from an amazing marketer. My first few campaigns are progressing nicely and I fully expect them to start making decent money relatively soon. If you want to learn a new technique for making extra money, give One Week Marketing a try.

As a way to diversify my freelance writing, I have decided to join InfoBarrel and start publishing a few things there. My first goal will be to get most of the content that I have on eHow over to InfoBarrel with new, and hopefully better, keywords. Once that is complete, whenever I write one article I will publish it on both sites. This should add only a few minutes to each article as the difficult part for me is the research.

Following Norm’s advice, I am going to use Xomba as a way to promote my articles and hopefully drive traffic to them. Promotion was one of my weaknesses but after reading One Week Marketing, I have finally figured out how to get my articles to rank well for the keyword I am after.

Hopefully by combining my article marketing experiment with eHow, InfoBarral and Xomba I will get my earnings back on track.

What are you doing to secure your online earnings?

So I have been using One Week Marketing for a few weeks now. The program has lived up to my expectations and shows some real potential. I have completed my first campaign and I am now seeing a decent amount of traffic each day from my creations. In fact, for one of my keywords, which has over 450,000 pages of competition on Google, I own number 7 - 9 on the first page. Pretty slick. Pretty slick indeed!

The main problem I have been hearing is that in this economy, $47 is a pretty steep price to pay for something you are never sure will work. Seriously, how many of us have been scammed in the past and downright refuse to spend another penny trying to make money online.

Today I ran across another viable alternative for you guys. Seven Day Profits is a product very similar to One Week Marketing. It teaches you the author’s method of making money in seven days. The thing I like best about it, it that most of the content is in video format, which means I can listen to it while I am working on something else. (NOTE: I have not purchased this product so I cannot vouch for its effectiveness - FYI).

Additionally, David is having a special sale in which you can save even more money. The trick is to visit

1. Seven Day Profits

2. Click on the Purple Elephant at the bottom of the sales page. This entitles you to buy the product at $17, instead of the normal $37.

Please note that this offer expires in a few days and will not be available. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I spent the first three months of my passive income career building up useful articles on highly ranked websites, such as eHow and Today dot com. Each month, my income has grown from these sites and I was truly getting excited about the revenue potential. Yesterday, I posted about the need to have your own website. Today, I wanted to expand on this idea with a few more thoughts.

eHow is in the process of removing hundreds, if not thousands, of articles from their system. It needed to be done since so many of the newer articles published are complete rubbish. I personally lost only four articles but to be honest with you, I cannot figure out what was wrong with them. Perhaps they were not “physically actionable“, whatever that means, but they were decent articles. I have read on the eHow forums of people losing 30, 40 even 50 articles with the push of a button.

Even worse is the fact that the urls for some deleted articles are now being redirected to eHow editors articles. That is just plain unethical in my books. Think about it! You work hard promoting an article, then eHow deletes you content, redirecting all of your traffic to their articles, making eHow money (not you). Very unethical indeed!

Today dot com is not going any better for me. I was one of the lucky people who was grandfathered in to the “old payment” system. I received $1 per post PLUS $2 per thousand page views. While my blog was relatively new, it was bringing in around 100 visitors a day and was generated about 7 comments for every 10 posts. This morning I received an email informing me that my payment plan was being altered, and from now on I would receive only $2 per thousand page views. That is not even worth my time. I do apologize to my faithful readers - all 10 of you but I will NEVER create another post for that site.

These two items only serves to reinforce the need for me to create my own business. Doing so would give me complete control over my content, complete freedom to publish anything I want and will allow me to be free from the unethical practices of some businesses.

What about you? Are you creating your own business are you helping someone else build theirs?

A Unique Revolutionary New Marketing Tracking System That Every Internet Marketer Needs

Until just recently, most of my passive income streams were located on sites that I do not own. These include such sites as eHow, Today, Blogger and Bukisa. While these are all pretty decent sites, I cannot help but get discouraged at some of the actions being taken by these sites’ owners.

eHow is going through a major clean-up (which is a good thing IMO). I have heard of many authors losing 10, 20 or even 30 articles with a push of a button. I sincerely hope that they had these articles backed up somewhere so that they can take them and publish them somewhere else, like Bukisa or Blogger. Unfortunately, many of these writers simply did not take the time necessary and must now start over from scratch.

Today dot com is not any better. When I joined, each author got paid $1 per post PLUS $2 per thousand page views. Recently they have altered their payment terms for new authors which almost makes it NOT worth the time. Luckily, I was grandfathered in, or else I would not write for them either.

As you know, I recently purchased One Week Marketing, and have begun to implement many of the strategies found within its pages. Of course, this technique involves using free sites, such as Squidoo,  to promote your affiliate products. I have completed one full campaign to date and have begun work on a second. I will let you know how it goes over the course of the next few weeks.

With all of the changes afoot, I have begun to fully comprehend the value of owning your own website. You are free to publish whatever you are comfortable with and no one can tell you what to promote. If you choose to simply republish articles from one of the many article directories, so be it. If you choose to use Yahoo Ads instead of Google; that’s your call as well.

The freedom to chose your own path is becoming more and more appealing as each day passes. I would hate to spend hundreds of hours writing, tweaking and publishing articles that can disappear in a matter of seconds.

What about you? Do you own your own blog or are you still playing by someone else’s rules?

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Ok. I am bit bored at work and some friends suggested this video. Pretty funny stuff. Check it out!

Once again, it is time to post my passive income results for the previous month - March 2009. Overall, it was another record month for Experimental Blogging. Like my friend over at Passive Family Income, I am not stressing out about our slumping economic environment. I am, however, looking for new, or better ways, to earn extra money each month.

During March, I purchased One Week Marketing, which focuses on building a Squidoo empire and learning to make money via free methods. As you know from reading this blog, free is good. We like free! Over the next few days, I will be putting together a few campaigns to test out this technique.

Passive Income Analysis
eHow: $79.48 - I had a 62% increase in earnings from eHow last month. I honestly did not add many articles in March. I guess a few of them have finally matured to the point where they are being found in the SERPs. I am going to re-focus this month and see what happens.

eBay: $41.09 - Again, not truly passive but I am included it here since it is online earnings.

Today: $16.19 - I still like writing for Today dot com. I got lucky and joined before they changed their payment structure. I only created 10 or 11 posts in March as I was just too busy to mess with it. Overall, I think I will keep this as a method to generate additional income.

Bukisa: $0.27 - I hate this site and will never add another article to it. In about 6 years, I may reach the payout threshold.

Yahoo: $1.99 - While this method of generating income is really poor, I will keep a few ads up (you never know).

Paid Posting: $24.25 - I like taking a couple of paid posts each month. I truly do not care about page rank and this is an easy way to make a few bucks.

Affiliate Sales: $95.01 - Yeah baby. Now this is what I am talking about. This represents a 166% increase over last month. Affiliate marketing may be the way to go. I am excited about what I can accomplish in April.

SwagBucks: $20.00 - Still my search engine of choice. I typically earn about $20 worth of swagbucks each month. I always cash them in for amazon gift certificates since I like to read so much.

Lending Club: $0.27 (accrued interest) - I received $50 for signing up from John’s affliate link. Unfortunately, it looks like his link did not work because he did not get his $25 bonus for me signing up. I wonder if I have to send in money of my own in order for him to get the bonus. If you know, let me know!

Squidoo: $0.08 - Whatever. I anticipate this amount to increase dramatically over the next few months as I start a few new One Week Marketing campaigns. Jennifer really knows her stuff and I learned a ton from buying this book. I highly recommend it!

Amazon: $18.57 - In March, I made a few more sales, mostly from eHow articles. I could get used to this!

Overall Earnings: $297.20 - Dang. I really wanted to bust the $300 mark. My goal for April is set at $360. This would represent a 20% increase from March and would put me back on pace to be earning $1000 a month by January 2010. This particular goal is extremely high as I just returned from a mission trip to Nicaragua. Being 5 days behind already encourages me to work a little harder this month. I have been slacking a bit over the past month or so.

What have you done today to help build you passive streams of income?