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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Filed under: Article Writing • Passive Income