Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - Niche Site Duel #4

I haven’t really done a lot with my Diabetic shoes website that I started a month and a half ago as part of the Niche Site Duel (NSD) but as I mentioned in my last posts NSD posts, this site is supposed to be a relatively passive endeavor and it has performed quite well despite my fairly low level o work put into this site.

My last NSD post I said I would increase the content on the site and I have done a little of that - just a little. I now have a total of five long and helpful posts on the topic on the site as well as a number of extra framework pages like tag pages, post pages, and category pages. I know five isn’t all that much but as long as I slowly grow the content out I’ll be happy. They are all long posts so I've got that going for me.  I am after all mostly promoting the main page for now so in time the site will gain more authority.

Keeping in tune with my plan of only using unique content that is high quality in my backlinking plan, I first setup a ring of many making articles (my main backlinks) around the web on various rev sharing sites with each sending links back to my home page. I haven’t really haven’t done any article marketing directly but indirectly I have done some.

On Ezine articles I posted the following six articles which I have used to send backlinks to my main supporting articles - mostly revenue sharing sites. These Ezines rank well right off the bat and are very likely to be indexed on their own and the juice they pass on to my main supporting articles should ensure that they get indexed, stay indexed, draw organic traffic on their own, make money on their own while slowly building the authority of my main website. The Ezines I’ve posted so far are:

• Why Diabetic Shoes Are So Important
• Why Diabetic Socks Are So Important
• What Makes A Good Pair Of Diabetic Socks?
• Why Extra Wide Socks Are Great For Diabetic Feet
• What Are The Characteristics Of Diabetic Shoes?
• What Are The Characteristics Of Diabetic Socks?

Earnings So Far

Note that each is unique and each of these Ezines are useful but none are as comprehensive as the main backlinks they support. Because I wrote these six eZine articles my main backlinks on Snipsly, How To Live A Longer Life (my other blog), HubPages, InfoBarrel, Posturown, and Buzzle (non-rev sharing) have made a combined total of $9.69 with Adsense. This isn’t a lot but considering they are only five money making articles and are only about 4-6 weeks old a piece it’s not bad… especially considering their main purpose is to build up the authority of the main diabetic shoes website.

My main website - bestshoesofordiabetics.com, which only had three significant pages published on it until a week ago, and five significant posts as of today’s writing, has made $10.48 with Adsense since the site went live on November 4 and it has also started generating some affiliate sales through Amazon.

Amazon contextual links within the main page of the website have already generated 4 sales and netted me a total of $17.23 with Amazon. I have considered switching many of my Amazon links over to Endless.com affiliate links because of the higher commission percentage but for now will stick with Amazon because people are more familiar with buying through them. When my site is getting more traffic via search engines I will of course do some split testing to see if conversions from Endless are high enough to actually make more revenue on sales but for now my traffic is small so I won’t worry about it too much.

Down the road I will probably continue to diversify and decrease the Adsense presence on the site by switching over to a lead generation model or another more focused affiliate program. So far my Ad clicks are worth about $0.42 each on average which is not bad but one sale of a $200 diabetic shoe through an Endless affiliate link could net me $30 – that’s much more lucrative to me and the links are less intrusive to the reader of the site in my opinion.

Next Steps

Yesterday I posted my next major backlink giving me seven significant backlinks to this site. I posted a whopper of a good guest post which sends a backlink to my main blog on an established health blog using the PostRunner system (my review) available to members of The Keyword Academy (aff). You can see that article here.  It is titled: What Makes A Good Diabetic Shoe?

Instead of article marketing to directories this gives me an authority post on an established blog backlinking my main page. The pst just went live this morning and now represents my seventh major backlink to my site and my second major backlink that doesn’t make me money.

I will post an eighth backlink – another mega guest post on a similar blog tomorrow or on Friday – giving me a total of 8 major backlinks and then will throw a couple more Ezines at those two blog posts. The Ezines won’t go live for a week at least however with the holidays hitting us this weekend. -Merry Christmas Y’all-

Near Term Goals

My other goals for the next couple days are to create bookmarking backlinks to all of my main backlinks, all of my published Ezines, and all of my website pages from revenue sharing dofollow bookmarking backlinks sources. I will post bookmark backlinks to each article on InfoPirate and SheToldMe as these two sites are revenue sharing. Each bookmark will be unique content pointing to each page and each will be roughly 100 words a piece. InfoPirate especially has a knack for generating good revenue on your backlinks so I expect to see some decent results in the revenue department as I do this.

The earnings on the bookmarks are not the main goal for taking this step. The earnings are a nice bonus but generally the backlinks help everything to stay indexed and stay ranking well if not improve slightly. The backlink diversity is also good and a few high quality bookmarks can help out.

A 7-Week Summary

It’s been seven weeks since I joined this duel and although I have not devoted my life to this project I have still built a helpful website for diabetics looking for more information on how to care for their feet. For diabetics, proper foot care is very important and I believe my website adds a lot of value to the web and for the reader. I do plan on continuing to add content to the site and to edit and prune the posts I have already published to make them better. I will also continue to refine the monetization of the site but for not it’s already a steady earner.

It is encouraging to see earnings of his magnitude with my level of organic traffic (about 7 uniques a day) and it shows that with improved rankings this site could easily be an excellent stream of income for me down the line.

So far I’ve devoted a grand total 18 posts to this duel. This includes my 6 website posts, my 7 main backlinks, and my 6 Ezine articles. My website posts are all 1000-2000 words each and the main backlinks are all in the 800-1000 word count range. The Ezines are closer to 500 words a piece. This isn’t too much work and I would say it’s been worth it so far.

My diabetic shoes website has made me $27.71 and my supporting articles have made me $9.69. In total I purchased a domain for less than ten bucks loaded wordpress on it, installed a few plugins and wrote 18 articles and have earned a total of $37.40 in seven weeks. This is a success so far and I only expect improved results going forward.

For All Other Posts In This Niche Site Duel series:
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011


For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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InfoBarrel On Yahoo - News Release

Just a quick post for the night.  I've had a number of InfoBarrel related posts go live on this blog over the past few weeks and that hasn't really been my goal.  This isn't going to be an InfoBarrel only focused blog but right now it is currently the focus of my efforts.

I have been spending time on a number of different sites, adding monetization to sites I've been on for a while and experimenting with other sites but currently InfoBarrel has been my main focus so I thought it was particularly cool to see this news release published over on Yahoo regarding InfoBarrel's latest milestone.

Just a couple days ago IB had it's 50,000th post published and it is cracked through the Alexa 6,000 rank.  The site is growing and and this InfoBarrel article published on Yahoo is just a small demonstration of that growth.

Ryan the owner of InfoBarrel published this article and it highlights the perks of IB as well as the reasons why the site is such a great place to hang out and learn - the community.  It's what Phil said in his guest post a couple days ago.  Nowhere else is there a greater mix of people who are focused not only on themselves but also on the task of helping everyone else.

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Making More Money With InfoBarrel - Help Others And Help Yourself

The following is a brief guest-post from Philtrate over at InfoBarrel - like my previous guest-poster Phil is relatively new to InfoBarrel as he started writing there in June 2010.  He has been a prolific writer there at times and contributes a ton of material in their forums.  I'm happy to share with you his perspective on InfoBarrel at this stage in his time there.  You can also catch Phil over on his blog on SEO Article Writing.

I write a lot of articles for a website called InfoBarrel. I commend this site to you in the strongest possible terms. It has the best earnings proportion of any of article revenue share site I have come across.

I earn 90% of the ads on my 150 articles every month and it is easy for everyone to earn the same.

I have tried other platforms and they just seem unnecessarily complicated.

InfoBarrel gives me two contextual in-body links to whatever website I choose, including affiliate links. I get another two links in my signature file, and I can have an unlimited number of signature files, so effectively I have four links for every article I write.

When I started writing at Info Barrel in June I knew very little about writing articles. I joined the Info Barrel forum and I strongly suggest you do the same.

I introduced myself and read a lot, contributing where I did not feel too stupid.

In most forums the old hands deliberately make any newbies feel inferior. At Info Barrel every new forum user is welcomed.

There is a different philosophy at InfoBarrel than you will find at most article submission sites. The philosophy here is a cooperative one. Everyone wants to grow the website and to encourage good writers because they take the attitude that by helping others, they help Info Barrel grow, so in effect, they are helping themselves.

Help others and, incidentally, help yourself.

Compare that to the back-biting that you will find in every other article writing forum. New people sometimes ask “Why is everyone here so nice?”

The people who contribute in the forum are mostly top InfoBarrel writers. Maybe they are such prolific writers who earn a fair return for their articles, month after month, because of what they have learned in the forums.

These writers pass on every writing and promotional tip they know. Why do they do that? Help others and, incidentally, help yourself.

Nobody is ever above learning. New members are welcomed partly from self-interest, too. Every new person who posts in the forum has unique knowledge. We all benefit from that knowledge, so we all encourage new members to contribute and to share what they know.

Thanks to Phil for his InfoBarrel Review - If you haven't given the site a try I wholeheartedly recommend it.

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InfoBarrel Review – How Info Barrel Works And Why It’s Worth Your Time

InfoBarrel Review Summary

This is an InfoBarrel review based on a year of experimenting with the site. Info Barrel is a website that offers writers a few notable benefits. It allows you to:

• make money with advertising by publishing content on the site
• sell your products whether they are digital or physical by linking to your store
• build backlinks to your website, blog, or business service by allowing on content links
• build an online brand through your article submissions and user profile

If you want to try InfoBarrel you can get a free account by signing up here.

What Is Info Barrel - Full Review

Making Money On InfoBarrel
To be completely honest most people that are members of InfoBarrel use it for one of two reasons. They use it to make money directly or to make money indirectly by building backlinks to their money sites. Neither is a problem and neither is better than the other. The whole point of the site as they bill it is to help you make money; it’s up to you to do it however you want.

Most members, myself included, make money on the site a few different ways. The site shares its ad space on each article with every author. You setup an account with the major web advertising companies (Adsense, Chitika, and Amazon) and you provide your ad code to InfoBarrel and your ads will show most of the time on your articles and the webmasters ads will show a minority of the time.

Chitika is an advertising company that bases most of its ads on the search term used by the reader in finding your page. Most writers with a large library of content make a small percentage of their overall earnings with Chitika but it is consistent. InfoBarrel shares 75 percent of your Chitika ad impressions with its writers.  You can sign up for Chitika here.

Similarly Info Barrel shares 75 percent of Amazon ad impressions with its publishers however the Amazon advertising block is not used on any articles unless the publisher chooses to show it. This is a nice feature because it gives publishers control over how many advertising blocks on their material. This can be good for topics where advertising isn’t very efficient or for publishers who do not like as much advertising next to their work.  You can sign up for Amazon Associates here.

The meat and potatoes of earnings that writers for InfoBarrel make is from contextual advertisements served up by Google’s Adsense advertising network. Publishers who setup an Adsense account can include their ad code on their article from anywhere between 75 percent of the time up to 90 percent of the time. This is an industry leading ad share percentage and is one of the primary reasons why many publishers feel that writing for InfoBarrel is the best place for them. There are other websites like InfoBarrel that share ad space but none share ad space at such a high percentage as InfoBarrel.

Affiliate Sales With InfoBarrel
In addition to this type of contextual advertising revenue many members are also able to directly monetize their articles by including direct affiliate sales links to various digital and physical products sold around the web. Many affiliate marketers sell products through Amazon.com and others go through smaller affiliate programs which are abundant in the online world. InfoBarrel doesn’t really have a strict policy in regards to affiliate sales but they simply state that affiliate sales is ok so long as the publishers are not overly aggressive or deceptive in their publications.

Blog or Small Business Marketing With InfoBarrel

One of the underutilized features of InfoBarrel which many traditional businesses could significantly benefit from is the ability to market their own business by publishing topical articles on their field of business and then linking back to their main business website. For instance if you have a plumbing business in Seattle you could publish articles about plumbing related topics and include links back to your small business website.

Marketing And Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This benefits the small business owner in three ways. It is the start of an alternate stream of business related income; it slowly builds up referral traffic to the small business website from readers who read their articles and click through to the small business website; and it builds the authority of the small business website through targeted and contextual backlinks so that it is easier for people to find the website in the main search engine results pages. This can potentially give a small business greater visibility in their line of work in their local region.

As a plumber you may end up getting more clients and customers buy improving this aspect of your websites visibility in the search engines. InfoBarrel can be invaluable to traditional small businesses through this one feature and it is a significant benefit that cannot be understated.

The InfoBarrel Experience And User Community

What is InfoBarrel? How Can InfoBarrel be used to improve your life or the life of your business? Why is InfoBarrel worth your time? InfoBarrel provides a means for you to publish content and make money from that content, sell products through that content, and promote your small business through links from that content pointing to your business website, blog, or other online property.

Info Barrel is a free service and it has a thriving community of users who help each other improve the site and their performance using the site. It is user friendly and the ownership of the site seems genuinely interested in helping it’s users achieve financial stability and success. InfoBarrel can offer a lot for seasoned writers or for novice writers. Content publishing is not topically restricted (so long as you stay away from taboo subjects) and allows you to speak in whatever tone you like. There are publishing guidelines but they are not very restrictive and they are easy to follow.

If you are a seasoned content publisher or blogger you should give InfoBarrel a try and see if it fits into your plan and if you are new to content publication then you should give InfoBarrel a try and see if it can benefit you or your business because the chances are high that it can.

If you have any specific questions about InfoBarrel or this InfoBarrel Review make sure to drop them in the comments below. I’d be happy to answer them as best as I can.

I’ve been an active of InfoBarrel for since November 2009 and I can answer most questions… and if not I can point you to someone who can. Good luck.

If you'd like to give InfoBarrel a try then click here to start a free account.

InfoBarrel Vs. Similar Websites

Here is a chart which was made by a fellow InfoBarell member comparing  InfoBarrel to other similar publishing websites online.  If you like visuals this chart may help you see why InfoBarrel can be helpful.

If you'd like to give InfoBarrel a try then click here to start a free account.

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Earning a Few Dollars While Writing for Info Barrel

In past blog posts I've discussed my experiences on InfoBarrel - see My InfoBarrel Experiment and my InfoBarrel Review - and I have even been featured as an InfoBarrel Success Story - see Chezfat Featured on InfoBarrel Success Stories - as I have done quite well over there since the beginning of the summer.

As some of you may know I routinely publish my monthly earnings reports over on IB and they show that I am starting to make good money on that site... and that income is growing consistently month after month - but that is coming from a member who has been writing for InfoBarrel for more than a year now. I feel that it's important to tell the story of someone who is coming in fresh and that's why I invited Freedom to tell his story.

The following is a guest post by a fellow writer at InfoBarrel going by the name freedomw. He has only been writing at InfoBarrel for a couple months and is scrapping it out, learning as he goes, and earning a few dollars throughout the process. Here is his story. It is typical of many content writers in the very beginning - and it was what I experienced my first few months of writing as well.

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Hello Brian’s followers and casual visitors of this blog, my username on Info Barrel is freedomw. He invited me to write a post on his blog.

For the month of October 2010, I made a breakthrough by having 806 page impressions according to Google Adsense. That’s an average of 26 for each day in October.  It also showed that I received 12 clicks and earned $3.46. All the statistics are pertained to my articles on a unique and pleasant website, Info Barrel, which lets me write about almost anything I want. I could even write about products to sell at Amazon and Zazzle and place two links on each article with my referral codes on them.

For Chitika, I didn’t earn anything. It is sad that I didn’t receive any clicks while getting 1264 page impressions. It is actually really sad.  Furthermore, I was finally approved by the company on October 3.

By the way, how in the world did I get more page impressions on Chitika versus Google?

I still can’t believe that I was able to sell four products from Amazon.  They are inexpensive, and therefore I’m sure the buyers won’t return their items.  I made a total of $2.02 from having a 4% commission.  The purchased items are not the ones that I am promoting as an affiliate marketer.

As for some tips on how to make money selling products as an Amazon Associate, I gathered some information from a thread that the person with the pen name LilBlackDress started.

September 2010 was a horrible month for me compared to what other Info Barrel members made. I just had 502 page impressions (average of 16 each day in September) with only one click.

August 2010 was a very tranquil month for a lot of Info Barrel members.  I received only 274 page impressions.  One of the staff members said that the eighth month of the year is the slowest.  He got that information from marketing meetings that he attended; he said it on the forum for Info Barrel.

I wouldn’t be surprised if November turns out to be a bad month for me.  Last year, I heard people were not consuming right away because they were willing to wait for better deals to come along. I anticipate the same will happen this year because the American economy is just moving steadily.

Another good reason for me to see minimal amount of earnings in November is because I only have 80% Adsense share. I already have written five holiday articles.  I achieved less than twenty points for the monthly contest on October.  It’s a long story why I slacked off last month. This month I’m definitely aiming to get 90% of Adsense for December. I heard the retailers earn 25% of their sales occur during the busy shopping season. Thus, I plan to write another post sometime after December.

I definitely hope you will leave a comment about this blog post. Better yet, sign up to write about non-fictional subject matters that you want to share with others. Maybe you just want to express yourself by writing, and you don’t care how many people read them.

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Thanks Freedom for sharing your story. And a little lesson for anyone that may not get it. In this article Freedom linked to his own profile page on IB in this article, which will help his authority on that page rise. That will in turn give more indexing power and search engine authority to every article he ever writes and publishes on InfoBarrel because each article he writes is linked to from his profile. Building authority to your profile pages helps in the long run and it's something I wish I would have done more of from the very beginning. Good luck to you Freedom, let us know when you start feeling like bragging about your progress.

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Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site

I love projects like this – I love tracking them and sizing them up to see what kind of result I can attain based on inputs I can control. In this case I joined the Niche Site Duel nearly two weeks ago – about 13 days to be exact and I posted my first epic post on my new diabetic shoes website. If you missed my first post on the topic you can check it out here: Shoes For Diabetics - Niche Site Duel and my follow up post: Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results In 4 Days.

In my original post I discussed the topic I chose and I introduced the reasoning behind it. I also spelled out the fact that I purposefully didn’t do any significant keyword research on it – I did do some but only a very small amount. I mainly wanted to choose a topic that was really easy to rank and really easy to monetize and a topic that had tons of long tails and keyword variations. I felt the keywords “best shoes for diabetics” would be very easy to rank and I was right.

After just one week into this challenge my site has been sitting in the number one spot for my main keyword and as I expected I was getting some traffic to it from that term but hardly any. What I still like about it however is that there are so many variations of the root keyword: “diabetic shoes” that slowly picking off more and more long-tails should be quite easy. Also I noted that long-tails tend to convert much better than short keywords so having a topic that has tons on long-tail variants is very appealing.

How Much Money Have I Made

I didn’t even monetize my site until about 8 days ago and in those 8 days I’ve already made $1.48 in Adsense income on the site and gotten some click throughs to Amazon and Endless.com through some affiliate links I added about a week ago.  However, I haven’t made any money via the affiliate sales channel yet.

I also noted that my main link building strategy would be to slowly build authority links back to the main page of the site. Starting with revenue sharing web 2.0 properties I planned on building links back to make money in the short term while my links slowly got picked up and indexed.

As a result of this plan I have long and helpful posts on InfoBarrel (aff), HubPages (aff), and Snipsly (for the links to these articles see my last post NSD2) all pointing back to my main site... and since these original backlinks were published I’ve already made $1.10 on the IB post, $0.40 on the Snipsly post, and $0.31 on the HubPage post. When all is added together in the past 13 days since I started this project I’ve made $3.39. Not bad but there’s definitely room for improvement.

Update On My Backlinking

So to update you all on my backlinking plan I’ll first say that I did nothing at all from about Wednesday last week until Monday night this week due to a previously planned Vegas vacation so I haven’t really added much lately however I did make some progress aside from improving the visual appeal of the site.

I backlinked my main supporting links (IB, Hub, Snip) with two links each from three eZine articles. Last week before I took off for vacation I published three articles on eZine each sending out two links giving me 2 meaty backlinks for each web 2.0 site. This has helped dramatically in getting these three articles and baclinks indexed and it helps increase their authority thereby pushing a lot of that authority over to my main niche site.

I also submitted a Buzzle article, which has yet to go live (which just went live late in the evening 11/17), which also will send a good backlink to my main niche site. You can see it here: What To Look For In Good Diabetic Shoes. Similarly I published an article on Posturown.com titled: Extra Wide Diabetic Slippers for Men and Women, which is also backlinking my main site. Lastly I published a great article on diabetic walking shoes on my main health and longevity site which sends a link back to my main niche site. You can read that post here: Diabetic Walking Shoes Can Help You Live Longer With Diabetes.

In case you are missing what I’m doing, I’m also backlinking each of my main supporting articles with backlinks from this blog in addition to the eZines. Instead of linking from this blog straight to the main site I’m linking to each supporting article instead. Increasing the authority of the backlinks they are sending off.

Also note that each of the six sites that are linking directly to my main diabetic shoes site are all authority sites and they are all dofollow contextual links in posts.  I am building the authority of the articles themselves by backlinking them. Simply put, dofollow backlinks from authority pages residing on authority sites are much better backlinks than a bunch of low quality nofollow backlinks from low quality pages on low quality sites.

Once my Buzzle and Posturown articles go live I will have six major supporting backlinks and I will write three more eZine articles to backlink my longevity blog post, my Posturown post, and my Buzzle post as I want each of these to be powerful pages supporting the main site.

Additionally I will run each of my supporting pages and all six eZines through IMAutomator for just a little juice… although I don’t expect this to help much it is insanely easy to do and takes hardly any additional time to setup.

Thoughts And Notes

It’s hard to believe that only 4-6 significant backlinks has done so well so far for this project but that is the case that I’ve seen so far. My main keyword is in 1st position, and my second keyword “shoes for diabetics" just hit page 1 today. It is currently sitting in position 4 already and in the last day my search traffic to the site just doubled on a bunch of new long-tail traffic. Traffic on a daily basis is still small but it is growing and is now roughly in the 10 visitors a day range. Again, I think this is fabulous for a site that’s 13 days old with only 4 backlinks and 2 more pending publication.

As I said I need to get my supporting articles (#4-6) backlinked twice each from eZine and then all six supporting articles backlinked once or twice from other sources and then I’ll start working one building another 3 main supporting article backlinks… and for that I’m slowly going to start moving my efforts away from Web2.0 and major article directories and over to guest posts on authority blogs.

For that part of the process I’ll be using PostRunner, a service reserved for members of the Keyword Academy (aff), which is designed to bring blog owners together with bloggers and content writers who want to publish guest posts. This is where things will start getting interesting. If you haven’t hard about PostRunner or the Keyword Academy then head over to my post explaining the process of getting backlinks by guest posting with PostRunner.

My Next Goals

My next goals are simple. I have already attained a #1 ranking for my main keyword now I have to get #1 for my secondary keyword: “shoes for diabetics” followed by “best diabetic shoes” “good diabetic shoes” and all the variations of “diabetic shoes for ____” fill in the blank. The amount of long tails are quite high and grabbing one after another will incrementally be very lucrative as each step will bring tons more LTs than I can even think of.

Of course rankings will come with more backlinks but also with more content and along those lines I plan to add at least a couple more posts to the main site in the next week or so. As I’ve previously stated I plan on working the main page more than anything else at least in the beginning but the interior pages are important too.

I’ve used another service provided to members of The Keyword Academy called Niche Refinery which is designed to help you ferret out the easiest and most lucrative keywords in a niche. It’s an amazingly powerful tool and takes very little of your time.

I scraped about 550 keywords from Adwords Keyword tool in a CSV file (took about 5 min), uploaded it to Niche Refinery and set it to process the keywords. I could do this myself over the course of a few hours to a few days but letting the program do it for me allows me to drink beer and watch TV instead (or do my day job) while the keywords are sorted and analyzed for me by the computer. Nothinig beats this program in my opinion.

I will add a selection of the best keywords of the 550 to the niche site later this week as new articles. Eventually they will draw traffic on their own but for now this is just to add more pages to the site for the search engines to index.

But first things first - tonight I will have to see if I can pump out 3 more eZines and then in the next few days I’ll see about getting them published. Good luck to you all and please do leave your thoughts in the comments below.

For All Other Posts In This Niche Site Duel series:
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011



See here for the Niche Site Duel Hub and all the participants in this challenge. Make sure to click through and visit their sites as there is a lot to be learned from everyone!

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NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results In 4 Days

A few days ago I published my introduction to the Niche Site Duel which was originally started by Pat and Tyrone. See the footer of this article for the hub of all niche site duel participants.

In my intro post I discussed how my main keyword is a low traffic low competition keyword and that it should be a springboard to a better keyword if I play my cards right and work hard enough and long enough at it. The main keyword I’m targeting is 4 words long and it has low competition on page one of Google but it also doesn’t really have a lot of searchers for it according to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool. Additionally the tool also shows that the CPC for the keyword isn’t all that high although it is around $2 which isn’t that bad.

What I’m going to be relying on to make money on this niche site at first is the long tails. When I get to number one for my main keyword that will be nice but the long tails are generally where the money is at when it comes to having a better CTR and better conversion rates.

To get all the long tails I can I decided to write one insanely long post which was just shy of 3,000 words. In this one article I have pretty much covered everything relating to my keyword and have included as many variations and synonyms to my keyword as possible. This should help a lot in bringing long-tail keywords out of the wood-works once this article gets ranking.

Initially I plan on getting this new site to rank by throwing some backlinks at it but unlike some others my plan is to build backlinks to this article slowly and only from higher quality sites and sources. I will not be using automatic mass article creation software but instead will do everything manually. It is my opinion (I’m still to new at this game to be positive) that higher quality links from more relevant sources are the best way to rank a website and get it performing well. This is not to say that other techniques don’t work but for now these are my values.

How I Plan On Getting My First Search Traffic

I’m after search traffic first and foremost. This is where the money is so I don’t care about social traffic. The only thing I will do is post articles online looking for high quality and relevant dofollow backlinks. To start off I have written a second fairly long post on the site on “The Best Socks for Diabetics” and used it to link to the main blog front page. Each article has its own category and each has approximately 6 tags. And every page links back to the main page.

This is a standard site structure but remember that the more pages on your site you have linking back to the home page the better the home page will perform. Internal linking is very important. Because it is important I will continue adding posts to this site just for the internal links even though initially I won’t be trying to rank the interior post pages.

3 Pillar Backlinks From Revenue Sharing Sites – Getting The Money Flowing

My first course of action after initially building this site is to get a few high quality backlinks to it from relevant pages. To do this I wrote a long and helpful post in InfoBarrel titled “The Best Shoes For Diabetics” which links out to the website once in the last paragraph of the article. I did the same thing over on HubPages with my article titled “The Best Cheap Diabetic Shoes For Men” and over on Snipsly with my article titled: “The Best Socks For Diabetics”.

The point here is that these are web 2.0 properties which have the potential of making some money right away which will help compensate me for my time while I wait for the new website to start ranking well. Each site makes money via Adsense and HubPages and InfoBarrel can make money for me via Amazon. In fact my IB article has already made me $0.49 already making this project already generating cash flow.

Internal Links To My Main Supporting Articles

Currently I have three good articles backlinking my new website and now I want to make sure these three articles are authority pages so I’m going to backlink them to make sure they are indexed and well crawled by the Google bots. For my IB article I went back to four previously published articles on diabetes and shoes topics which I wrote a long time ago and added internal links to the IB article. In another couple days I will do that again with four more articles and then again a few days later. Eventually I’d like to have a good 15 or so internal links to this IB article pushing good authority to this page. I will do the same for articles on Snipsly and on HubPages however this won’t be as effective for me over on those sites because I don’t have as much content published to pull internal links from.

Article Marketing & Social Bookmarking To Main Supporting Sites

After focusing on internal linking on my main supporting sites I want to continue building the authority of these three main supporting backlinks to my main site by doing a little article marketing on them. I will use a couple dofollow directories which I know are high quality. Ezine is one and it’s one everyone has heard about and the other is Posturown.com which is a quasi-revenue sharing site/group blog / article directory which I know from personal experience does really well at getting indexed and passing good juice onto pages it links out to. I have yet to take this step but that’s what the rest of the day and tomorrow is all about.

Once I get some good links to my IB article I will do the same for the HubPage article and for the Snipsly article. The goal is to get all three ranked decently and with minimal page rank so that I can be sure they are sending good authority on to my main site.

In addition to this plan I will be taking the easy way when it comes to social bookmarking (which I feel has limited value even when you take your time and bookmark manually) and will be relying on IMAutomator, a free automatic web-based social bookmarking program to send bookmarks to my main site page, my three supporting backlinks over on IB, HP, and Snipsly, and most importantly to my arsenal of article marketing articles which are used to build the page rank of the main supporting backlinks.

IMAutomator does the bookmarking in a drip system so that I don’t flood the sites with links all at once and should help out at least a little – in my opinion this may not be necessary but doing it automatically takes little to none of my time so I’ll give it a whirl.

The Marketing Plan For This Week

This week I plan on adding a page or two more of long and detailed content to the main site but mostly it will be devoted to building the authority of my three main supporting pages on IB, HP, and Snipsly. I believe that by next Sunday I should have made at least a few more dollars on this project just on those three sites… I haven’t even added monetization to the main niche site yet so that may come by next week as well.

Right now I’m planning on mixing Adsense and Amazon as my main ways to monetize the site but eventually I want to explore some more obscure affiliate programs with medical shoes and diabetic supply companies. I haven’t explored this route yet but plan to in the future when things are starting to hum along.

Results After 4 Days – Looks Like Diabetic Shoes Can Make Money After All

As of now my niche site has been live for about 3 ½ days – I have ten results indexed for the website – I’ve made $0.49 from this project via Adsense on InfoBarrel. Ohh yeah, and my main keyword is already showing up on page one of Google in the #7 spot. Crazy!

I need to get Analytics installed on the site right away so that I can start understanding how to better market the site when I get to full blown article marketing. :)

Good luck to you all!

For All Other Posts In This Niche Site Duel series:
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011

See here for the Niche Site Duel Hub and all the participants in this challenge. Make sure to click through and visit their sites as there is a lot to be learned from everyone!

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Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game

As many people have been enthralled by Pat and Tyrone’s niche site duel over the last couple months I too have been a bit interested. For years many marketers discuss setting up niche sites but don’t actually show them off. Pat and Tyrone, and many others have started a duel for what appears to be nothing to actually show their site that they are working on and document their march to the top of the search engines.

I have been tempted to join in on the action for a while now but I have been busy increasing my income over on my longevity blog and over on InfoBarrel as of late (see my recent success interview on the InfoBarrel Blog) and I didn’t really want to drop those areas of my attention however I decided that I might as well jump in now otherwise I would end up letting let the ship sail by.

Today I got the bug and opted to jump into the niche site duel along with everyone else and see what I could accomplish. The rules are simple – you can do anything you want you just can’t pay for a PPC campaign. I also have noted that no one is linking out to their niche site from their main blogs so I suppose I won’t do that either… though I may be tempted to in the near future. I’ll see what others think about this practice.

Anyway, for this duel I’m going to be jumping into a niche that I haven’t really spent a lot of time in. Over on my longevity blog I have had a good amount of posts on insulin and diabetes but not really on physical care revolving around the subject so this niche will be a bit of a detour for me.

Unlike the way to typically do keyword research I went with “my gut” on this one and didn’t even research the keyword beyond taking a look at Adwords KWT to see if it has some traffic and then analyzing the top ten in Google to see their relative strength. Normally I do more in depth research but I just feel this is going to work out well.

Many others in this challenge go for strict rules regarding the strength of the top ten – many consult paid tools or methodologies such as comparing the keyword in quotes to the amount of results; I don’t do this. I like to look at the results on the first page and find the ranking pages that have my keyword in the title, URL, and the description and then look at the PR of those pages.

In this case my main keyword is only present in two of the top ten’s title, description, and URL. My niche site will of course have the keyword in all three places so these are my relative competition. Next I look to see what their page rank is and what they basic backlink profile looks like.

Using the FireFox plugin “SEO 4 Firefox “ I can see that the two pages I am concerned with are in position 9 and 10, they are PR 0 and PR N/A. The article in the #9 spot is on Livestrong’s website and has no external backlinks per Yahoo Site Explorer and the #10 spot is from Mademan and was published only two weeks ago and also has no external backlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer. This leads me to believe that I can get to the bottom of page one of Google with almost no effort. The top spot will be a little tougher but won’t be too bad.

Regarding my keyword – I chose an easy keyword with low traffic potential but I intend on eventually making a run at the higher potential related keywords when I am close to the top for my main keyword. My main keyword is four words long and my eventual target is two words long. I will be initially shooting for “best shoes for diabetics” and eventually shooting for “diabetic shoes”.

Unlike some others in this challenge I will not be making a big site. I am really targeting everything I can on one page. This is different by far from my main health and longevity blog. Eventually I will add other pages to the site for internal links but mainly I’m just looking to monetize the main page and the main page only. And as this is my goal I ended up deciding to make the main page wildly long. It is roughly 3000 words and should be capable of ranking for just about everything in the niche with enough backlinks.

I made the entire site and published my 3000 word beast all this evening in the span of about 3 hours. I will of course go back to my theme and improve it and improve the site framework in the future. I will also do significant tweaking to my main 3000 word post but overall this is my first draft and it is published. I want to build traffic up before I make the site look good anyway.

The goal here is to get one page with tons of good and helpful content on it ranking for everything. That way I only have one page to market and blogroll link exchanges will be more beneficial to my individual page since they all point to the main page. I also made the front page as insanely helpful as I could… I do intend on going back and editing more to add more helpful content for a reader but I think 3000 words is pretty good for now.

In a future article here on ResInc I will go into more detail on how I plan on marketing my niche site. I look forward to getting this project rolling because I could use the extra money – I just found out my wife is having a baby! I’ve got responsibilities now! I’m also 2-months behind in starting this duel so I’ve got some catching up to do. Good luck to everyone else out there!

For All Other Posts In This Niche Site Duel series:
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011

For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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Chezfat Featured On InfoBarrel Success Stories

I know many of my readers know that I’ve migrated to InfoBarrel and have been using this site significantly over the past few months as my primary site of choice for making money online. Well, during the month of October I did a lot of tweaking to my Longevity blog and increased my revenue there. I also started building more content on HubPages with the intent of monetizing the site but also (more importantly) as a way of sending some quality backlinks to my InfoBarrel articles. BTW - you may want to read this on how I get many of my guest posting backlinks.

I also have started making some money on a number of other sites online – both owned by me and modeled in the revenue share context. And lastly, I was asked by Ryan McKinsey of InfoBarrel to be featured as a success story on their official blog. You can see here for the Chezfat Success Story blog post for the full interview - you can even see my pic. :)

After I made this push to improve my InfoBarrel Income, as you can see in my InfoBarrel Review post a few months ago here on this site and then posting all my InfoBarrel Earnings on the site for all to follow along with, I started to become quite active on he IB forums. I have been trying my best to learn from others while helping as many people as a I can. I have to say it has been a joy to get to know so many good people in this environment and my financial successes have been nice too.

So for anyone out there following along on my residual income journey I’ll let you in on a little something. I made $10 on InfoBarrel in June and increased that to $337 in October. In four months of work I built a $337 a month passive income stream which should continue no into the foreseeable future. If you haven’t yet given InfoBarrel a try, let me invite you to join InfoBarrel today and give it a shot. Just make sure to say hi and I’ll do my best to help you out as you go.

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Revisiting Xomba Bookmarks And Making Money With Xomba

It’s been a while since I posted about my Xomba Experiment – many month in fact. Not more than a few days ago I received a comment on my post Residual Income With Xomba in which Rob Lee (a Xomba user) asked if I had any kind of update on my time with Xomba. I thought about it for a brief spell and then realized that I hadn’t really analyzed my Xomba Income for a long while other than to look briefly at the over all income derived from Xomba on a monthly basis. I haven’t been posting there much more than every once in a while so it hasn’t been on my mind.

Anyway, looking at my Xomba Earnings now that I’ve been officially on the site for the better part of a year and the bulk of my Bookmarks were published in February and March I figured it’s high time to devote at least a small post to Xomba once again.

In my last post on Xomba I noted that Xomba Bookmarks didn’t seem to stay ranked well after a few weeks of publication however they seemed to convert pretty good while they were ranked. I can say that this is generally true still with the exception of a few things I’ve learned over the past 8 months or so. The bookmarks do rank well even long after publication but only for long tail traffic… and considering how a 50-75 word bookmark doesn’t have enough words to develop many long tails they don’t really tend to get many hits outside of the main long tail you are targeting.

In my major foray into Xomba I focused on good keywords but not long-tail keywords. Because of this only some of my Xomba Bookmarks have done well over time. For a long time I’ve emphasized the importance of building backlinks. In the past I recommended using InfoBarrel for backlinks and then I started using Xomba for backlinks. Now I am focused on making sites like InfoBarrel my main moneymakers – see my InfoBarrel Earnings over on IB for more on this.

Now that IB is a min money site for me I have turned to guest posting for backlinks as these are better long term backlinks than bookmark links from Xomba… at least in terms of building dofollow backlinks and increasing my search authority. I get my guest posting links through a program called PostRunner which is a tool offered (along with others) for member of The Keyword Academy – I currently recommend joining this program wholeheartedly – it’s only $1 for your first month and $33 per month after that. I will be paying my membership dues for as long as this program is available so please at least check it out.

So all that’s to say I believe now that Xomba Bookmarks would rank well if they were targeting long-tail keywords rather than normal keywords. I also believe they would rank well for normal keywords if backlinks are built to them but due to their brevity I don’t see them as being the best way to spend one’s time; especially if you have to backlink them to rank for better keywords.

There are some obvious exceptions however. Long-tail keywords tend to convert better than short keywords meaning your CTR should be higher on a site like this and I think this is the case with my Bookmarks. Also, Xomba bookmarks are morel likely to drive traffic to your money articles elsewhere because people will click through if they don’t click your ads. Looking at my stats I get a lot of referral traffic from Xomba considering the amount of total traffic I get to my Xomba articles. This referral traffic can then be converted into revenue on your main article on another domain such as your own site, blog, or InfoBarrel article.

So anyway – having gotten past my long preamble I’ll eave you with some tats and let you make up your own mind what to do with them. I know that I may incorporate Xomba back into my regular use but only for specific situations in the future. I may share those situations in a future post but for now I just want to provide my stats.

I have a little less than 350 Xomba Bookmarks and most of them are about 6-8 months old with little or no backlinks pointing at them. My most visited Bookmark is my Bookmark Leading Causes of Death In America which backlinks my article on my main blog titled The Leading Causes Of Death In America. This article gets PSA ads so I took the Adsense of the page on my blog. The Xomba Bookmark also gets PSA ads so it too makes no money despite the high traffic. This one article is cause for my low CTR on the site because it gets well over half of my entire traffic every month. Other than the referral traffic it send to my blog it is a relative waste of traffic.

My entire Earnings on Xomba over the course of my time there is $69.87. Half of my views have come from one article which (by the way is a very long tail search query – 6 words long – which is why it ranks so well. This means that $69.87 was generated by my remaining bookmarks and without telling you my ad impressions or CTR let me say that the other articles get a very good eCPM – good enough to rival all my other sites and content places. This is because I don’t get any short-tail traffic – it’s all long tail which notoriously converts well.

Next the alternative income which Xomba is responsible for is somewhat significant. I’ve received a little less than $4 in Adsense revenue on InfoBarrel and my Longevity blog combined from people clicking through Xomba to my linked page. This is not much but ads to my overall Xomba related revenue by about 5.7 percent.

Xomba In Summary

In first fist big push to monetize Xomba and see if it was worth it I found mixed results because I feel I was using it incorrectly. If I were to do it again from the start I’m sure I could make that same $70 in only a few months or less with probably far fewer Bookmarks. If I were to focus on this I would use very long tail keywords which should rank well and convert high… I would also be very strategic in what articles my Xomba Bookmarks would point to as this would help in building the alternative referral income which would be significant in increasing my over all total.

Would I backlink my Xomba Bookmarks? Maybe – and if I did I would use PostRunner by The Keyword Academy to do so as this is the best system out there to make building backlinks to your articles. Let me know what your thoughts are down below and I’d love to hear if you’ve had successes on Xomba – Maybe you can inspire me to use the site more often. :)

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Friends And Feedage – Making More Money On InfoBarrel

I wanted to publish a short article today which is more about giving back to others than about anything else. I do have one piece of advice however which I will give out right away so if you aren’t the social type then you don’t have to read all the way to the end.

It’s my opinion that you can easily make good money online by simply staying anonymous and never meeting another person online at all. It’s not really as fun and it’s quite solitary but it is possible. When you make friends online and you each support each other with encouragement then that helps; when you support each other with contextual anchored backlinks then that helps even more but even without these things you can still succeed… especially when you are writing about non-social niches. When you are writing about topics that do not really spawn friendships and partnerships. Replacement toilet seat hinges may be one such niche that just doesn’t get you any friends.

Too succeed in writing online for residual income your have to do what you can to help yourself out and one easy way to do this is with a site call Feedage. Feedage is basically a site where you can create a profile and then submit your RSS feed to your profile and it will create a page that will list the summary of each article on that feed for the most recent 30 articles. Each summery includes an anchored link pointing to the original article and every link is dofollow. You can see what this looks like by checking out my IB Feedage page displaying my InfoBarrel article feed. A few other examples are the feed from a few friends of mine on InfoBarrel Travis, Zach, Phil, and Eileen.

This page really looks like a no frills page; something that is not worth setting up but in actuality it can help you dramatically in your efforts on sites like InfoBarrel. My one tip for this blog post is this. If you write for InfoBarrel and you want to make more money then set up an account at Feedage and submit your IB article feed to it. Your article feed is found right on your InfoBarrel profile page. Once you set this up you will suddenly have a page which automatically links to each new article you publish helping it to get indexed quicker and build authority in the eyes of the search engines just a little faster. Then if you can build authority to your Feedage page it will help even more. To do this all you have to do is send some backlinks at your Feedage page… or have a friend do it for you.

Friends after all do help things along quite nicely. Luckily it’s easy to find good friends over on InfoBarrel (just check out the forums) so if you haven’t joined yet and started making money over there I recommend you join InfoBarrel today. If you are unsure how much you can make then let me guide you to my InfoBarrel Earnings… hopefully that will inspire you to start building your article library today.

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Beat Procrastination: Accomplish Your Freelance Writing Goals

This is a guest post by Christina Crowe, author of the blog Cash Campfire | Earn Online Income.

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Do you wake up every morning and struggle to make your way to the keyboard? Are you always putting your writing tasks aside for later, only to not get to them? Maybe you have a clear set of freelance writing goals outlined, but they never seem to get accomplished. Maybe you don’t have a set of goals and just write blindly day after day, not knowing what you’ll get done by the end of the day.

Motivation to make money can come at odd hours, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Dedication is a necessity in any freelance writing career. Writing requires determination, so what do you do if you don’t have any? Is your writing career destined to fail? Do you give up hope? Leave your work to rot and dry out in the sun? Or do you keep going, dreading each time you have to press down another computer key?

Well, you don’t have to dread. You can acquire that same spark of excitement that first made you take on freelance writing. All it takes is a few tugs and pulls in the right direction. Can you taste it? Good. Soon you’ll find that spark within reach.

Discover When You’re Most Productive

Everyone has a certain time of the day when they’re able to get more work done and accomplish more freelance writing goals. My time is when I feel most energized - in the morning. Your time might be late at night or in the evening. Whatever the case, find out when you’re most productive and try to get the most work done during your productive hours.

How do you discover when you’re most productive? Experiment. Figure it out through trial and error. Do you get more distracted at night? Write in the morning. Are you usually too tired at night but too groggy in the morning to work? Write in the evening. Only you can determine when your productivity is at its peak.

Often times, the time when you’re most productive depends on what’s happening around you. Do your children come home from school at 3pm? Work before 3pm. Is the whole house constantly in motion throughout the day? Work when everyone goes to sleep or quiets down. Once you find out when your productivity hours are, you can develop a routine.

Decide What You Want

Determining what you want and which tasks are more important can be tricky. Many times, freelance writers go through their everyday life doing unimportant tasks because they can’t define what they want. Then, when they discover that the tasks they’ve spent all of their time doing don’t really contribute to the overall outcome of the article (what is earned), they get discouraged and motivation drops.

To avoid a loss of motivation, decide what you really want and what the end result will be if you acquire what you want. Make a list of goals that you want to achieve throughout this week. Expand the list until you hit 20 or more items. Then, make a table and divide it up into sections: Most Important, Neutral Ground and Least Important. Distribute the items in your list of goals according to how important they are to you or the overall outcome. Every day, focus on the most important tasks first. When you start a task, try to stay focused. Don’t stop until the task is completed. At the end of every week, make a new list of goals that you want to accomplish throughout the following week. Repeat the process.

Set Up a Freelance Writing Schedule

Plan out your day by deciding which hours you want to work and which hours you want to designate for breaks. You’ve already determined what time you’re most productive, so a good tactic would be to work during those hours, with breaks in between, and leave the rest of the day to do as you wish. You can also make a mental note to take a short break after you write a specific number of articles. When determining how many breaks you want to have and when, decide how long you want your breaks to be. A good length is generally 15 to 30 minutes.

Don’t forget to leave time for meals and chores. Make sure all scheduled events (work, breaks, meals and chores) are proportionate to one another, so that you don’t have too much of one thing and too little of something else. For example, don’t set a lot of time to write and then little time to rest. If you go this route, you’ll burn out faster and not get any writing done at all. Keep your time balanced.

Get Inspired

Motivation is the key to success as a freelance writer. If you’re not motivated, it will be more difficult to write and you’re more likely to procrastinate. Get inspired by keeping track of what other freelance writers have done to become successful, calculating how much money you might earn if you do get that article written and talking to other freelance writers in your industry.

A recommended tactic that has helped me is to invest in various books on writing web content. Every so often, read a chapter of the book and you’ll notice an increase in how often you write. An alternative to books is inspirational blogs on writing. If you write more about certain topics, try reading blogs devoted to that topic.

For more inspiration ideas, read my article Finding Motivation: How to Adapt a Routine.

Break Up Article Tasks

Is an article difficult to write? Break it up! Instead of diving right into an article, plan it out. Think carefully about what title and subheadings you want to use for your article. Then, when you’re writing the content, the article will be a lot easier to work with because you’ll only have to worry about the introduction and what to write under each subheading.

Track Your Progress

Did you meet a milestone? Write it down! Better yet, make a graph. For example: If you want to make, say, $500 in one month from a specific residual income stream, create a horizontal bar and make a number line on the bottom ($50, $100, $150 … $400, $450, $500) that you’ll use to track your progress. You can view an example of this on my article Finding Motivation: How to Adapt a Routine. Each time you hit a $50 mark, fill up the bar to that point. When you make it to $1,000, reward yourself! I’ll talk about this later on.

To help track your progress, determine how much money you make (on average) per article per month. To do this, divide the total number of articles you’ve already written for a particular content website by the amount of money you’ve made last month. The resulting number will show you how much money you generally make per article. Calculate how many more articles you would have to write in order to meet your income goal. While you write, keep this number in mind and use this number as a basis to determine how many more articles you need to write for the current month.

Reward Yourself

When you accomplish a goal, don’t just forget about your accomplishment and keep on writing. Reward yourself! Go out to eat. Buy yourself a large screen TV. Take a day off. Play in the mud. Anything! Just make sure you acknowledge that accomplishment and reward yourself with something special. Don’t go over-the-top with the reward, but don’t congratulate yourself with something meager either. The reward has to be worth the effort you put into achieving it. It has to be great enough to get you excited, but low enough so that you don’t go altogether broke.

Tight on money? Heck, you don’t even have to use your money! As a reward, spend time with friends, play catch with your son or curl up on the couch and watch a movie with your husband.

If you want to go all-out, give yourself extravagant yearly rewards instead of rewarding yourself monthly. If you want to go this route, I suggest taking two sheets of paper and dividing each sheet up into 6 sections. Each section represents a month (number the months if you prefer). At the end of each month, list your goals for the upcoming month in the designated section. If you achieve all the goals in any given month, place a sticker on the top right hand corner (yes, you can re-live kindergarten again!). At the end of the year, if over 85% of the year has stickers, celebrate by traveling somewhere special, buying yourself that high-tech laptop you’ve always wanted (something I would do), going to an amusement park or whatever your heart desires. However, it’s imperative that you don’t calculate how many months 85% of the year is UNTIL the end of the year. If you do the math before then, that number will be in the back of your mind every time you write and you might intentionally not achieve a goal because that month may not “count” towards the reward.

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Baby Girl Clothes Case Study – One Month Review

In my last post I previewed my new baby girl clothes case study as it related to my InfoBarrel Experiment challenge. My challenge was to start treating InfoBarrel like a place where you can make substantial money rather than just a place to generate backlinks. Over the past couple months I have experienced quite an increase in revenue from InfoBarrel and recommend this site to anyone looking to build residual income. You can join InfoBarrel here if you have yet to do so (aff).

To quickly summarize I decided to publicly start posting on this topic and show just how I take a keyword and turn it into a marketing campaign and build it into a substantial cash flow in a relatively short amount of time on the heels of significant leg work.

Baby Girl Clothes - Articles Published

I have posted in the last month 5 money making articles on the topic over on InfoBarrel, 1 money making article on the topic on HubPages, and one money making article on the topic at Snipsly for a total of 7 money articles. The Snipsly article and HubPage articles are two of four “main” supporting articles to my ultimate goal 1000+ word IB article: Baby Girl Clothes and each backlink the main IB article with a relevant anchored dofollow backlink.

My main Baby Girl Clothes article on IB has the main long tail keywords which I’m targeting “cute baby girl clothes”, “trendy baby girl clothes”, and “unique baby girl clothes”. My Hub targets “newborn baby girl clothes” and my Snipsly targets “designer baby girl clothes”.

My four other IB articles which support the main IB article target related keywords all with small but significant money making potential: “cheap unisex baby clothes”, “baby onesies for girls”, “unique baby clothes for girls”, and “funny baby clothes for boys”.

In addition to my Hub and Snipsly articles I have two more “main” supporting articles. I posted a baby girl clothes article on ArticleBlast and a Baby Girl Clothes article on a relevant clothing & fashion blog. Each of my four main supporting articles have between 7-15 backlinks a piece and my four IB supporting articles each have between 3-7 backlinks a piece and my main IB article has a whopping 41 backlinks pointing at it – each from a different location and over half coming from guest posting.

For those that missed how I guest post so easily, check out my previous post on Guest Posting with PostRunner.

First Month Earnings

So that’s a lot of writing and to be honest I haven’t done much to this project in the last 10 days or so – I’m mostly letting everything stew to see how the SERPs react and one month in I can say I’ve already made approximately $7.22 from my seven money making articles combined and that’s with not even adding my Adsense code to Snipsly before a few days ago. It will be fun to see how September earnings for these seven articles fare.

First Month Rankings

My HubPage article is sitting in the #1 spot for its main keyword and in #9 for “cheap baby girl clothes”, Snipsly is sitting in #12 for its keyword. My four supporting IB articles are ranking #13, #10, #100+, and #9 for their keywords. My main IB article’s long-tail keywords are ranking #13, #12, and #28 and my main keyword “baby girl clothes” on IB is ranking #80. This rank has been VERY inconsistent over the course of this first month as it has fluctuated almost daily quite significantly. It has been as high as the teens and as low as the upper 100s… it will be interesting to see this article start seeing consistent rankings week after week.

Potential Residual Income

As I identified on the IB forums I feel this main IB article alone could potentially bring in many hundreds of dollars… possibly as much as $500 a month on its own if it’s in the number one spot. The others could add up to another one or two hundred combined on a monthly basis as well.  Obviously I have a ways to go but this is progress and my earnings are already happening and they will only grow bigger in the coming months.

Going Forward - The Loose Plan

In September I plan on beefing up my supporting IB articles and identifying a fifth & sixth major supporting article on another clothing blog to help improve the rank of my baby girl clothes article. I will also continue to increase the backlink profile of the main IB article and by the end of September I’m sure I’ll see good improvement.

Again – if you haven’t joined Infobarrel make sure you do because the site can offer you a lot of benefit if you put in the work. Make sure to index your IB article feed too – it helps, and never discount the value of proper keyword research and anchored dofollow backlinks. Good luck to you all in your projects and feel free to leave you comments below.

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Guest Post With PostRunner At The Keyword Academy

As I promised over on the IB Community forums earlier today I said I would write up a bit of info regarding PostRunner a blog guest posting service made available to members of The Keyword Academy (aff).

I am a member at The Keyword Academy and have been so since March and love it. As I've told others the membership is worth it for the PostRunenr service alone in my opinion however the membership also offers plenty of additional perks especially for the people who are new to internet marketing and content/blog creation.

What Is PostRunner?

PostRunner is a guestposting service that is one of many benefits of being a member of The Keyword Academy. There are a number of benefits like coaching for beginners, and niche selection/keyword tools, videos on how to setup a moneymaking blog/content site, tracking tools to keep organized with your backlinking, and plenty of very experienced members who make a lot of money running blogs and content sites that can answer your questions. These are not the same people you'll find in A-list blogging membership sites; these are mareters rather than bloggers for the most part.

Each of these benefits are amazing on their own right but the bread and butter of The Keyword Academy membership in my opinion is the PostRunner service.

PostRunner is about 1000+ different wordpress blogs owned and maintained by the members of the Keyword Academy - as far as I can tell there are a few thousand Keyword Academy members and rouhgly 1000 blogs hooked into the PostRunner system. I personally have one blog in the system and am contemplating adding a second, other members have none in the system, and other members have multiples. Each blog is owned by the members (like me) and each blog is hosted on seperate hosting accounts - some are monetized and others are not (mine is not monetized).

What Are The PostRunner Rules?

The rule for members is that anyone can post a guest post to any blog in the system and the site owner has the discretion of approving or declining the submission based on the quality of the post and their own persoanl discretion. There are post quality requirements on the system level to guest post as well as post length requirements and maximum link requirements.

The system rules require 100 percent unique content of high quality. No spun or auto-generated content is allowed nor are blog owners allowed to change the link text or add nofollow attributes to the links that guest posters include in their submissions. The guest posting system is designed to be as usefull to the blog owners as it is for the guest bloggers. And because the owners of these blogs use the system for their guest blogging all the sites are high quality and cared for and quality on all posts is generally high.

Most guestposts get accepted on the first attempt. I've posted more than 300 guest posts through the system and I've never had a guest post denied by a blog owner more than once. Keep the quality up and everybody wins. Post Runner really top notch and it makes creating backlink diversity a breeze.

The Keyword Academy (aff) is as white hat as one could possibly be - if anyone is suspected of breaking the rules with their posts or with their blogs they are cut off from the system and since each site is essentially owned and maintained by a different owner on a different hosting plan this doesn't get into trouble as a big blog network in the eyes of the Search Engines. Following Google's rules is critical and the system values these rules more than anything with their passion for quality sites and quality content.

Right now you can only use PostRunner if you are a member of TKA and it is a recurring monthly fee of $33. It is well worth it in my book. First month membership fee is $1 and you can cancel at any time. You can even use postrunner in your first month to try it out and see if it is valuable for you.

If you want to give it a shot I'd love to hear your opinion of the program - My referal link is on my blog in the upper right hand corner of each page or you can click the links to The Keyword Academy in this post.

Currently I use PostRunner to send backlinks to my moneymaking articles over on IB and it's making a hige difference. I've been enjoying my time at IB and am pleased to help out fellow InfoBarrel members.

Also of Note
Many of the people that use Postrunner (outside of the newbies) are big time moneymakers online - many of them are making many thousands of dollars a month posting keyword focused articles to blogs and sites like HubPages and InfoBarrel using the sites on Postrunner to build backlinks and authority to their personal blogs and content articles. This method works and is the reason why so many big time money-makers are mebers. Many are making 2000-5000 a month and PostRunenr is amjor part of their process.

If you want to give PostRunenr a try I'd love to refer you in. Remember the first month is $1 and every month after that is $33 payable by PayPal subscription.

You can check it out for yourself here and please let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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RSS Feed Indexing – Does It Help?

A while ago when I discussed the idea of making sure that your article directory posts get indexed I said that getting your profile pages indexed from these sites would help. After all if your profile page is indexed and crawled by G often enough the links to all the individual articles will be followed as well.

At the time I also mentioned MyBlogLog as a potentially great way to make sure all your blog posts get indexed. I haven’t set up an account for this blog but I have for my main longevity blog. In any event MyBlogLog will take the feed and show the most recent five posts on your profile page linking to each post and giving an excerpt of the posts. This should help in initial indexing however only the first five posts are displayed. Once it drops off the page however you lose the link so that got me think – what other ways were there to do similar things with the feed except maybe I could display more than five posts.

Enter Feedage.com

I setup an account here just today and entered my author RSS feeds for my main article marketing accounts and presto, I now have a page over on Feedage that displays my feed of last posts for that site. Each post is truncated and links directly back to the source. Now whenever I post something It will be in the author profile which hopefully should be indexed as well as my Feedage page, which also should be indexed and followed, and if I ever get around to setting up my feeds on MyBlogLog they too will be indexed and followed.

That should be pretty good for getting new posts indexed, especially those pesky article directory posts which I need to be indexed for the backlinks. What do you think of this, huh? Think it could work for you?

Here you can see my creation for my main IB, Hub, GA, EZ accounts with a few more to follow. Ad hopefully this will help with my new Infobarrel Experiment as well as getting me ranking better for baby clothes as I discussed in my last post.

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Another Project - Cute Baby Girl Clothes

In my last post titled InfoBarrel Experiment, I discussed how I was transitioning from using InfoBarrel from a backlink generator to a money maker. A timely even on the forums pointed out an article on clothing that happens to be doing really well and a few people noticed how many inlinks the page had listed on Yahoos Site Explorer. I noted that it’s not that difficult to get a ton or inlinks if your really want to and the benefits of getting tons of them can be quite fruitful as I estimated the keyword of the page in question was probably earning somewhere around $450 per month.

Baby Girl Clothes

Of course because the page was on [blank] clothing I figured I’d hunt down a good clothing related keyword to try my hand at. I will continue working on my car insurance keywords over there but will be also working on this one article on Cute Baby Girl Clothes trying to get it to rank first on page one of G and then as high on the page as I can get. I also want to show how quickly a lot of quality backlinks can be generated with a little work rather than through shady means.

The entire article basically discussed the many different types of baby girl clothes including newborn baby clothes, infant clothes, toddler clothing for girls, and trendy, designer baby girls clothing. The article was very informative listing many boutique clothiers for little girls and babies and should it ever make it high in the SERPs it should be a valuable resource to many shoppers for cute baby girl clothes.

Anyway, this quick post on Cute Baby Girl clothes should start me off with one quality link and now I’m on to getting a whole bunch more. Good luck to all of you guys doing the same thing. And as always, I will eventually be getting a good deal of my links through guest blogging which is organized by The Keyword Academy. It’s the easiest and most efficient way to guest post period. Check it out. First month is only one buck.

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My InfoBarrel Experiment – 8 Month Review

You can see my updated InfoBarrel Review here.

My InfoBarrel Experiment

I first wrote about writing for InfoBarrel roughly eight months ago. At that time I wasn’t really planning on doing much with the site outside of the realm of sending dofollow backlinks to my blog and other online revenue sharing articles however I’ve found in eight months that this little InfoBarrel Experiment of mine is starting to change a bit.

For years many people have been building niche sites based on keywords. You see them in pretty much any websearch you do. If you think of a category of products roughly three words long and search for it chances are there will be an domain in the top of the search results which is the same exactly as your keyword search.

I started thinking about going down this road but I have opted to build blogs based on themes which cover many different related topics. Individual pages will be keyword based but the site will be big with a cohesive theme. Google seems to be favoring this more and more and I expect that sites like InfoBarrel will continue to thrive based on this trend.

There are of course many different revenue sharing websites, InfoBarrel is not the only one. I’ve written for eHow in the past as well as Xomba and HubPages but these sites have been around for a while and have lots of domain level competition already. InfoBarrel has less published content meaning there is more of a ground floor feel to the site. I’ve never had an article title rejected as being a duplicate title whereas on the other sites I find this happens quite frequently.

Furthermore my 8 month InfoBarrel experiment has showed me that the site is capable of generating income for its users. Sure it’s good for sending backlinks but I’m starting the use the site more as a revenue generator for me more frequently than ever.  It even give you a minimum of 75 percent revenue which is easily higher that similar sites like HubPages or Xomba.

Of all the places I write I actually earn more money per 1000 page views on InfoBarrel than anywhere else… which leads me to believe that investing my time there is a worthwhile endeavor. Generating 100 search visitors to InfoBarrel has become the most lucrative 1000 visitors I can get am I’m starting to see this significantly in my earnings.

I haven’t written about my residual income earnings in about three months and will have to do that once again sometime soon however this new era of my online residual income journey is going to be more focused on InfoBarrel. I will continue to backlink my blog with IB but will write on different topics on IB looking for revenue as a new focus. Essentially my new InfoBarrel Experiment will be to make significant money on InfoBarrel… possibly more than anywhere else.

InfoBarrel Earnings

Currently for every 1000 search visitors I get to my InfoBarrel articles I make $23.11. That equates to roughly $700 per month for getting 1000 search visitors every day. It may take some time to get 1000 visitors a day but not that long if you are dedicated to the task.

Just pick good keywords, The Keyword Academy can help with that ($33/month) and market them properly with dofollow backlinks, again, the Keyword Academy can help with that too. Repeat the process a bunch of times. Write hundreds of articles and you can have a significant residual income stream.

My personal InfoBarrel Experiment up until this point has revolved around using the site for backlinks but in the future this site should become my bread and butter. Earnings here should surpass all of my other sites combined… at least that’s the goal.

Of course staying diverse is very important. I will continue building my thematic keyword-centric blogs both self-hosted and freely hosted blogs like Blogger. These will obviously also continue to grow in revenue and be significant money makers but they also will help with branding and direct sales whenever I decide to start developing those channels of income. In the mean time, if you haven’t given InfoBarrel a try I suggest you do while the site is still young.

You can sign up and start your own Info Barrel experiment for yourself, just make sure to friend me and keep us all up to date on your progress, questions, and victories.  Sign up here and keep in touch.  I'll definitely chronicle my progress in this new endeavor in the near future and discuss exactly how I make the most money on the site as possible.

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