My Xomba (Boomarks) Xomblurb Experiment

What Is Xomba?

Xomba is a website that’s been around for a while that is basically an Adsense sharing content website much like InfoBarrel. The difference is that Xomba doesn’t let you send dofollow links around the web, only nofollow links. Not only that but the Adsense ad share program is only 50/50 compared to a base rate of 75/25 at InfoBarrel. Of course I naturally thought yeah right; why would I do that?

Well it turns out there are some reasons which are good. For one, this site lets you write very short articles. Articles are called Xombytes and are at minimum 150 words. That’s all you have to write. And if that isn’t short enough for you, you can write Xomblurbs which are at minimum 50 words long.

Xomba Is Worthwhile – I Think

At first I thought to myself that Xomba wasn’t worth it because of the nofollow links and the low Adsense share split. But recently I’m second guessing myself. You see as I’ve been balancing my time reading and learning about how to work better and make more money online I’m also trying to experiment a ton and see what works.

I previously mentioned (in my last post on GeoTargeting San Diego) that I was experimenting based on the teaching of Vic from Blogger Unleashed on the GeoTargeting topic. Well as it turns out I’m actually working my way through all of his archives and thought I’d give another idea of his a try. For a while Vic was highly promoting a free service that was basically a social bookmarking service that was designed more for SEO purposes rather than its social features. As far as I know the service he was plugging doesn’t exist anymore but it was nofollow at it’s core.

The point was that you would use the leverage of the bookmarking site to funnel search engine traffic to your article on your blog. In many social bookmarking circles the first paragraph of the linked article populates as the “blurb” or "description" for the bookmark, and the title of the linked article auto-populates as well. This is how many people social bookmark. The thing is though that all of that bookmarked material that auto-populates is duplicate content and only one version of it will show up in the SERPs.

He tought however that if you changed the title to be a related keyword and rewrote the "description" or “blurb” to be keyword rich that you could rank well in the SERPs for your bookmark too. Then at the end of the bookmark you present a “call to action” persuading someone to click through to the linked article on your blog. By doing this you could funnel traffic to your blog that you wouldn’t otherwise get without a lot of keyword authority.

For instance if your blog is about “Residual Income Ideas” like this blog is but you wanted to write an article about “masking tape”, because I don’t have keyword authority for masking tape, I could write the post here and then a separate keyword focused “blurb” that links to this post. The bookmarking site has some authority for just about everything thus it will rank in the SERPs well for "masking tape" and visitors to the blurb will click through to my post. Indirectly my post gets search traffic even though it doesn’t rank for the keyword on it’s own.

My Xomba Experiment

Xomba is not the site mentioned by Vic a couple years back but it’s basically the same if you write Xomblurbs. You can write a 50 word description of the article you’re linking to; subtly suggest the reader click through to your post, and tag the article with up to five keywords. I try to use all five.

In my Xomba experiment I’m going to “bookmark” with Xomba every single one of my posts from my Longevity Tips blog with an SEOed “bookmark”. Most of my traffic to that site comes through search engines to roughly 20-30 posts and I’ve got over 300 total so I’ve got a lot of pages not getting any search engine traffic. If Xomba can funnel some of that traffic to those posts then my targeted page views will go up dramatically.

Even better is the fact that I can theoretically make money on Adsense clicks from Xomba at the same time so if the search traffic doesn’t click through to my site then they might make me some good residual income from Xomba by clicking through to the ads.

The Big Question About Xomba

You might be wondering the big question that I was by now. Will Xomblurbs rank well in the search engines? Will they rank better than my site? Well, I wrote a Xomblurb using the exact same keyword as a recent InfoBarrel article that I had posted a couple weeks back which already has about five backlinks pointing at it and within one day and no backlinks the Xomba Xomblurb was already outranking my IB article in the SERPs for that keyword. My InfoBarrel article currently sits in 20th spot while my Xomblurb using the same keyword exactly sits in the number 12 spot. That alone makes me think there is potential.

The other question: Is it worth my time? Let’s put it this way, if I see results it will be worth my time but is it better than just doing what I’m already doing, obtaining dofollow backlinks? Well, for me obtaining dofollow backlinks takes a lot of work. Every article I write takes about 20-40 minutes and I usualy only get about 3-5 articles up a day. With Xomblurbs however, I’ve posted 32 Xomblurbs in less than three days so far. I plan on getting as close to 200 as I can by the end of February. I know that sounds crazy but they’re that easy to write. I probably won’t get to 200 but I’m going to do as many as I can. If I can do 32 this fast then I should be at 100 or so by Friday at least.

As for my goals with this challenge: I have surfed around looking for Xomba success stories and I don’t see as many as I do for other sites but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places. Maybe a commenter can point us to some success stories or tell one of their own.  I have seen a few people with thousands of Xomblurbs reporting earnings for them in the range of $1 per month for every 5-10 blurbs on average. For now until I try it myself.  I’ll stick with that rule of thumb but honestly I want to see if I can simply funnel this search traffic that I'm not getting back to my blog. That’s my goal. As of this writing I have zero referral traffic from my Xomba to my blog; at then end of March I look forward to seeing if that number goes into the hundreds or even… heaven forbid, the thousands.

BTW: Xomba has a referral program... I cannot vouch for the site yet as a money maker or targeted traffic generator but if you want to give it a try then feel free to sign up under my referral link.  It's also located in the left sidebar at the top as a nice friendly reminder for you readers at all times. :)

And hey... why not send me an anchored backlink to this article or my main index page to say thanks. :)

Update 3/23/2010: I just posted an update on this Xomba Bookmarks Experiment. It is a one month review; check it out for more info.