Residual Income Online With Xomba Bookmarks

My One Month Review Of Xomba Bookmarks (Formerly Known As Xomblurbs)

Last month I highlighted my upcoming Xomba Bookmarks Experiment in which I intended on testing out Xomba as both a form of residual income and as a means to funnel traffic from Xomba to my other web properties which currently don’t get much traffic.

As I started the experiment I actually decided not to pick and choose which article I would Bookmark with Xomba and decided to send bookmarks back to every single one of my blog posts at How To Live A Longer Life and to every single one of my articles on eHow. Originally, I intended to send Xomba Bookmarks back to every one of my InfoBarrel articles as well but having bookmarked over 250 articles in the last month I’m starting to question if this is worth it or not.

Funny that I should say this too as only a couple weeks ago on my wrap up of the eHow earnings algorithm analysis for Home And Garden articles I was raving about Xomba and how they surprised the heck out of me with their earnings potential; well now I’m starting to second guess my enthusiasm for the residual income potential for these bookmarks. Mind you I am not writing them off - I’m just curbing my enthusiasm.

To Summarize The Xomba Experiment

In 31 days posting to Xomba I’ve bookmarked roughly 260 articles of which I’ve bookmarked every one of my published eHow articles and the majority of my blog articles which have commercial value. That was a fair amount of work though to be fair I did most of this bookmarking in the first half of the month. The last two weeks I’ve been out on vacation a bit and been working on personal projects for both work and fun. Needless to say I’ve been busy with things other than earning residual income online. The funny thing is March is shaping up to be the best month for residual income that I’ve ever had… by a long shot.

Anyway, back on subject, a couple weeks back I was only 14 days into this experiment and I had 165 Xomba Bookmarks published and at the time my earnings there were doing much better than I expected. To be frank, I didn’t expect these things to rank well in the SERPs because they were so short even though I am SEOing them as best I can. In fact most of my 50 word blurbs were closer to 80-100 words because it just seemed like 50 was too short. Anyway, what I’m finding here after 31 days is that these Xomblurbs or Xomba Bookmarks don’t seem to have staying power in the SERPs as they all get a decent burst of ranking right off the bat but seem to lose it fast.

Looking at my stats I see that most bookmarks get their traffic within a week or so of publication and then they drop off the map. Now Google does work like this normally; they give a fresh content bonus and then later recalibrate rankings. During the recalibration phase articles will seemingly disappear from search totally before reappearing in a more long term SERP ranking area. It will be interesting to see if this seems to be happening as the weeks march forward and turn into months. For now however; I’m only getting traffic on the Xomba Bookmarks that are less than a couple weeks old.

Now, I started this experiment as a means not to generate residual income but as a way to funnel traffic through the Bookmark link to my articles on my blog primarily and looking at my Analytics I see that over the past month Xomba has indeed become the number one referrer of traffic to my main blog but it hasn’t really translated into income; I’m not sure why exactly but so far that is the case. I’m even getting a good ad click rate from my traffic that has come from Xomba Bookmarks, the problem is that the ad clicks I’m getting are low value. I wonder if it’s just happenstance; only time will tell. I’ll have to track this month after month and see if the trend improves.

For now I’ll leave you with this; in the last 31 days I’ve had 4,419 unique visits to my main blog; of those 77 came from Xomba Bookmarks. This is up from zero in months past. Of those 77 visitors I’ve had a handful of ad clicks on my main blog totaling $0.86. That is hardly anything and this is the main reason I started this Xomba Bookmarks experiment. Maybe this will get higher in the future and maybe this has to do with my old blog posts that don’t get much traffic not being optimized for Adsense, which is a real possibility, but I was really looking for more from this end of the experiment.

As for direct monetization of the blurbs; in 31 days I have yet to crack $8.00, though I am close. Two weeks ago I would have said I expected to hit $15 in the first month but things have slowed considerably for two reasons. The Bookmarks don’t seem to have staying power in the SERPs and I have only posted lightly there for the last 10 days or so. Looking at others results I figured having 1000 Xomba Bookmarks would be worth around $50-$150 per month, but so far I’m looking at an estimate of $25-$50 per month for 1000 Xomba Bookmarks. Again, only time will tell what actually happens.

The strange thing is that I really like Xomba after having spent so much time there this month. I’ve spent so much time there that I’ve hardly done anything else. I’ve completely neglected making many blog posts or doing any article marketing but due to the pleasure of good timing work from January and February is really making a difference in my overall residual income in March and my income is up a ton. I’ll post on this in more detail in early April but I find the irony of timing to be a joy sometimes.

In the future I expect to continue using Xomba Bookmarks but I do not intend on pumping out 250-300 per month; I just don’t see the benefit in committing so thoroughly at least until my Bookmarks age a bit and I see otherwise. As April rolls around the bend I will plan on slowing adding Bookmarks to my InfoBarrel articles from Xomba. I’ve got about 125 of them; I’m pretty sure I can get through all of them by the end of April without feeling like I’m devoting all of my time to Xomba. Of course I will once again give an update on the progress at the end of month two or so.

Before I go let me add a gratuitous plug for a couple of my more recent eHow articles.  These have nothing to do with this post but I want the links.  If you are interested in seeing how I write and SEO an eHow article you can look at my most recent posts on ceiling fan blades (link removed) and on perennial garden design (link removed). Enjoy. :)  As an added aside I'm paying it forward here with a link to an eHow backlinking idea:  you can read all about it here at free backlinks to your eHow articles posted by Tammy.

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One last caveat; I don’t want to make Xomba sound like a waste of time. Most of the Bookmarks I’ve put up are going to articles which may not have the best earning potential. I didn’t follow the 80/20 rule, had I done so I may be looking at much better results. As a rule of thumb spending your time working on the 20 percent of your work that shows promise is a better use of time; maybe I just taught myself a lesson; follow the 80/20 rule and don’t work on backlinking duds. Good luck to you all in your online residual income pursuits.