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. :)
Read More
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. :)
