I have been pretty busy this week writing articles, mostly for Infobarrel. I am up to a total of 27 articles, which I think is a pretty good effort since one day I didn’t feel so well and I had some trouble with the internet here on one day.
Hubpages is going slower. I don’t know why, but I like Infobarrel more in some ways. One advantage I think you have with Infobarrel is that it isn’t so saturated with keywords like Hubpages. Google typically only returns one result for a URL for a keyword search. Since Infobarrel doesn’t have as many articles, you are going to have more chance at getting more competitive keywords to rank with Infobarrel than Hubpages. I haven’t done a lot of testing, but this theory seems to make sense to me.
Also, the fact that Infobarrel manually approves the first 10 articles, it is bound to stop people who can’t write so well and people who only want to promote their websites like Hubpages. Infobarrel also encourages people to write longer articles. If your article is longer than 450 words, it appears on the list of recently created articles. I am sure that if you write an interesting headline, it encourages people to click through to your article. Of course you really want your traffic to come from Google, but I had at least one article “tweeted” from a member at Infobarrel, which was nice to see.
Sometimes the more time I spend writing and researching an article, the less views it gets. If I am on a roll, I can write 450 words in 10-15 minutes. If I am struggling what to write, I can spend a whole morning on something. I have quite a few unfinished articles which need more work. I think it is better to stop working on something if it is taking too long and come back to it later.
I am changing my tack a little on finding topics to write about. I suppose I can’t help but judge the success of an article based on the number of views it has. I know I am also doing this to get links to my sites, but I think it is human nature to want to see lots of views and some feedback in the comments.
Anything to do with making money online, home based business and internet marketing seems to do well. Travel type articles don’t seem worth the time unless you are just doing it just for backlinks. I think this economic downturn has definitely seen an increase in people wanting to make money online and work from home. More people seem to be working in casual or contract jobs and they are turning to the internet to help make up the difference in their income.
This is great for established internet marketers. I am sure many people have actually made a lot of money from profiting from these trends. Of course I haven’t done any research on this, but it’s just the feeling I get from reading forums and blogs.
Some people have asked how much my hubs and articles are making me and honestly it is hardly anything. I set up a channel in Adsense and the figures would be very depressing to anyone who tried to calculate an hourly rate on how I am spending my time. But, I have seen an increase in my daily Adsense earnings since I started doing this, which is what encouraged me to set my September goal.
Sorry, if anyone is looking for any magic tips or secrets. One thing I do find that works for me is getting up early and knocking out a couple of articles before you do anything like start checking emails/forums/stats etc. By the evening, I can’t bothered writing much, but I do feel a bit more creative and get ideas from randomly surfing the internet and watching television. Even if I don’t write any complete articles at night, I make notes on ideas I have and how I might be able to make money with them.