Article Publishing Site Throwdown!

admin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:45:57 +0000

As most of you know I am absolutely frustrated with Bukisa. Articles that are well key worded and highly promoted are getting few views yet some of my first articles which are poorly key worded and totally unpromoted are getting views. I’m also not happy with their referral program, I feel it encourages people to spend more time looking for referrals and little or no time creating content.

I recently discovered (and signed up on) Info Barrel. At first glance it appears that both sites are owned by the same person as the graphics are remarkably similar between the two sites. There are some critical differences however that, in my opinion, make IB a far superior choice as an article publishing site.

Many of us are getting adsense revenue from our blogs or websites and Xomba, but, with the minimum payout of $100 on adsense are months (or even years) away from getting our first check.

Enter Info Barrel. This site pays through adsense exactly the same way as Xomba does, and, in my opinion is a far better choice as a second or even third article publishing site as it will add to your adsense pool and give you a quicker payout.

Now, let’s get to the nitty gritty..

How do articles perform?

I’m glad you asked.. Let’s look at two articles. They are on the same subject, targeting a similar traffic keyword. For the Bukisa article there are 10 xomblurbs pointing at it and about a dozen other links on social sites. The Info Barrel article has NO promotion whatsoever.

First the Bukisa article performance in the last 5 weeks..

About 10 hits a week, or 1.5 per day..

And now the Info Barrel article published one week ago..

57 hits, almost 8 a day!

There’s something really wrong here. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, I’m just looking at the numbers. Also, Bukisa has an Alexa rank of 28k, and IB has a rank of 54k so the Bukisa article should have far more hits, but it doesn’t, what’s up with that??

So, my conclusion is that articles perform much better, hit wise, on IB than on Bukisa.

IB 1 Bukisa 0

Oh, let me also say that I chose to use the same subject type articles so they wouldn’t be unfairly effected by current trends.

How can this possibly happen?

Actually, the answer is simple. IB has the most robust article publishing page I have ever seen, it blows away every other one in terms of options. eHow, Bukisa, Xomba don’t even come close to it.

Check this out..

Wow, more options than a 2009 Lexus!!

Amazing, not only can you use BOLD (an SEO goody), but you can also designate H2 and H3 tags. Absolutely awesome! You’re also allowed to insert links into the article body as long as they are relevant.

IB 2 Bukisa 0

The Payout

The Bukisa payout is simple, you get whatever the ‘Bukisa Index’ happens to be per 1000 views. Currently it’s set at 3.72, so you get $3.72 for every 1000 views you receive on your articles, this works out to about 1 cent per 3 views.

IB pays you 75% of the adsense income for an ad click on one of your articles. It’s impossible to calculate how much this will be but a well keyworded article will get views and will eventually get a click.

IB 3 Bukisa 0

The Referral Programs

As I’ve already said, the Bukisa referral program, in my opinion, is a bit too generous and encourages more recruiting than writing. Info Barrel on the other hand gives you just 2% of the adsense earning of the people you refer. Not so much to make this a recruitment drive site, but a content producing site.

IB 4 Bukisa 0

My Conclusion

Info Barrel wins this throwdown without much of a fight. IB wins on every level, from article performance, editing options, link creation, payout and referral program.

Personally I’m going to use Info Barrel site to publish content targeting high payout, low traffic keywords. Just one hit should generate more income than a whole month of Bukisa views.

Anyone else using IB? Any luck with it?

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Mint.com – my review

admin — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:49:38 +0000

I don’t know why i’ve been putting off trying this site out. Mint.com is, quite simply. the most amazing online service i’ve used in a long time. It took all of 10 seconds to register and start using the program, it’s mostly an intuitive program to use, I didn’t read any of the help screens at all.

You start off by entering the login details for all your accounts; username, password and, if there are verification questions, the answers for those questions. This took a while, but after an hour I had all my accounts registered except for my motorcycle loan. I don’t think this is a mint issue but rather my credit union since the account is listed seperately on their website as well.

Once all your accounts are entered you can go to the overview page where you can see all your income and all your debts. It even has an area for investments so I entered my sharebuilder account too!

Here you can also setup your budget. The cool thing here is mint goes through all your accounts and finds what you spent whether it’s on your bank debit card, discover card or whatever. Mint pulled out all my gas charges even though they were on 3 different cards, seriously cool!

There’s a page for transactions, where you can see how your money is being spent and a page for trends where you can check your spending over the last year, you can even filter by merchant! so I was able to see exactly how much I spent at Home Depot this year for example.

The investments page tracks your investments, showing activity trends and what not. A nice feature too.

There is a savings page where you can enter your credit score and the site will search for deals for you, I haven’t really looked into this yet but I will soon.

Now, there’s one more thing I should mention. There is an alert feature that will send you an email or text message to your cell phone when you exceed your budget in any category, food for example. It will even alert you when a bill is due soon. This is exactly what I needed, no more missed payments! woohoo!!

With all these good features the program does have some annoyances. When you login you need to ‘refresh’ your accounts so it has up to date information. This can take a while if you have lots of accounts or a slow connection. Also, if you try to drill down thru transactions for a particular account and you’ve been logged in for a you’ve probably been auto-logged out by the bank already, another refresh is in order.

All in all this is a fantastic service and I would be happy to pay 10 or 20 bucks a month for it. I carefully watched the little ‘lock’ in my browser to make sure everything is being encrypted and it looked good. I highly recommend this especially if you have lots of accounts and/or miss payments occasionally.

Anyone else using this? any ideas or tricks/tips to share?

P.S. I just noticed they program even shows the APY on my ING savings account, sweet!