The Cheap Bastid» Articles

My One Year Anniversary!

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:21:10 +0000

A few of you may have noticed that I just hit my one year anniversary of publishing articles online to make extra money.

Well, what a year it’s been. I’ve learned so much about what works, and I think more importantly, what doesn’t work.

Most especially I learned that publishing articles online isn’t a race, it’s a slow, never ending process of building up passive, permanent income streams, always looking to improve your income with the least amount of work.

This past year income wise has been great, through my article income I managed to not only pay off all my credit card debts, but buy a new Harley! The cool thing is my online earnings are covering my payments, so it’s like getting a new hog for free!

I’ve learned a while back not to set lofty goals for myself when it comes to publishing new content, I think doing that just sets onself up for burnout, and, just as bad, publishing low quality content. I think my peers will agree that to succeed at this you must publish articles that are not only useful and informative, but high quality. Don’t allow yourself to put out rushed, 1/2 hearted articles designed for the sole purpose of making money. Go the extra yard and put some polish on them and you will be rewarded.

My goals are simple, I’ll just publish one, two or maybe three articles a week over the course of the next year. If I do that I’ll double my published articles by the end of the year, and certainly at least double my income.

Over the course of the next few weeks I plan on publishing a series of posts designed to teach a person new to the exciting (and profitable) world of online article publishing. I’ll start at the very basics and continue to more advanced concepts as the series progresses.

My goal with this is simple, if I can teach just one person how to make some extra cash online I will have succeeded. Lot’s of folks out there would love to make some extra money to help pay the bills but just don’t know how, or even where to start. I’m going to help them through the difficult process of starting out and ‘getting your bearings’

As you can see from my earnings last month that the extra money just keeps going up and up. Soon, even my car payments will be covered by my online income!

I must say this, just 4 days into December and I’m just amazed! I broke the $150 mark yesterday, at this rate I just might break the $1000 mark by the end of the month.

If you would like to learn just how to do this just make sure to come back here every few days over the course of the next month or so. I guarantee you will learn something. Now, I can’t guarantee you’ll make money, but I’ll give you the tools and skill you need to make it easier for you.

Happy holidays everyone!

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I’m Back!

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:01:28 +0000

Hi Everyone!

I’m sure most of you are wondering what happened to me and why I seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth for the last few months.

Well, there isn’t any amazing story about tragedy or some other life wrenching episode. Simply put, I burnt out.

You see, I put way too much ‘work’ on my plate. Near the end I was logging into eHow at 7am to rate some articles and make some forum posts, I would then go into work and during lunch research keywords. When I got home I would check my earnings and then write articles and blog posts until 10 or 11pm every day.

I put way too much on my plate, and, when I finished a project I just added more things onto my to do list.

I blame nobody for this, not infobarrel (for those contests) or One week marketing. I can only blame myself for not accepting the fact that I’m human and just need a break once in a while.

I’m back and I’m not going to set unreasonable goals for myself. If I do one article a week, that’s fine. If I do two or three even better. The important thing to remember that online article writing isn’t a race and, to be honest, there is no ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ it’s an ongoing, neverending process.

Now, even though I haven’t written an article in over three months it’s interesting to see that not only did my earnings not drop, but they actually went up.

This is the beauty of permanent passive income. It’s always out there, and always making money for you.

It’s good to be back. It’ll take me a while to get up to speed again but I definetly will.

There’s much I need to talk about, including a new project that I thought of a few months ago.

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The Keyword Selection Guide – Part 2

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:21:46 +0000

: Image 1

In part 1 we used the Wordtracker keyword tool to get more variations for our possible article topic, electric shavers. We decided on two candidates, electric shaver and electric shavers.

In this part we’ll use the google adwords keyword tool to further research these keywords, possibly find additional ones, and even come up with some future article topics all from this one useful tool.

First off, open up the adwords tool by clicking on the bookmark you saved earlier. Type in electric shaver, enter the catch phrase and hit the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ button.

There’s lots of columns and numbers there that may be confusing at first. Let’s dissect them.
Keywords: These are possible keywords that you can use
Advertiser competition: This is how much competition an advertiser faces to get their ad to appear on a page. The more competition, the more the advertiser pays to get placement, and the more you’ll make
Average search volume: Month: This is the average search volume last month
Approx Average search volume: This is the average search volume per month over the last year. Seasonal topics will show a big difference between the month average and the year average.

Before we go further we need to add a column, the most important column in my opinion.

Go to that drop down list on the right labeled “Show/Hide Columns” and choose to display “Show Estimated Avg CPC”

Another column appears in the list, this column, Avg CPC is the average amount that keyword pays per click. This isn’t really an average though, use this column in conjunction to gauge how well it will pay, the more competition the better.

As you can see from the above image the two keywords we were considering, electric shaver and electric shavers aren’t the best paying keywords, they do get good traffic though.

I’m going to stop here for a second. If you are writing an article for Bukisa, where you get paid on views not ad clicks our two keywords would be a good choice. Just in case, click once on the average search volume column to see if any other keyword gets good traffic. Nope, those are the best with about 1/2 million people per month searching for those keywords.

Now for eHow, where we get paid by ad clicks we need to find keywords with a balance between good traffic and high pay. So click twice on the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column to sort by pay.

As you can see our original two keywords moved 1/2 way down the list as there are more profitable keywords above it.

This is the subjective part. Personally I shoot for the best paying keywords in the XX,000 traffic range, but sometimes I’ll take a lower traffic keyword if the pay is unbelievable. Oh, check out ‘car insurance’ and sort by CPC and you’ll know what I mean.

In this list two keywords pop out at me. Electric shaver braun and braun electric shavers. These are two good ones to use. I would also take our original two keywords as they can be easily worked into the article.

In this phrase, braun electric shavers , we have two keywords; braun electric shavers and electric shavers.

Now, here’s an important thing to remember.

Keywords with more than one word are sometimes called ‘long tail keywords’ and when you type them into the keyword area of your article you need to use the correct syntax.

For space separated keyword fields put a dash in between each word in a long tail keyword. For comma separated just put a space. So, in eHow we would list our four target keywords as:

braun-electric-shavers electric-shaver-braun electric-shaver electric-shavers

This is important because google now knows you’re targeting that specific phrase, and will show your article if somebody types “braun electric shavers” into the search engine.

Now some of you may say to yourself, these keywords pay just about the same, why the bother. Well, two reasons, by choosing a keyword to show with little variation is payout and syntax I can show you how we can combine two keywords in our title, like this…

How to Get a Great Price on a Braun Electric Shaver

See, two keywords: braun-electric-shaver and electric-shaver. Do this as often as you can for success on getting traffic and money!

When google looks for keywords it gives more weight to keywords in the title and in the first paragraph of the article, my title above has two keywords which i’ll specify in the keyword section.

The second reason for showing this keyword is we now need to look at our competition to see what we’re up against to get page ranking.

The next part will show how to research our competition to make a final decision on our keywords for our article.

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eHow December earnings

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:33:58 +0000

I have continued to bang away articles on ehow, well, as best I can. I do work all day and, to be honest, i’m quite tired when I get home. Nonetheless I managed to end up with exactly 50 articles by midnight on New Years eve (just barely made it).

Earnings were impressive considering I published most of my articles near the end of the month. I made a total of $33.05, so i’ll be getting my first payment of a bit over $34 this month.

I must say I am totally fired up with ehow, I think with some effort on my part I can easily get my earnings to about $1000 a month by the end of the year.

I’ve learned a lot about SEO, ad targeting and keywords and it has most definetly paid off. In fact, my best article earned over $10 on its own in about two weeks.

My goal for January is to get up to 75 articles and get my earnings to $100. Today is the 7th and to date i’m coming up on the twenty dollar mark, so, with the additional articles I should easily hit that magic number by the end of the month.

Not to rest on my success I will continue to study all I can about SEO and keywords until I can consider myself an expert.

Actually, I have a request, if anyone can recommend any books available on Amazon or elsewhere let me know, i’ll take a look and buy it. I’d of course prefer somebody post up their amazon affiliate link to a great book so they can make some dollars. I like to help out if I can

Also, if anyone has some tips to share I would really appreciate it.

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The last few weeks…

admin — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 02:42:48 +0000

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth… A few weeks ago the unthinkable happened, a coworker got laid off in our department. I was almost 100% certain the IT dept was immune to layoffs due to the large number of high profile projects we have going on right now. I was wrong..

Back in the ’90s I was laid off, and completely unprepared for it. End result, I was unemployed for over a year, and with no savings, ended up in absolute financial ruin. I vowed I would never let myself get into that situation again.

Well, fast forward to 2008 and I find myself without savings and heavily in debt, a layoff now would be absolutely catastrophic for me.

So, I had to take drastic steps these last few weeks to at least prepare as best I can in case I get laid off. I spent the last few weeks pumping out article after article on ehow, which is, in my opinion, the absolute best way to earn money now, and build a passive income stream for the future.

I managed to push out almost 30 articles the last few weeks, and my daily income went from about 15 cents to almost $3 a day. I’ll get a payout next month of about $30 bucks, and I expect to end next month in the $100 dollar range.

By my estimate, I need to get my article income to about $400 a month to be able to pay my bills (earnings + unemployment), I figure, with maximum effort I should be able to hit that mark by March.

So, to sum up, my immediate goal is to get my article earnings into the $400 dollar range, then, I can concentrate on other income streams.

Needless to say there is no budget for December, I am trying to spend an absolute minimum on everything without exception, i’ll do the same for January and February in an attempt to get some credit cards paid off.

Once, the dust settles so to speak I can continue forward with my ultimate goal, which is to be debt free ASAP while building many passive income streams.

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