The Cheap Bastid» Writing 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!

Possibly Related Posts:

eHow Earnings In! – Sears Rejoices!

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:34:56 +0000

Last months massive eHow earnings arrived at PayPal today. In a few days it’ll be in my account and a few days later Sears will get it.

And that, my friends, is the power of passive income. I did very little on eHow last month and it paid my Sears bill.

If you haven’t started writing articles online to make money I encourage you to start now.

It’s fun, it’s easy, and best of all, it’s money!

Possibly Related Posts:

Article Performance Results

admin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:40:14 +0000

Over the last few days I’ve been really studying my articles to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Although I’m not going to come out and say which categories are making money (gotta have some secrets you know…) it is quite obvious where I should direct my efforts this month.

eHow doesn’t give you much in the way of tools to use when it comes to analyzing your article performance. What you do have is the earnings page, just click on the month and start sorting by different columns. You should see some trends show up, such as popular categories, common action words and so on. I highly suggest you use this one tool.

One thing I did notice is I’ve actually achieved an 80% sucess rate with my eHow articles, by that I mean only 20% of my articles are non-earners.

Not counting this months articles (9), at the end of February I had 125 articles published with 106 of them earning money.

A breakdown by month

In November I published 5 articles, all 5 are earners.
In December I published 33 articles, all 33 are earners.
In January 55 articles were published 43 are earners, 12 losers there..
February saw 22 articles published 15 are earners, 7 losers
And in March so far I published 9 articles with 2 earning, 7 not earning.

This is proof positive that article aging is indeed a reality, it also seems to me that it takes three months for full aging to take place.

Now that big surge in earnings I experienced a few weeks ago is clearly a result of my January articles starting to ‘age’ , this should continue this month and quite down in a few week. Looks to be a dismal April though, I only published 22 articles last month

Anyway, I just wanted to share this with everyone, especially those new folks who may be a bit concerned with their earnings. It takes time, so keep writing and also keep in mind that the articles you write this month will really start to earn 3 months from now. Look at it this way, write a bunch of articles now and get a free weekend getaway in June.

Possibly Related Posts:

My March Goals

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:24:11 +0000

Now that February is over I can sit down and define my goals for March. I like to think of March as the gateway to summer in article aging terms. So, in keeping with that I intend to publish summer related content like a madman this month.

I also made a decision concerning my time allocation. It just makes sense to concentrate on what is working, and downplay what isn’t working.

With that in mind here are my goals for this month.

Publish 75 articles on eHow for a total of 200
Publish 6 articles on Bukisa to get to 35 articles
Finish 1 lens on Squidoo, ending at 5 lenses
Publish at least 200 pieces of content on Xomba

Now theres some big numbers here, 75 eHow articles is a tall order, but theoretically I should get a week vacation this month, or, at the very least one or two extra days off.

Bukisa – Xomba will work together as I intend to see just what it takes to get payout without producing too much content.

I only have so much time to produce new content and the fact is it simply pays better on eHow, so if I can get to payout with 35 articles there and X number of ‘blurbs I’d rather do that then come up with 15 – 20 new articles just for Bukisa.

As far as Squidoo is concerned I am just so confused about how to work it that I don’t want to get too far into it until I know what the deal is over there.

This will be the month that I concentrate on article promotion. Last month I made about $1 per article, I know some people get as high as $3 per article average so I’m going to spend any free time promoting, and coming up with new ways to promote my articles.

My income goal for this month is simple, $250 from all sources.

Possibly Related Posts:

A Xomba Day

admin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:00:52 +0000

Today I’m going to spend some time promoting my articles and lenses on Xomba. The experiment I started yesterday is already paying off with those ‘blurbs getting 6 hits. Bukisa hasn’t updated earnings or views yet so I can’t tell if traffic ended up there.

On eHow I have two articles that are earning over 5 cents per view. One article has about 180 views with earnings near $10. I intend to do at least 5 ‘blurbs pointing at this article today.

Later in the day I need to publish 5 articles on eHow to reach my monthly goal. I’m also going to start another lens over on Squidoo.

It’s nice to have a day off…

Possibly Related Posts:

Article Aging | Do they really get better with age?

admin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:59:01 +0000

Like any new eHow’er, when I first started writing articles I lurked in the eHow forums reading and learning.

The following dialogue would happen over and over again, seemingly on a weekly, if not daily basis.

Newbie24 “I have 32 articles but I only made .06 cents last night, why??”

Veteran3 “I checked your articles, they are all only a few weeks old, you need to wait until they age at least a month or two before you’ll start making money off of them”

Well, what the hell does that mean?? This isn’t wine, it’s words!

When I first read this I didn’t believe it, I though it was foolish to say that. After all, once Google indexes your page nothing more needs to be done, right? wrong!

I’ve read books and visited sites for the last few months and gradually I came to realize that articles do indeed age, in fact it’s only after about 12 weeks that you can really say an article is nearing it’s full potential.

First off, let’s talk about the reason Google exists. Believe it or not Google does not exist solely for webmasters to jockey for page rank. Google actually exists to “provide Internet users with quality relevant content based on their search inquiries” Simply put, Google will display the most relevant content based on what a user types in.

With that being said consider this..

If two eHow articles with the exact same title should show up in the search engine results page (SERP) based on what a user types into the search box we all know that the oldest article will appear first, with the second article as a subset of the first.

In addition, if two exactly identical articles should appear the oldest (original) article will be the ONLY one listed. I’m not going into the whole duplicate content debate right now, that’s another post..

Here’s what the experts have to say from SEOMOZ.ORG, a well respected SEO site..

Older articles have more authority

As you can see, the experts agree that the older an article gets, the more authority it is assumed it has on it’s keywords. This also means that if somebody copies your article and posts it on some other site, your article will always be listed first.

Now, let’s talk about another reason an article needs to age. You might want to brace yourself for this one…

Not everyone uses Google!!

I know, blasphemy, but alas, it is indeed true. I myself was a non believer up until a few years ago.

So, whereas Google may index your article in a day or two, other websites may take weeks, possibly even months to get to it.

Here’s a look at the traffic stats on one of my Squidoo lenses, notice NO Google traffic, but one hit from Microsoft Live…

No Google traffic!

Some of you may have noticed that my earnings have been extremely good over the last week. Why is this happening? I can honestly say it isn’t the 16 articles I’ve published this month or the booming economy.

One thing I do know is that from December to January I published over 85 articles, some of those articles are now nearing the 8-10 week old mark and are starting to make real money, I know this because I checked my reports and I see articles from January in my top 50 now, some in my top 25 list.

Be patient when it comes to earning, it really does take time, don’t get discouraged. Just keep writing and remember, the article you write today will ‘grow up’ in 2 – 3 months.

Another thing to remember is that to take full advantage of holiday or seasonal articles you need to publish them at least two months, preferably three months in advance. That means get your summer articles out NOW!!

Possibly Related Posts:

Article Writing | Bukisa Experiment Round 2

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:47:41 +0000

As some of you may know, I used to publish articles over at Bukisa in November and December of last year, but gave it up due to the high minimum payout, and the poor income. It seemed article writing over at Bukisa just wasn’t worth my time.

A week or so ago I decided to have another go at it, using my newly acquired knowledge of keywords and other article writing tips that I have.

Well, the experiment consisted of three articles, each targeting a different type of keyword.

The results were absolutely startling in terms of which article earned the most. In fact, they are so unbelievable, that I honestly don’t believe it.

So this evening I will be publishing another article over there, using the same keyword strategy as that top performer.

Lets see how this goes…

Possibly Related Posts:

eHow Alert! | Summer related articles making money now

admin — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:07:19 +0000

Just wanted to let y’all know that I have 4 summer type articles (fishing and camping) that as of two days ago are making much more money than usual.

My suggestion to all of you is to start publishing summer related articles NOW!

Remember, it takes at least two, maybe even three months for an article to fully propagate through the search engines, so publish them now to get the most profit during the summer months.

I for one will be publishing like crazy, this was actually on my list, but not until next month. I don’t want to miss this like I did with my Christmas articles.

Possibly Related Posts:

Marketing Articles | How to do it and why

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:35:32 +0000

If you read my post ‘Writing Articles for Profit’ you already know that your work doesn’t end when you press the ‘Publish’ button, in fact, I believe that your work has just begun…

The easiest way to earn more money online is by getting more clicks on your eHow articles. Now, the best way to get more clicks is by getting more people to actually read your article.

Marketing your articles can make the difference between making a few cents a day or making a few dollars a day.

Marketing your articles has two benefits.

More people will see your links and head over to your article
The search engines will see the back links to your article and rate it higher in search engine results pages (SERP)

The higher your article comes up in search results means more people will click on it. More visitors = More money. It’s that simple.

Marketing articles means putting links up on the Internet for people and/or search engine spiders to follow.

There are two kinds of links

Do follow, which means the spider will follow over to your article and you’ll get credit for a back link
No follow, which, as you guessed, means the spider will NOT follow over to your site, you’ll get no back link credit but people can still click over.

There are also two places links can come from

Within the domain, internal links
Outside the domain, external links

From my recent post about the eHow ‘More articles from this author’ you know that links from one article to another article are internal links, and although they carry less Google weight than external links, are still relevant in large numbers. Witness the PR2 rating on my earliest articles..

We can add internal links at whim, when we publish (or edit) one of our articles we can add a link to an existing article through the ‘Related Articles’ area. I would use this sparingly, but I will always choose at least one of my articles. Do this for a month and you WILL see results, both in page rank and traffic.

Marketing articles isn’t fun, in fact, when it comes to writing articles I find it to be the most ‘work’ like thing I do. Nonetheless, it must be done if you’re serious about making money online.

In the next part, which will be published on Monday. I will provide my personal list of over 32 sites that allow ‘Do follow’ links, including the PageRank of the sites and whether or not they have a Firefox button.

I adamantly suggest, if you’re not already using it, to download and install Firefox and it’s associated SEO related add-ins.

Possibly Related Posts:

How to Write for eHow – Janet Ford eBook

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 01:08:39 +0000

One of the biggest boosts to my income occurred when I purchased Janet Fords eBook on how to write for eHow.

As you can see by my earnings history, my eHow income jumped considerably in December and January after reading her ebook.

She’ll be coming out with a new ebook in a few months and in preperation for that this book is going on sale at just $15, which, by the way, is worth much more than that.

This book has tons of information on how to write articles, promoting articles, brainstorming ideas and so on…

It’s a great value and it’s 100% guaranteed to make you money.

I’ve decided to promote this great book on my blog so you can get a copy before it’s no longer available.

You can find her ebook here.

Possibly Related Posts: