Halfway Thru the Month of Xomba

Well here we are, half way through the month. I called it the month of Xomba since I made a commitment to publish a link or article everyday during the 31 days of December and see what the added effort would bring. So far, I have been able to live up to that goal with the exception of one day. On that day, it was busy at work, and I ended being so tired I went to sleep at 8:30. That's OK by me since I really needed the extra rest.

I think I will be able to achieve my goal of 200 Xomblurbs by the end of the year since I currently have 163. That is just a little over 2 each day. The goal of hitting 40 Xombytes (articles) may be a little more difficult unless I get writing more. I currently have 30 so it would still be possible to achieve. I will certainly do my best.

Earnings are Decent

The result of the extra effort and focus seems to be paying off. I am getting more traffic as represented by AdSense impressions, and I have earned almost as much as I did all of the month of November. That is good news so I am motivated to continue to put in the extra effort for the rest of the month and on into the new year.

I plan on making Xomba my main site for the next several months for residual income. The problem is that I really don't know yet whether or not it will truly end up being residual. I suspect that it will have some residual aspect to it since I see Xomba ending up fairly high on some Google searches.

Xomba got a new site engineer and will be making changes to the site. Included in these will be better data reporting which will likely improve my ability to detect what people are reading and looking for at the site. I think this will be incredibly useful.

Xomba is a great way of making some money online. If you would like to get paid for your social bookmarking efforts please join under my Xomba referral link. Also, if you have any questions, feel free to ask since I will be happy to let you know more about my Xomba experience and will be brutally honest in the process.

Google Loves Life123

In my last post, I said that I wanted to spend a little time reviewing some of my online income activities and what I am doing to make money online. I figure that I can take roughly one post each week for the next several and give an update on my experience with each of the sites for which I am currently writing or attempting to make money. I decided to start with Life123.

Make Money on Life123

For those of you who don't know, Life123 is a site to which you can publish articles and receive payment. It has a reasonably unique business model compared to some of the other sites for which I write. Because of this unique approach, there are several pros and cons to the site which I will point out a little later.

You start out by submitting an "apprentice" article on one of the designated topics on the site for publication. The article is reviewed and, if accepted, allows you to become a contributor. A contributor is allowed to submit up to 10 articles per month. These are still reviewed, but are usually published within 24 hours. I am currently a contributor. Once a contributor has submitted a minimum of 10 articles and has 500 total views across the articles, he/she can become a writer. Writers can submit up to 40 articles per month. Once the writer has submitted 25 articles with 2500 total views, the title of "expert" is reached. This is the highest level designated. Experts can submit 150 articles per month.

Earnings occur based upon an articles total views. The first 50 views entitles the author to a $5 payment. The next 500 views warrants another $5 payment, and the next 500 views allows the author to receive an additional $10. So, the most that can be made per article is $20, which brings me to the list of pros and cons.

Pros of Life123

1. Relatively easy to earn $5
2. No AdSense account needed
3. Payment is through Paypal
4. Payment occurs at $5 level
5. Google seems to love Life123

Cons of Life123

1. Cannot publish article elsewhere
2. No longer retain article rights
3. Must be 18 and United States citizen
4. No residual income opportunity

My Experience at Life123

I started at Life123 the last few days of October. It was relatively easy to become accepted as a contributor. I have published 14 articles so far and have earned $10. I have not reached the payout threshold, so I have not been paid yet. I will be sure to let everyone know if there is an issue.

As of this morning, I have received 424 total views to my articles so I am on the verge (within the next week) of reaching the writer level at which point I will be able to contribute up to 40 articles per month. My plan is to be able to contribute 15 for the month of December which would put me at the minimum number of articles for the Expert level while I wait for the number of views to reach 2500.

At that point, I expect to contribute between 15 and 20 articles per month to develop some steady income while developing residual income at my other sites much like I outline in this post about making money working at home. Over time, the Life123 articles will be at different levels of views, and I could easily get some extra money from reaching the next 500 or 1000 views on some of them. As the articles mature, they may easily find themselves rising in the Google rankings. As a matter of fact, my article on Transient Global Amnesia has been getting a fair number of daily views (it has 92 total). It is on the second page of Google.

Overall, I view my Life123 experience as positive and would recommend it as an easy way to get started making money online. It is not good for residual income, but should be treated more like a part-time job with the potential for some reasonably consistent monthly income after the first few months provided you continue to publish to the site. Speaking of, I need to get 2 or 3 articles written for Life123 today...off to work.

Important Note: I received an email from a representative of Life123 in order to clarify the payment policy. The policy is to pay any author who makes $5 minimum by the end of a month. The payment is sent out by the end of the second week of the month so an author could expect to have money in a Paypal account by the 15th or 16th of the month at the latest.

It is cool to see how quickly information can be disseminated on the internet.

My First Advertising Campaign

I have been pretty excited since the weekend when I started my first ever online advertising campaign. It sounds impressive, but really it isn't quite a campaign. I don't even know if it would qualify for an outing. In reality, it is a 125 x 125 pixel button that I made for free and designed myself. You can see it here at Sarge's blog. It is advertising this blog! I even made the red printing flash to draw attention to the button. You can clearly see that I am not a professional internet marketer and am instead just an everyday joe trying to fumble my way through the internet.

I had been thinking of advertising on another blog to try to promote this blog. I even had the button all ready to go and saved on my computer. I figured that as long as I didn't spend any more money than I made on this blog, it would be OK. Unfortunately, I thought I would have to wait until next year. But this was such a good deal, I couldn't pass it up. It is still too early to tell whether the advertising is working. The button will be there for a month so I will watch traffic and referral patterns to see what happens. I will be sure to report the results in a future post.

In the meantime, I would just like to say that this month has been pretty decent so far. I had a busy day today and haven't gotten much done online. Maybe I can get some more done this evening. Over the next few posts, I will update some of my current online income activities in much more detail. Hopefully, they will be inspiring and instructive. This post is somewhat short since I mainly wanted to share my lack of marketing skill. Nevertheless, enjoy my red flashing font. I think it's cool!

My Xomba Commitment for December

I have always heard that Xomba was a good way to make money and have even made a respectable amount myself for the amount of effort expended. But I never really got around to developing a true commitment and focus for the site. That is all going to change for the month of December 2009.

For the month of December, I am making Xomba my primary residual income site. I plan on putting up a link or two or three everyday for the entire month. Plus, I plan on writing several original articles for the site so that by the end of the month I have 40 articles and 200 links.

So far these first 7 days, I have been able to live up to the task and devote some time each day on the site and the early indications are that it will prove to be worthwhile. I already am on pace to have more AdSense impressions and earnings by the end of December than I had for November. The results seem to be tracking the amount of effort, and that is good in my mind. I still don't know what long-term residual potential might exist, but I think that information will come in time. When it does, I will be sure to share with you.

You may or may not know that I am a featured writer for Xomba in the Money & Investing section. I have an article pending and when that gets on the front page, I can only imagine that the impressions and earnings will benefit. I plan on writing 2 or 3 more for the month as well to include in my overall efforts.

Here are a few of the links to my Xomba featured articles since they don't have a widget:

Money and the American Dream
Investing in Gold at Record Prices...A Good Idea?
I Am Earning Real Passive Income Now
Selling the Same Shares Twice (Part 1)

Also, if you want to join Xomba, I will benefit if you use this referral link. It doesn't cost you anything since the additional percentage of AdSense impressions comes from Xomba and not you. So, give Xomba a try to provide backlinks to your own work and earn money at the same time. I think you will like the earning potential.

As always, thanks for reading and following this blog. I appreciate all the comments that you share.

HubPages Traffic is Falling Apart (Maybe)

For those who don't know, HubPages was the first major site for which I started writing the last week of May of this year. It is the site at which I have been most active, having written 115 Hubs (articles) to this point. Granted, some of them are just absolutely pitiful since I was learning as I was writing. I think my writing is getting better now that I have learned about various aspects of writing such as keywords and search engine optimization. But I would like to make a few comments on the trend of my HubPages traffic which I have noticed over the past few months.



I am a stats junky and keep lots of data pertaining to my traffic and AdSense impressions. In September, HubPages comprised just about 75% of my total AdSense traffic. In October that number was 60% and in November just 55%. Now for the first 5 days of December, my HubPages traffic is just under 40% of my total traffic. Both this blog and my Xomba traffic have been increasing to make up the difference since total AdSense impressions in September and October were virtually identical.



I have heard that November and December are usually down months for internet traffic since people are focused on the holidays. I certainly saw that during the four day Thanksgiving weekend. As it stands now, traffic will be down about 10% during December compared to November but it is hard to make an accurate assessment only 5 days into the month.



Even though HubPages traffic is falling apart, I will say this much for it. For the last 30 days, my Google search engine traffic is nearly as much as my internal HubPages traffic. I view this as a good thing since search engine traffic is much more valuable than other Hubbers reading my articles. I am hoping that the traffic will find a base and that any growth represents organic search engine traffic growth. That would be a great consolation to the traffic decrease.

I Want to be the Turtle

There are many lessons to be learned from Aesop's classic fable about the tortoise and the hare. I am sure that you have heard it. The hare ridicules the tortoise for being slow and subsequently a challenge is made pitting the two in a race. Of course, the over-confident hare bolts off the starting line and gets so far ahead that he decides to take it easy under a tree, falls asleep and ends up losing the race. I want to be the turtle of online income.

The turtle has many positive qualities:

1. He realizes his limitations. He doesn't pretend he is fast. He knows his capabilities and really isn't thinking about racing the hare. He is just going about the business of getting to the finish line.


2. He is quietly confident in his abilities. The turtle realizes that he has limitations but is, nevertheless, confident enough in the abilities he has to race the hare.


3. He is up for a challenge. By all appearances, the turtle should lose this race. He is not swift and doesn't match up on paper to a hare. He still goes out and tries despite his apparent shortcomings.


4. He never gives up. It sure would have been easy to just give up when he realized that the hare was so far down the course that he was out of sight. Yet the turtle just kept plodding along, one step at a time. He really wasn't racing the hare in his mind. He was just determined to finish.

I want to be the turtle of online income. I know that I am not a web professional and don't have a ton of web knowledge or experience. I know that I am not a professional writer. I work full time and have a limited amount of spare time to devote to the development of online income. But I do feel that I have useful ideas worth sharing and can write a decent sentence. I am always eager to learn and experiment. I am certainly up for the challenge and have managed to persist for over 6 full months. I certainly don't plan on giving up. I try not to focus on anybody else (although at times it can be difficult but is getting easier). Finally, I just want to make that finish line.

For me, the finish is $3000 monthly in 8 more years and 6 months. Provided I continue to work a little each day, I could potentially have over 3000 articles and maybe even a few websites developed in that time frame. It will be a long haul, but that's OK. I am convinced that like the tortoise, "slow and steady will win the race."

If you are getting started in your journey for online income, don't just take off like the hare. You will get burned out and never finish what you started. It may seem counter-intuitive, but just take one day at a time and publish a little something each day. Before you know it, one article becomes ten, which becomes 100, then 200, then your own site and a second site. That first dollar becomes $10, then $100 and before you know it, you could live off your online income.

Remember, to achieve your goals, think like a turtle.

Featured at Life123

Guess what! I am the featured writer at Life123. I am found on the writers homepage which can be seen here. I will probably be there for about a week if it is like some of the other featured writers that I have seen. I consider it quite an honor that they would choose me. I am hoping that this will allow me to move to the next level that much sooner.



I am able to publish again also. I seemed to be having trouble so I sent an email to ask what it meant by 30 days since I had been through my 30 days and the site still wouldn't let me add to my content. The people at Life123 responded quickly and resolved the issue rather quickly as well. I was very impressed by their professionalism. I would recommend the site to anyone just starting out.



As mentioned, I hope to be able to get 3 more articles up to the 50 view level. The 3 that are currently closest all have view counts in the 20's. Here are the links in case you want to go read them:



Stock Investing Greats and the Lessons They Teach

If Gold is Too Expensive, Consider Silver (This is incredibly timely. If you only have time for one article, read this one.)

What is Tetralogy of Fallot?



Currently, I only need 220 more views to get to the next level at which point I will be able to contribute 40 articles per month. I figure that will happen sometime between now and Christmas. I hope to be able to publish 15 articles for the month. Thank you to everyone who has been able to stop by and read my Life123 articles. I really appreciate it. I plan on making Life123 a source of fairly steady and predictable income for 2010 so that I can start looking at getting my own site and paying for the related expenses such as hosting, etc.

Next time, I want to update everyone on the SEO Experiment. Very interesting stuff.