1000 Ways to Make Money Online

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve updated 1000 ways to make money online and that’s because I’ve been busy working on several of those thousand ways. One of the ways I’ve been seeing more and more success with lately is Infobarrel. My plan is to give the usual backdrop of the site, write a little bit about how to make money with Infobarrel and gives some anecdotes of how you can use Infobarrel to boost your earnings with Hubpages.

All you wanted to know about Infobarrel

Alright, probably not all you wanted to know but then again that’s why there’s the FAQ section. To cut to the heart of what Infobarrel is, they are another information site where you can write articles that displays contextual ads and amazon affiliate recommendations. Infobarrel uses several familiar types of advertising including Adsense, Chitika and Kontera (you don’t get Kontera money). Infobarrel also gives you a chance to install google analytics onto your articles which will come in extremely handy (see later in the post).

They have all of the usual rules (proper grammar, original content, no porn, yada yada) but they also have a couple of additional requirements. The first is that they want you to create an article of at least 325 words. This requirement is useful for two reasons:

• It keeps the integrity of the articles on Infobarrel higher because it deters small, spammy, “I only want the link” articles.
• Google tends to respect longer documents. Not saying you can’t rank for short articles but, in general, the longer the article the better. This also gives you a chance for some more long tail keywords.

The other requirement they have is to keep any external links out of the first paragraph. In fact when it comes to linking they require that you do it contextually. I had a hard time with this at first; I would use call to action phrases such as: “Click here to learn more about…” or “Check out these…”. This is frowned upon because it blatantly calls visitors away from their site and if they don’t have visitors they don’t have money. I’ve even been called on using the asides such as: “Infobarrel is a great way to make money (More Infobarrel money making tips)”.

Just so you don’t have to struggle through the review process as much as I did my advice is to use links like this: “Infobarrel is great way to make money online and with a little help from some money making tips, you can make some serious cash.”

The other important thing to note about Infobarrel is that they have a review process to make sure you’re following the guidelines. If you do everything I’ve said above you’ll have no problems. Just makes sure that you only have two links that leave IB and that they’re not in the first paragraph. If for some reason you are denied, they’re nice enough to tell you why and give you a chance to fix it.

Sign up for Infobarrel

How to make money with Infobarrel

Because IB is so similar to places like Hubpages, the methods for making money with infobarrel are pretty much the same. I can’t emphasize enough about doing a healthy dose of keyword research and on top of that competition research. Part of the reason to use Infobarrel or Hubpages as opposed to your own websites or blogs is that they have existed for many years and have built up the reputation in Google’s eyes that has gained respect when it comes to ranking in the search engine. Using Infobarrel, you can take a topic, say bicycle seats, write a 5-600 word article on it and watch it rank on the second or third page. This makes getting to the front page so much easier (and the front page is where the money is).

There has been some issue in the past about ad location with Infobarrel and they’ve switched stuff around. I would argue that the ad location isn’t as important as most would think and that if you write a good (meaning long, on topic article) you’ll get plenty of long tail traffic (using the example above long tail keywords would be black bicycle seats, bicycle seats for kids, bmx bicycle seats, etc.). Just keep that in mind when writing the article.

Part of why writing on these sites will get you good search engine rankings is that these sites (commonly referred to as authority sites [although Web 2.0 sites are far from the only authority sites]) have a lot of “linking power” or “link juice” that is passed along to either sites within their domain (i.e. www.infobarrel.com) or sites out of their domain (a.k.a. your webpage). So if you were following along at home you may have created a hub or two because of my make money with Hubpages series. If this is the case, you could easily construct a similar, on-topic article and plant a link that would send some “link juice” to your first article. This will help improve the first articles ranking in the search engine.

This will work internally as well. So let’s say you wrote an article entitled “How to install a bicycle seat” and you casually mention some of the above long tail keywords (black, for kids, and BMX). Upon checking your google analytics account, you realize that there has been a large number of searchers that found your site using the term “BMX bicycle seats”. While it’s really good to know this, what’s better is you can write an additional article on Infobarrel on bmx bicycle seats and link back to the first one (How to install a bicycle seat) using the term “bmx bicycle seats” and that first article will get a better ranking for that term. While this isn’t a great example because the first article isn’t trying to be an article about bmx seats, you could see how to apply this. Perhaps something like “How to make money online using Hubpages” being linked to the article “How to make money online”?

I wonder if this is something I’m trying?

Why I think you can make a ton of money with Infobarrel

So if you believe all of my ramblings and you’ve read down so far, you’re doing well and you might just be thinking about signing up for Infobarrel if you haven’t already. Let me tell you a little about my crackpot theory on why I think you can make a ton of money with Infobarrel.

I need to start with a brief history lesson. Back a few years ago, Squidoo was a power house on the internet in terms of ranking well in the search engines. This brought a lot of people over to their site looking to make money online. They would create some ridiculous page (meaning bad), slap it up there, rank and make mad cash. I’m not sure how it all transpired, but eventually Google gave Squidoo what was affectionately known as the Google slap. After that, Squidoo lost some if not most of their mojo and the people who were making money had to find some other way to do it.

Almost a year ago Hubpages was the next greatest thing. You could do some of the same things, but the important part is that you would rank easily. Then things got out of hand and it’s still debated whether they got the Google slap or not, but Hubpages aren’t nearly as powerful as they used to be (partly because of the 30 day hubchallenge).

My crackpot theory is that there’s always going to be a flavor of the year when it comes to these sites, and based on my Infobarrel earnings, and some of the things I’ve seen in the search engines, I think that IB is poised to be the next big money maker. That being said you’ve still got to put in the work to rake in the cash. If you’re serious about trying to make money online, take everything I’ve mentioned above and write yourself 100 well-tuned articles. Do it as a 1 month challenge. Do it as a 3 month challenge. No matter what, just start cranking out articles and you will see a return.

I think it’s only fair to mention that there seems to be a strong correlation between my earnings and my articles hitting the three month mark. Take that as a caveat if you want to. But know that you can start raking in some cash writing for Infobarrel.

Sign up for Infobarrel

If you’re wondering where eHow comes in to all of this, I’m not quite sure. I’ve thought about eHow a lot and I think their communist approach towards articles has helped them to sustain their ranking ability. I know that a number of my articles are hitting top 10 in the search engines without any effort to improve their rankings. In fact, I’ve tried to write follow up articles on Hubpages and Infobarrel and they still don’t come close. They’ve changed things up a little bit, but I still think they are a viable diversification strategy to Hubpages or Infobarrel (which both use Adsense).

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