350pd?

I had two $350 days in a row! Yowza! If I earned that on a regular basis, I could retire about 20 years ahead of schedule!

Some of it had to do with the stars aligning...all my usual sources of income had very good days, pumping earnings well above average. But a good chunk of it came from an unusual source that bears some attention.

 Let's start with a breakout of the two days earnings, which came to about $700:

• $225 from Demand Studios/eHow
• $ 94 from LinkShare affiliate earnings
• $ 32 from Commission Junction affiliates
• $ 14 from Infolinks in-text ads
• $ 52 from Adsense
• $315 from Uclue

The biggest chunk of my windfall had to do with a site I haven't really said much about. Uclue is a researcher-for-hire Q&A site. People who need to know something -- and need to know it bad -- come to Uclue, post their question, and offer a fee to have the research done. We handle everything from market research to identifying cartoon biplanes, and for the most part, our clients go away very satisfied with the results.

It may seem odd to pay to have questions answered on the freewheeling Internet, where information on just about any topic can be had for no charge. But the things people need to know about don't always show up in a simple Google search. And even if they do, the client may not have the time or inclination to do a search on their own, cull through results, and neatly summarize the information. It can be easier and more efficient to simply hire a researcher to handle all that for him.

You can get a good sense of what Uclue does by looking over some of the questions and answers at the site. My two big ticket items were priced at $200 each, and one of the clients left a generous $40 tip, all of which resulted in my $315 payout after Uclue took its cut of the action. The two questions reflected the typical diversity we come across at Uclue: one was regarding the advantages of professional licensing and the other, cloud computing.  Unfortunately, they were both handled as eyes-only "private" answers, so I can't use them to illustrate the work I did.

Instead, take a look at an older question that is publicly available: Need methodology to Find Forums, Groups and Discussion Boards. This client needed a step by step guide for conducting advanced Internet searches to zero in on who is saying what at online forums and discussion groups. He needed the information badly enough to offer $400 for the answer.

I wish we had a lot more of those $400 challenges. And I wish I could invite other researchers to join us at Uclue. But the fact is, high priced questions are rare, and even more run of the mill questions are hard to come by. People may have questions they desperately need to have answered, but they probably don't know to come to Uclue for exactly the research they need.

I think there is an almost endless market for a paid research service -- everyone needs to know something, now and then, that they're willing to pay to find out. The tough part is making the connection. How does a service like Uclue make itself known, so that -- when you do cross that threshold and are suddenly eagerly willing to pay someone to find out if prostitution is legal in the Virgin Islands or to dig up research on the safety of narrow band UVB phototherapy -- you know to turn to Uclue for an answer.

We haven't really figured out an effective marketing strategy yet that will make Uclue a household name.

As a matter of fact, if you have suggestions, I'm all ears....

  

In Defense of Content Farms (well...some of them)

Online content farms are a bit like offline food farms. There are farms that produce beautiful output -- fresh, flavorful, ripe, pure and wholesome, the type of stuff you see at your favorite displays at the farmer's market. Then you have your pretty crappy stuff -- unripe, tasteless, full of chemicals, non-nutritious and just plain ugly to look at.

Let's call the really good stuff that the farmers produce organic. And let's call the crappy stuff...ummm...how about spam!

There are content farms producing wonderful organic content. And there are content farms producing spam by the ton. I'm really fortunate to be a freelance writer for an organic content farm named Demand Studios, owners of the much-maligned eHow, among other sites.

Demand has been dragged across the coals, unfairly in my view, and I just want to say a bit on their behalf.

First off, it's a great gig. I work when I want, where I want, and as much or as little as I care to. I can write for a flat fee to bring in immediate income, or for revenue share, to earn a continual stream of income for years after an article is written (I have a few individual articles that have each earned thousands of dollars). I don't earn like Bill Gates, but I do a lot better than flipping burgers (I figure about $30 an hour, but in truth, I haven't worked out my earnings in much detail).

As for the quality of my content, I can say...with a bit of a caveat...that I have no reason to hang my head. My articles are well-written, well-researched and, dang it, they're useful! I don't think any readers will feel unduly spammed if they happen across How to Make Money on the Internet, or How to Find Unclaimed International Assets.

The fact is, Demand is demanding when it comes to article research and quality. Writers are always griping behind the scenes about how strict the editors are (yes...Demand has oodles of editors!) and what a pain it is parsing AP writing style. Sure, an occasional clunker may get past the reviewers, but all in all, the vast majority of what Demand puts online is good stuff.

Not great stuff, mind you. Just good stuff. There are no Pulitzers looming in our freelance futures. But everything we produce is servicable and geared towards answering -- and answering well -- the very questions that people are asking online, no matter how mundane.

That caveat I mentioned? The focus on quality is a recent development at Demand, something that's dominated their content creation for the past two years or so. Prior to that, a lot of the stuff that went up on sites like eHow was, sorry to say, garbage. I certainly contributed articles to that collection that I can't honestly say I'm proud of. Demand is still in the process of culling through that older material and deleting what needs to be deleted. Most of it's gone, but you'll still come across a few junky gems here and there.

But happily, Demand has completed its transition to a full-fledged organic content farm. It's a good freelancing gig producing good quality content that is well-matched to the needs of millions of searchers. Apparently, the stock market agrees. When Demand Media (the parent of Demand Studios and eHow) went public in its January IPO, the stock price jumped and has stayed elevated since. Investors seem willing to place a solid bet on the Demand business model.

So what's everybody so worked up about? Why is Demand being sullied as the ruination of all that is decent about the web, a source of nothing more than Internet pollution?

That's a really hard question to answer. There's no good reason for the invective, that I can see, but there are a few obvious factors that enter the mix.

There's a lot of angst out there, as the business end of earning a living as a writer or journalist is changing before everyone's eyes. Opportunities that were successful in the past paper-based world are disappearing, even as new cyber-opportunities are blossoming. Demand has been on the receiving end of some scorn from old-school writers, highly-skilled Paul Bunyans, warding off the evils of new tools that allow anyone with a power supply to hack down trees or crank out articles.

Demand is also paying the price for its wayward youth. People remember those nonsensical, useless eHows, even though they're mostly long gone from the web.

And I guess there's also a certain indiscriminate thing that the human mind does. There are certainly bad content farms out there, just as there are bad spinach farms and bad strawberry farms producing things that make people sick. And when that happens, folks tend to throw out all their spinach and all their strawberries...and from the looks of things, all their Demand Studios articles as well.

Which is a shame. Because there really may be some unclaimed international assets with your name on it!



P.S.  Are you a journalist writing about quality issues at content farms? Do me, yourself, and your readers a favor. Look over 50 eHow articles at random -- it won't take that long -- before coming to any conclusions about overall article quality at the site.

Ebb and Flow

For quite a while, I stopped posting things on my various blogs and sites. No clearcut reason. I would just think about making a blog entry, or updating my reference sites, and end up with a Nahhh...not now.  Just part of the ebb and flow of one's creative energies, I suppose.

Part of the problem, though, has been the ebb and flow of my internet earnings. I am closer and closer to my goal of $200 per day in online income, but success is making me lazy. There's something about the magic of residual income. I can sit and do nothing (which is exactly what I have been doing!) and the daily earnings still roll in.

Even as some of my online sources have ebbed quite a bit, others are flowing like gangbusters. If I make the effort at Demand Studios to write four or five articles a day, I can reach the $200 a day mark, easy. It's the effort part that's become a challenge.

On the ebbing side of things, I don't know what's become of my direct Adsense earnings. They used to be a reliable source of about $25 per day but now I'm having a hard time breaking out of single-digits. And work at the online Q&A site, Uclue, has also been much slower than usual, as have earnings, of course.

But at my old standby, eHow, income has blossomed. Two of my eHow articles -- two that I've written about earlier -- are bringing in an amazing $15 a day...each!  Total eHow earnings are running about $75 a day now.

Will it last? I suspect it's going to grow, actually. One of my articles on making money online looks to be something of a breakout article. It gets a few thousand views every day, and the views have been increasing. I think (more to the point, I hope) this means that word is getting around, and more and more people are coming to have a look. If views continue to increase, earnings should climb as well.

Which means, of course, that I'll just get lazier and lazier. But I will try to get back here before too long for another post.

A tale of two eHows

I checked my eHow earnings today, as I do pretty much every day (and if they don't post, grrrrrrrr.....).

My two top earning articles pulled in about $6 each since yesterday. One's a little over $6, one's a little under. But those two articles, alone, are a nice boost to my daily income. The articles are very different from each other, and it's interesting to look them over and try to figure what makes them work.

One top article is How to Make Money on the Internet. I've worked really hard on this one, trying to make it the best how-to-earn article out there. I had to. There are so many articles and so many websites with a similar theme, that I knew I had to find a way to make mine stand out to have any chance at it being successful. I put in a lot of time reviewing money-making sites, casting most of them aside as pretty worthless, and writing an article that highlighted the legitimate sites.

It's worked well. The article gets a lot of ratings and comments, and readers really appreciate it. I assume they also do all the nifty things we want readers to do: bookmark the article, send it to friends, add links to their sites, Digg it, and basically spread the word. I haven't actively done any of that myself...I leave most of my article promotion to the organic forces at work on the internet.

But one thing I do that's very important--every few months I update the article, removing outdated links, adding some new ones, and changing descriptions as the situation calls for (which reminds me, I have to update what I say about eHow now that it's no longer an active writers site).  It's an active way to keep the article evergreen.

My other top earner could hardly be more different. It's an article on free websites and domain names. It took me all of fifteen minutes to write (and has earned $1,030 so far. That's like getting paid $4,120 an hour!). It doesn't have a lot of content and doesn't offer a heaping helping of insight. (It doesn't even explain how to add Adsense to the free sites, but Tammy's article does.)

So why does my measly article earn so well? Truth is, I'm not really sure. I suspect I made a good choice with my title. I included both domain name and free website as keywords and there aren't a heck of a lot of sites that actually combine both those terms. The fact that the article is not from a web hosting company probably also helps. And of course, it gets some good old Google juice just from being on eHow.

But the bottom line is, I just got lucky. Sometimes, that's what it takes.

It's been a while since my last post...

How many blog entries do you think start out this way: It's been a while since my last post...!

Actually I did search on the exact phrase "a while since my last post" and Google tells me it's been used 7,690,000 times!

Life throws you a curve every now and then, and between my day job getting explosively busy, my home life getting explosively crazy (you don't want to know), a lot of unexpected socializing and the onset of summer, well...I just haven't posted for a while. In fact, I haven't done much on the internet at all.

But you know what? There's a lesson here. While I was busy doing nothing, at least nothing on the web, I was still making money. That's the beauty of rev share. You get paid, even when you're not working.

For me, it was an important reminder. I had been putting in a fair amount of effort at Demand Studios (if you haven't checked them out, you should) and writing a surprising number of flat-fee articles while ignoring the revenue sharing opportunities that DS offers to writers.

That took me by surprise, me being such a big rev share fan and all, but I decided to go with the flow. I was enjoying writing my little flat-fee Tips, so much so, that I've done about 800 or 900 of them so far...it's tough keeping count.

Flat fee does have some advantages to it, among them:

• Nearly instant gratification. DS pays its writers twice a week. It's so nice to get that little PayPal email announcing my latest deposit.
• Flexibility. There are DS writers earning $300 a day. Sure, they're strapping themselves to their computers and writing 16 hours a day. But still...they're proof that it can be done.
• Near certainty. Write, and get paid. Oh, an article might get rejected here and there, but for the most part, you know your efforts are going to pay off.

What's the down side? Two things, really. One is that you get paid, but you don't get paid much.  The top fee for most DS articles is $15, and they can easily take an hour or more to finish up.  You do the math.

The other thing is what my busy life reminded me: stop writing flat fees, and you stop getting paid. If you take a week off, you get no income for that week. If you're hospitalized for a month...no income for a month. Decide to retire and stop writing...no income for the rest of your life!

Rev share is very different. Oh sure, it has its own set of pros and cons. For most folks, the uncertainty is a big minus. You can pour your heart into an article, and it may never earn a cent! But overall, rev share has worked well for me. Over the long term, a single revenue share article, on average, earns about five times as much as a flat fee article  And even when I stop writing, my rev shares keep on keeping on.

So...it's time for me to get back into action at Demand Studios, and time to crank up the ol' rev share machinery.

Wish me luck.

Writing and earning at Demand Studios

If you've been following this blog even just a little, then you probably know I'm shooting to increase my online earnings to $200 per day, up from my current income of about $110 a day. Demand Studios is going to be a big help. A pain in the butt, but a big help.

After spending a few weeks getting to know the Demand Studios platform (eHow kicked us out, remember, and over to DS), I'm bringing in a pretty steady $30 a day, which comes close to $1,000 a month. That's a hefty chunk, and gets me a good way towards my goal already. I don't know if I'll choose to keep it up, but for now, it's a reliable source of new income for me.  Some of the DS writers earn a lot more.

For the uninitiated, DS is turning out to be the internet's 800-lb gorilla as far as freelance writing goes. They give their writers a choice (sort of) between flat fee or revenue-share writing. And they offer a peculiar assortment of writing assignments, everything from little Tips that take 5-10 minutes to write, and pay $3 each, to old-fashioned eHows or new-fangled Livestrong healthy living articles. These usually pay $15 a pop, and sometimes fetch $30 for 'special assignments'. (By the way, they have oodles of editor assignments as well -- proofreading, title corrections, and so on -- but I haven't really explored that end of things).

Everything you write at DS gets screened by an editor, and man, some of them can be mighty persnickety and mighty capricious. And the style at DS is a dry, newspaper-ish almost academic type of writing that just makes it harder to put some soul in your work. Like the old WWII saying goes, There's three ways to do things. The right way. The wrong way. And the Army way. Ditto with DS...you have to learn to do it their way, if you want to make it work out. That's the pain in the butt part, and the reason I might peter out after a while.

But for the time being, I have to admit, whenever I have a few spare minutes during the day, I find myself thinking, I'll go write a quick Tip, and earn another three bucks.

It adds up.

Getting Views: Part I

I write a lot of genealogy articles, mostly at eHow or at my blog, FreeGenealogyTools, and now and then just elsewhere around the web.

Every article I write, I can pretty much guarantee getting 400-500 views within 24 hours.

The reason I can do this is that I know the genealogy corner of the web pretty well. I know the top-tier genealogy sites, I know the most popular forums, and I know places where I can post active links to my latest masterpiece, er, article. And from experience, I know where I can post a simple link, and get the most bang for the buck. Truth is, for any new article, I'll only post one, maybe two links, tops. That's all it takes to drive a few hundred visitors to article.

(And no, I'm not going to tell you where I post, because I don't want to encourage a lot of spurious attempts at links. But if you have an article that you think deserves some good genealogy link juice, let me know in comments, or with an email, and I'll see what I can do).

I wrote "that's all it takes..." as if it's an easy thing to generate hundreds of views overnight. But it ain't. This blog post I'm writing, for instance, isn't likely to see anywhere near 500 views in a month, much less a day. And my eHow articles average about 10 views per day, each, on a good day.

But since online family history is a real specialty of mine, I've put in the time to really get to know this one corner of the internet very well. I can use that knowledge to pump up my views, and jump start some good traffic. And that's the take-away message for today's post, I suppose. If there's a topic area you're really focused on, whether it's cars, carrots, or cardiology, then get to know the territory, find out who your friends are, and make the internet work for you.

By the way, 500 views ain't nothing if there's no follow through. Having 500 views on the first day, 510 views on the second day, and then one or two views a day trickling in after that just means my article was the proverbial flash in pan. But getting 500 views the first day, another 500 after that, and making it happen day after day...now that's the kind of posting I like to see!

I've only had that kind of viewing success with a few of my properties (but I certainly hope to have more!). More about those in a future post.