Thursday, 7 February 2008

Why You Shouldn't Write for PayPerPost

One of the things I was thinking of doing with writing paid posts for PayPerPost. But after doing so many reviews on other websites I have come to the conclusion that it is way too much work for the amount of time writing them. It's also pretty sole destroying writing review after review about payday loans, vacuum cleaners and shopping comparison sites.

It might be a good thing to do if you're starting out and don't have any money. Writing 10 reviews at $10 each gives you $100 which you can spend on something like Bookmarking Demon.

Instead of spending all my energy on writing pointless reviews I have decided to put that energy into writing more articles, re-writing for article directories, squidoo, huppages etc plus firing up Bookmarking Demon everyday.

My routines is pretty much:-

  • Long Tail- Find a long tail phrase to write about. Generally I just us Google's keyword tool and don't worry too much about finding out what the daily search amounts are. These are never very accurate anyway. I find terms by typing is stuff like "how red wine" or "what flooring." If I really want to get an idea of serch values I use Free Keywords from WordTraker.
  • Research - I then go onto a site like EzineArticles or Buzzle and find a couple of articles on the particular topic I want to write about. I then re-write every single word so that I don't get hammered for stealling content. It can take me a while getting my head around the article but once I've finished I re-write it again
  • Re-Write and Waffle - When re-writing an article it's a lot easier than the first time. I can therefore write it much quicker and waffle my way to an extra hundred words. I've been trying to write at least 700-1,000 words whereas normally I would only do 400-500. The reason is that Grizz of Make Money Online For Beginners says that you can get more keywords into an article but without keyword stuffing. It might also make you look more authoritative.
  • 2nd re-write - I re-write the article again but not 100%. Normally I only re-write half of each paragraph.
  • Submit and Publish - Once I have three versions of each article, I submit one to Article Marketer, one to buzzle.com, goarticles.com, hubpages and squidoo then the longest one will go on my own blog.
  • Social Bookmarking - I then load up Bookmarking Demon to submit a bunch of URLs from my sites and other people's.
Lately I've just been concentrating on my Home Improvement blog as this is making the best money but I also want to try and bolster up my Food and Wine and gardening blogs as I kind of ignored them because they weren't bringing in any money. They used to be static sites but I really hate using Frontpage so I converted them into blogs.

In addition to this I also re-wrote some flooring articles and added loads more waffle to create a blogspot blog How to Install Flooring. I don't actually give people advice on how to install flooring, I just talk about why people should install that particular type of flooring. Normally this isn't something I would ever consider doing but ultimately I really just want to make money. If people don't get what they're looking for, sorry.

Anyway, back to what I was originally writing about. I want to find ways of getting passive income. By expanding and promoting the domains I already own, hopefully I will only need to do a little work to maintain them and stop them from dying. If I spend all my time writing boring reviews, this is time I'm not researching keywords, writing, re-writing and promoting. Does this make sense?

Another point is that Google will find out eventually that you're writing for PPP and take your PR away. You might say "oh, who gives a toss?!" But you wouldn't be saying that when all your work dries up. It won't affect your ranking in the SERPs but you won't be making money from any other paid review service either. Your blog no longer has any value for any advertiser. They only care about the little green bar. And the chances are that you're writing review because you're not getting SE traffic and not making any money.

So you're back to square one. Not making any money online.

Friday, 14 December 2007

Submit to Free Directories

UPDATE: I now use the free version of Brad Callen's Directory Submitter instead.

There's a big debate as to whether these SEO-friendly web directories are useful of not. Some people use software to semi-automate the process, submitting their website to hundreds of sites. Matt Cutts (head of Google spam) on the other hand says that they are worthless.

My personal view is that it doesn't harm to submit to a handful, plus they'll show up on Yahoo links which will help boost the perceived value of the site to prospective purchasers.

These are the sites that I have submitted www.dailydosh.net to, it isn't by any means a comprehensive list but it's what I have used for the last year:-

Thursday, 6 December 2007

Writing a Press Release to Promote Blog

When you read a lot of blogs about making money online they tell you to send a press release (PR). But how many of you have actually done this? The main reasons people are apprehensive is because:-
  • They have never written one before
  • They don't know if they have anything newsworthy
  • They are not an expert on the topic of their website
These are certainly the reasons that have I have. However some time ago I listened to an interview that Jim Morris did with Howie Schwartz who said that he simply sends out an article with intro to the effect of "we are proud to announce the launch of a new website called..."

So last week I decided to test this out. I re-wrote an article about debt and added in a quick intro. The result was that it was accepted on some distribution sites but www.prleap.com rejected it because it wasn't in the traditional PR style. To see the PR I submitted to Press Exposure, click here.

If you use an article as a PR don't expect to get a ton of traffic however it does add to your overall linking strategy. Also, these PR distribution sites get no-where near the same amount of submissions as article directories so each link may carry more weight.

I haven't submitted to that many sites but here are the ones that accepted the article/pr:-