Thursday, 12 May 2011

Infobarrel.com Review

With eHow now officially dead in this niche, I'm taking the time to review one of the soon-to-be challengers for top dog:
InfoBarrel is a community of writers who spend their time creating amazing content geared towards helping readers either educate themselves or solve a problem. InfoBarrel is built in a manner that we reward our writers for creating this amazing content. Writers can choose to either donate their earnings to charity, or build a passive income stream through a number of advertising channels.
That's how they describe themselves on their 'about us' page.

The primary difference between InfoBarrel and the myriad of other similar sites is the revenue. InfoBarrel will pay you something like 75-90% of the ad revenue on your articles (instead of a token percentage, or low flat rate).

The primary advantage to using InfoBarrel and not 'going it alone', is you get the traffic from their community, and from their search engine rating.

InfoBarrel won't do all the work, though, you will need quality content (quality is much more important than on similar sites) to succeed:

  • Everyone has something they are knowledgeable about-- find yours and write a few articles on the various aspects of it.
  • Whenever you wonder something, research it, and write an article on your findings so others may learn as well.

InfoBarrel has it's flaws, though.You'll have more trouble posting your article on Reddit, than you would from 'going it alone', for example.

Sign Up (full disclosure: that is my referral link, there is no disadvantage to you using it, I just get a bonus. If you would prefer I don't get this bonus, you can manually type the web address into your URL bar.)

Friday, 6 May 2011

HubPages: The current leader.

HubPages is the most rewarding place to publish, discover and interact with people who share your interests

--HubPages.com: 'about us'

Pros: Page rank (usually 6-8), Alexa rank usually (< 300).

Cons: 'Only' 60% ad share (better than many, but not the best).

The real power of this platform is it track record of success. 1,137,098 published 'hubs'. While other platforms may give better payouts, they have a long way to go to defeat the momentum of HubPages. HubPages will survive another economic downturn, will other sites?

Sign Up (full disclosure: that is my referral link, there is no disadvantage to you using it, I just get a bonus. If you would prefer I don't get this bonus, you can manually type the web address into your URL bar.)

Thursday, 5 May 2011

eHow writer's compensation program has finally ended.

Last year, eHow stopped accepting new articles under this program, and today all payments have terminated.

eHow, in its quest to be a for-profit wikipedia-wannabe has ended the last symbol of what built its pagerank and stature. Let us take a moment to reflect on the end of the old champion of this niche. All old posts on eHow have been scrubbed.

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

The simplest way to add credibility to your articles.

These days, Wikipedia is THE source for knowledge. Almost everyone, young and old is used to its tone and style. If you want your articles to have an authoritative 'feel' to them, just apply the Wikipedia content guidelines to your articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style