Monday, September 27, 2010

Why Do I Do This to Myself?!

I started ANOTHER blog. I don't have time for another blog. It's a self hosted blog about becoming a healthier person. I didn't start the blog to make money. I started it to help me get into better shape. I am so unhealthy. I sit on the computer all day without any exercise. I eat out a lot and I eat a lot in general. This new blog will keep me accountable for taking care of myself. Because I started another blog, I will have even less time to work on my Info Barrel experiment. I'm hoping that being healthy will make my online time more productive. I should be able to better focus on work if I keep up on exercise.To end this post on a positive note, I made another $0.14 today!

Monday, September 20, 2010

Quick Update

The weekend was very productive. I got EzineArticles written for all but two of my articles. I'll get that done tonight. I also got 25 forum back-links for each of my articles and I got some more social bookmarking links. I'm planning on writing 10 articles this week. I still have a little bit of back-linking work to do for my current articles but I think I'm pretty much done for a little while. I'm starting to see regular clicks. I have one click today for $0.22. I'm up to $7.53 so far this month. I hope to get to $10 this month. My goal is $50 next month so I have a lot of writing and back-linking I need to do by next month but I think I can get it done.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Productive Weekend and Concerns

This past weekend was very productive. I was able to create at least 10 forum back-links to each of my articles. I found a really easy way to find forums that allow links in the profile. I'll go over that in a later post. Next, I need to get 10 blog comment back-links. This is going to be tough because I don't want the comments to look like spam, otherwise they will get deleted. I also need to get all my sites bookmarked. I would like to get them all bookmarked on Xomba, Redgage, SheToldMe and 10-20 other social bookmarking sites. I still need to get an Ezine back-link to 8 of my articles.

I didn't realize that back-linking my articles would take up so much time. I'm having concerns and it's making me rethink my strategy. Sometimes I think that I should be cranking out the articles. I need lots of articles to make money but those articles won't make money unless they are ranking well. Info Barrel isn't like eHow - Info Barrel articles don't rank instantly and they need back-links to rank well. I got three clicks today for a total of $0.58 so that gives me hope that the back-linking strategy is working. I'm going to continue with the current strategy and I'll see where I am in three months.

I'm not going to be able to spend much time working on the experiment this week. I've got homework due every day. It's overwhelming but I'm going to try to do some Info Barrel work at night after I get done with homework. I want to be ready to write more articles next week. Anyways, I just wanted to give a little up date on my progress. If I don't post again for a while, it's probably because I'm drowning in homework.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Clicks!

I woke up to three clicks today for a total of $1.41. I'm thrilled! I haven't had any clicks for about two weeks so this is a relief. I was starting to think that I was doing something wrong. I still haven't written anymore articles. I really want to get this whole back-linking thing down before I start adding to my article pot. Yesterday, I signed up for each of the top 50 article directories. Well, it's down to 45 since some of them are membership sites and a few other sites require you to apply to become an author and I don't have that much time. My new back-linking plan is to write 10 Info Barrel articles and add 10-20 social bookmarking links to each of those articles. Then I'm going to add 10 forum back-links and 10 blog profile back-links. Lastly, I'm going to add one EzineArticles back-link to each article. I'll then write 10 more Info Barrel articles and repeat. When I get to 100 articles, I will see where each of my articles are ranking for their main keyword and add 10 social back-links, 10 forum back-links and two article back-links to any article that isn't ranking on the first page. I'll do that at 200 articles, 300 articles and so forth. This way, I'm getting a lot of back-links to my articles but I'm not spending all my time back-linking.

One last thing before I end this post. I really hope the Saints don't cheat again. I wouldn't think they could cheat two years in a row but I've seen bad refs keep their jobs after horrible calls. Anyways, I'm confident the Vikes will win as long as the Cheatin' Saints (not to be confused with NASCAR driver Jimmie "The Cheater" Johnson) don't cheat. Go Vikes!!

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

I'm Preapproved!

The Labor Day weekend was not productive at all. I had meant to get registered at all 300-some social bookmarking sites but I didn't register at a single site. On Friday, I spent all day doing homework. My graphic design classes have a crazy amount of homework and I'm barely keeping up. Saturday was spent shopping with my mom and a family barbecue and bonfire that night. Sunday was spent all day at my grandparents house. I had gotten a Wii when I was shopping with my mom on Saturday so I spent Sunday night playing video games. I was having trouble getting exercise so I figured that a Wii would at least get me off the couch. I ended up getting a sporting game with tennis, bowling, golf, basketball and other outdoor games. It's a fun way to get moving. Labor Day was spent doing more homework. My brother stopped by and, of course, wanted to try out the Wii. He already has a Wii and brought some games with him for me to try. I loved Super Mario Brothers. I'm glad I don't have it cause that could really suck up the time.

Even though I didn't do any work on my Info Barrel experiment, I have some good news about it. I got my preapproval e-mail! I had posted in the forums that I have ten articles posted and not an hour later I received the email. I have around 50 or so eHow articles that I removed in July that I want to get moved over but I was waiting until I was preapproved first. It will take some editing to get the articles to the correct formatting and I didn't want them to have to get approved each time I made an edit.

Today, I wrote two articles for EzineArticles for back-links to my oldest articles. I hope they get approved. I'm still not sure exactly what they want but I've seen some pretty bad articles on there. Mine should get approved with no problems. I'm planning on writing and publishing two Info Barrel articles tonight before I go to bed. I'm also going to try to write two other articles at the same time to use as back-links on EzineArticles.  My plan for the week is to write 10 Info Barrel articles and to get all articles back-linked on EzineArticles. I made out a schedule for the week so I can get all my homework done by the due date and still have enough time to make money to pay bills, write Info Barrel articles and maintain my niche site.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Time Consuming Work

This is day two of my Info Barrel experiment. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll get any articles written today. I already have ten articles written and I'm currently in the process of back-linking them. I made a list of every social bookmarking site listed on the share box on the Info Barrel articles. There's something like 250 sites listed. I also found some other bookmarking sites while browsing the forums. I have a total of 334 social bookmarking sites. I also have a list of 49 article marketing sites and I'm hoping to get another 25-50 back-links from forum profiles. I've been registering at social bookmarking sites all day and determining which ones are worth using. It's tedious work that is going slowly. I've only registered at 50 sites so far. I haven't even started back-linking. Once I get registered at all the sites and get the profiles set up, it should be pretty easy to go through and bookmark all my articles. I'm planning on adding 5 bookmarks per day for each article. I also need to do some article marketing. I heard that you can use the same article for most of the sites so I'm planning on writing 3 short articles for each Info Barrel article to use for back-linking. I'm going to spend all weekend registering at bookmarking sites and will hopefully have them all set up before Monday. It's going to be a boring weekend!

Going on a Journey...

...and I want you to follow along with me. I'm Alecia Gibson. Online, most people know me as Ally or AllyG47. I'm 26 years old and I know exactly what I want in life but I have never figured out how to do it. My goal is to live my life without worrying about money but, at the same time, not having to spend my life working for someone else. I've tried many different professions. I'm currently a freelance writer and I'm going back to school for Web Design and Development. I've decided that the two best ways to achieve my dream is to create a passive income writing and to start niche websites. I'm going to try to make $2,000 a month writing Info Barrel articles and I'm also going to attempt to make $1,000 with a niche website that I started in July. I hope to reach my goal by next June.

Why Info Barrel?

I choose Info Barrel for a few different reasons. I never used to like Info Barrel because I always felt the people that used Info Barrel were snobs. They would hijack threads in forums I visited and go on rants about how every site except Info Barrel sucked. I hated it. I decided on Info Barrel to make my $2,000/month because I've found that it's the easiest site for me to use . I've already posted some articles there and they went past the editors with no problems. I made $5 with Info Barrel last month with only 2 articles which is pretty good. I also found that not everyone that belongs to Info Barrel are snobs, only a few people and I can put up with them.

Why a blog?

I started this blog so I can keep track of how far I am from my goals. I also figured that it would be a good place to get back-links to my articles. I'm currently doing The Challenge with Ed Dale and I've learned that a back-link is a back-link whether it's no-follow or do-follow, PR0 or PR6. Of course, some back-links are better than others but the point is to get as many as you can (without spamming). I'm also going to start a Wordpress blog and the same information here will be posted there. I'll be posting monthly reports on how close I am to my goal. I'll probably write the post reports in an Info Barrel article and link to it from here but I'll also post some mid-monthly reports on this blog so keep an eye out for that.

What's the Plan?

The plan was going to be that I write 12 articles per day Monday through Friday but I've realized that I can't do that when I'm working full time, maintaining a niche site and going to college. I'm going to write 3 articles a day to start with and see if I can keep up. They key is to write something every day and to keep the momentum going. I will adjust my daily goal if I can't keep up. I'm also going to try to stop at every 10 articles and add a couple back-links to each article.

So there's my experiment laid out in front of you. As you can see, I've got a lot of work to do. I'll be adding more posts in the coming weeks discussing keyword research, proper SEO, getting back-links, optimizing the author's box and more. If you are interested in joining Info Barrel yourself, click here to join.