I’ve been consistently pumping out infobarrel articles each day, though not as fast as I wanted too. I’m a bit behind on my output with around 35 or so articles. However, I’m going to make a concerted effort to pump out 10 – 15 a day to get reach that 100 by next Monday.
I’ll tell your right now, get an infobarrel acount. Right now, I am LOVING infobarrel for the link juice it provides. I’m going through all my hubs (almost 350 now) and adding at least one backlink from infobarrel to each hub. I’ve notices an increase in traffic to hubs that have infobarrel links. I’ve also noticed with some of my self hosted niches that a couple infobarrel links was enough to push it into #4 of the front page.
I’m not saying throwing a couple infobarrel links will push your hub to the number one position for “acne” or anything, but there is some solid link juice to be had. If you are targeting a long tail with little to no competition, a couple info barrel articles and Ezines should be enough to put your site on page one.
So far, my observation is that infobarrel links are about equivalent to Ezine links. However, if I had to choose between the two, I’d actually go with infobarrel because you can put your own ads on and include eBay/Amazon affiliate sales. I’m really starting to think of infobarrel as EzineArticles with the ability to make a bit of money.
As infobarrel does not have Google analytics functionality built in yet (they have built a beta version of this, but it’s not open to the public yet), I’m flying blind here as to what’s going on with traffic. I hope they include this stuff soon so I can begin to track these stats.
Now, let’s talk money.
A few days ago I made my my first coin with infobarrel. A .70 cents from an infobarrel ad click. Considering that I’ve only had up info barrel articles for a week, that’s not bad. Considering that I put up 40 hubs and only made like 2 bucks with Hubpages the first 10 days, .70 fit the first weeks seems on track.
With only a bit over a week since first posting my articles up, it’s still too early to ascertain the money making capability of infobarrel. The articles I’ve posted are still finding their rankings in Google. Even with Hubpages, it’s often a week between putting up a hub before I find I get a click – and Hubpages has more domain authority than infobarrel. So it might take 2 or 3 weeks to really start to get clicks from infobarrel — at least this is my hope!
Today (this morning), I’ve actually made $2 from infobarrel with 2 clicks. Very interesting. We will see if I start to score regular clicks now that it’s been over a week. Regardless, that’s 2 bucks I didn’t have today. If I can make $5 bucks a day regularly from 100 infobarrel hubs, I’ll be very happy with my 100 article experiment.
I have been doing almost NO external backlink support to my infobarrel articles. The only linking I am doing is between my own Infobarrel articles. Once I get these 100 or so articles up, I will start to send Ezine article backlinks to each infobarrel article and a run with BMD, UAW, and AMA.
So how to Hubpages compare to Infobarrel? My observation is that hubs have more domain authority and thus your long tails will naturally rank higher and bring in more people. I can state pretty confidently, as someone who has almost 350 hubs, if I had put those 30 or so infobarrels on Hubpages, I’m sure I would have made more money. One advantage hubpages has is that the position of the ads are much better for getting clicks. If you set your layout just right, you have a top strip of ads follow by a box of ads immedietly to the right. You also have ads to the right hand side of the screen, in the middle of the article (if you include a picture as I have suggested, half way thorugh the body), and at the very end of the article.
Infobarrel only has 3 ads per article — not 5 like hubpages. The default layout position of the ads to the left of the first paragraph. Basically, hubpages is far more optimized for adsense clicks than is infobarrel, especially with the top strip and right box of ads. It’s very easy to click on that L shape ad strip. Look at the image below to see what I’m talking about.
Decent, but not as good as it could be
Hubpages has MUCH better ad layout
Now, there are various layouts to play around with in infobarrel, so it could be that you can tinker around with it. From what I’ve seen though,the LESS text you have in your article, the better the default ad layout is for getting clicks. However, the less text you have, the less long tails you have and the less trafic you get. But, i’m going to play around and see if I can’t squeeze out a better layout for ads while including at least 400 words of text.
Now, even if hubpages is better for directly making money (but we can’t tell that until about a month), Infobarrel indirectly makes me more money because any Infobarrel link to a Hubpage ultimately drives up the Hubpage ranking and brings in more traffic. In fact, it’s only beneficial since you have the possibility of making money with Infobarrels while also providing solid backlink juice that will help you make even more money with Hubpages or whatever other site you are sending links to.
It’s very important that you have access to as many different backlinks sources as possible. It’s MUCH better to have 2 backlinks for Squidoo, and 2 from Hubpages than 15 Ezine Article links. Many SEO’s feel that after 5 or so links from the same C class IP, Google gives diminishing returns for link juice.
I’d say hands down, if it’s better to use Infobarrel as backlink source over GoArticles. These days, GoArticles don’t have much love from Google. It’s taken me weeks to have GoArticle articles get indexed by Google. I’m not saying don’t have GoArticles, but if you only have one article and you have to choose which service to use, put it up on Infobarrel – you may make some money from it while giving better link juice.
So, I’m quite happy so far. It’s too early to tell still the money making potential with Infobarrels – we need to give at least another week to age the articles, I need to send some more backlinks, and I need to get out another 60 or so articles. I suspect getting at least $5 bucks a day should be very possible though. It just might not be as instant a process as Hubpages.
So, it’s well worth signing up for an Infobarrel account if you don’t have one already – you don’t want to miss out on this money making link source. I have a good idea about maximizing your article writing work to reap the most benefits from both Hubpages and Ezine articles in one go. I’ll discuss it next week. But the basic premise is to write an article for Ezine articles, Hubpages, and infobarrel by using SPIN notation.
That one article, if you do a good enough job, will be unique – unique enough to meet the Ezine articles, Hubpages, and infobarrel requirements. I want to test it out though.
I’ll post another update next week, once I have my 100 or so article up. We’ll see what happens then in terms of $.
22 Comments
Thanks for sharing. I do have a few articles at IB but haven’t seen too much action yet, although I can’t say my KW choices were the best. I do like the in-text linking option though.
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Thanks for the great info Ben. I really appreciate how you are willing to share and how well you lay out the information. I am signing up with IB right now using your link and will be posting soon.
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Following your experiment with a lot of interest…thanks for sharing all of your results with us..
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I am liking infobarrel much better then ezinearticles because they actually approve my articles FAST unlike eza! I think they have a lot of potential and I am going to start buidling a parallel series of articles over there too.
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yea, Info Barrel has a lot of potential. For making quick money, hubpages is better, but it’s good investment to have infobarrel articles as a link resource and to make money. As they get more domain authority, articles you have up will make more money.
You can also just shortcut the process by sending links. Either way, it’s a great link resource. The owners of the company are all SEO’s as well so they know what they are doing.
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I’ve started using infobarrel too, mainly for backlinks to my niche sites. Approval is very fast. I’m using spun articles and rewriting the first and last paragraph and they’re being accepted OK by both infobarrel and ezine.
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Seems that Ben is writing too much infobarrels since the site is lagging so much
I can’t upload my articles because the server is timing out all the time!!
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Thanks for sharing ben, I’ll start on infobarrel once my 100 hubs are in the bag
are you making your infobarrels on the same keywords as your hubs and just rewritting the articles or are you making your infobarrels on different keywords than your hubs?
Thanks again
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admin Reply:
June 25th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Hi Lee. A combination of both. I’m exloring new niches and using some to support hubpages/ezines.
You can make money with them too. I took home $5 yesterday from my infobarrels.
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Good job Ben,
How’s hubpages going? You sayed the last time that is not going up (the income). It has gone up? Just curios
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Are you familiar with howhub.com for backlinks or adsense revenue? How fast indexing and link juice etc. I haven’t tried it out yet but maybe I will.
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admin Reply:
June 26th, 2009 at 8:56 am
@phillip
Never used it
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Hey Ben,
What’s the most time-efficient word count length for EZine article promo?
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Ben, nice to see you trying new things out. I have no doubt that you’ll soon be making a living online.
Is this how we should do our keyword research for info barrels and hubpages?:
Here’s an example. Type in “life insurance” into the keyword tool. You’ll see that one of the long-tails, “life insurance for elderly”, has a CPC of $14.33 and 590 clicks. There is virtually no competition in the SERP if you look at page rank. So we should go ahead and make a hub or infobarrel about “life insurance for elderly”? Simple as that?
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admin Reply:
June 28th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Yea, that’s one way to do it. However, with HIGH CPC stuff like that — it’s quite hard to rank, since everyone want’s a piece of the pie. I suspect you WON’T rank at all for that term — at least not a while. Google seems to have some sort of mini sandbox when it comes to the insurance/loan/forex/stocks/viagra niches. I don’t think I’ve ever had an insurance click yet.
However, you may be able to rank for some longer tails in that niche, and people might just click on your add. So yes, you can give that one a shot. I’ve found targetting product brands/specific products to be quite effecitve. Eg. Super Flat Iron Machine for Acne or John Does Magic Cancer Cream. Since it’s so focused, people are ready to click on an add showing the product name.
Ben
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btw. Are you using interest based advertising or no?
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admin Reply:
June 28th, 2009 at 8:22 am
yes
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Thanks for the reply Ben! Virtually all of my 60 or so hubs have to do with insurance and loans! Gotta change strategy then.
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admin Reply:
June 28th, 2009 at 9:19 am
I’m not saying you can’t get money in insurance with long tails. It will just be much harder to rank with.
However, you don’t want all your hubs around the same topic. If you make 50 hubs in a niche and find you are NOT getting much in the way of clicks after a couple weeks, then it’s time to move somewhere else.
You really want as many completely different niches as possible. You can find a lot of “gold” niches like this and you diversify — always a good thing. As a rule of thumb, if I find a niche that looks promising, I throw up about 10 or so hubs about it then move on to a different topic. If some of those hubs start getting clicks, then I go back and start to expand in that area. But sometimes you don’t start to see any clicks for a week or two.
Cheers
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Also, forgot to ask, if you used TKA’s profit potential formula, what’s the average potential you have for each keyword? Does it make sense targeting $10 potential or might their be more traffic than usual?
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admin Reply:
June 28th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Nick, I don’t really follow Court’s formula, exactly — I do my own thing. I go about my niche building Grizz style. But Court’s forumla will definetly work if you follow it.
However, when looking at a niche, I will run the number to estimate exactly how much to go for. I like to try and go for niches that will yeild a $150 or more revenue. However, if there is a niche that brings in 10 bucks a month and all it take is writing a article, then go for it. This is sort of what I’ve been doing with hubpages. 10 bucks a month is not a big deal, but when you have 200 or sites that brings in 10 bucks a month…
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Looking at the example given by Nick “life insurance for elderly” the top sites are all PR0,1,2,3 but most of them have the keyword in the URL, title, description and header (I used market samurai). However there are lots of long tailed insurance related keywords that have a bit higher competition as regards PR but most of them do not have the keyword in URL title etc. Ben would these be OK. You said you haven’t had any clicks for insurance related hubs but I don’t see why these wouldn’t be worth trying or do you think they’ll be dumped in the sandbox straight away?
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admin Reply:
June 28th, 2009 at 10:09 am
I’d say it’s worth giving it a shot. Just because I haven’t had any luck, doesn’t mean people won’t be able to find some success. However, you absolutely won’t rank for “life insurance for the elderly” but you may (accidentally) ranks for a much wider longtail version of that. I don’t know if you get thrown in a sandbox, but google doesn’t rank you high at all for terms like these.
The bottom line: with hubs, try as many different niches and as many different possibilities. I gauge this by trying 10 or so hubs in a niche, If I don’t get any clicks after a couple weeks, I move on to something else.
Now, if you wanted to tackle that niche with a full blown campaign, then that’s a different story. You would buy your domain, then make 5 ezines, 5 hubs, 5 infobarrels about that topic, then go for there. Maybe in a few months you would start to rank high for that. But in my experience, domain authority from hubpages or not, you won’t find yourself on the front page (or second page or third) for any of the classic insurance/travel/loans/forex/stocks/business/viagra/weightloss niches. Now there may be exceptions, but so far, it’s what I’ve seen. I prefer to go for small side niches now that are not as well known. These less well known, VERY specific niches really lendthemselves well to adsense. And of course, competition is significantly reduced.
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Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
Hobosic
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Easiest and the best way to earn online you have shown to me , thank you very much.
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Ben, I’ve been taking your advice with creating Info Barrels, however I’m finding their draft/publish feature is quite frustrating. Several times I’ve hit publish only to no longer see any evidence of the text I’ve written, yet it tells me I have an article with that title, somewhere…You noticed this issue during your time using the site? I know you’re not their customer service, but just curious if it’s a glitch you’ve had happen as well…Thanks again for your info and help…
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Hi Ben
I know this is a old post that you wrote but i really hope you get this message as I am still really fascinated about making money with info barrel and hub pages..
I KNOW its been almost year since you started your info barrel and hub pages but do you still receive ad sense money from them? do you still think you can make money with them?
Also do you think its best to just focus on info barrel as reading from your post it seems they pay more and getting better results? plus obviously the potential of back-links?
or do you recommend doing a hub then spin the article then do a info barrel and use the hub to back link to info barrel?
anyway I appreciate you wisdom and advice on this.
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admin Reply:
April 15th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
mat, I still make money with hubpages and infobarrel. Hubs made good money for 5 months then they were slapped down for about 6 months. They’ve started making good money again, however — I am starting to see 100+ dollar days again. I would now say that hubpgages can still make good money, but now the game’s changed — your hubs need to be suitably aged (6 months to a year) before they rank well. And they need backlinks. Infobarrel does ok — I still make money with it, though not as much as hubpages.
Between the two, I would say focus on hubs — the CTR is much higher. But age is pretty key with hubs now — if you bang out a couple hundred hubs and expect to make a full time income in a couple, that won’t happen. Now you need to treat them like any other self hosted website — except that it actually takes longer to rank them now.
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mat@passport covers Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Thanks Ben
for your quick feedback
man it seems I might as-well make 100 blogger blogs…instead..lol
just wondering on back links what’s the best way to create good juicy ones?
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admin Reply:
April 18th, 2010 at 9:03 am
I don’t suggest wasting time with blogger blogs. These days, blogger blogs are the hardest to rank. Your best bet is to buy self TLD hosted domains. Yes, it’s expensive. But if you spend the money, you are likely to develop them and they rank better than do a lot of the 2.0’s out there. That seems to be an assumption google has now with ranking: self hosted domains are more “trusted” than “free” sites.”
If you are dead flat broke, then find some way to start buying self hosted domains — it’s the best way to go now. Your other alternative is to churn out a zillion hubs, but as I said, don’t expect too much for 6 months to a year — and they need backlinks. I you honest to god can’t come up with them money for a lot of self hosted domains, then do your research and buy 5 or so good keywords, keywords that you can develop into large sites over a year, then work those.
The prevailing assumption people have these days when it comes to MMO is “how can I make money for free or for cheap.” I’ll tell you right now — in my year and a half of doing this, he who’s not afraid to throw down some coin (domains, software, buying links of some sort, outsourcing, etc) tends to do a lot better than those looking to do everything free. That’s not saying you can’t do it all for free, but it takes a looooooot longer. The grizzly style of building a network of hundreds of free web 2.0 and blogger blogs, I feel, is not really an option anymore.
For backlinks, read my backlink posts — i talk a lot about how to get them.
Hey Ben, I’ve been following your blog for a good few months now (got to a little later than I wanted) and I have a question. You recommend now to make your own websites since you can rank easier and faster and you get to keep 100% of the profits, but what do you make your websites about? Do you focus on information sites and slap on Adsense? Maybe you just make review sites for Ebay, Amazon and Clickbank? Make your own product? What do you put on your websites that you can actually make money with?
Please reply back, I’ve been pondering about this for too long lol
Anastasia
PS. Hope you had a good backpacking trip!
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I just came across your site today and appreciate the detailed info you’re providing about InfoBarrel and your experience so far. Thanks for the information. I’ll continue to follow your site.
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