Making Money with Xomba

In the comments of my last Xomba post, Gayle asked me if I had any tips on writing for Xomba. Keeping in mind that I've only been focused on Xomba for a little over a week or so, these are some of the things I'm doing that might be helping with my Xomba earnings:


1. If at all possible, become a Featured Author as it increases your exposure on the site. I am a Featured Author for Business and Entrepreneurs and there is another opening in that category. (There are two Featured Authors in each category.) There are openings in several other categories as well. Pick something you have some experience with and use your eHow articles as part of your 'resume'.

Your only requirement to keep your status as a Featured Author is to write one Xombyte (minimum 150 word article) every two weeks and post it in your category. That is so easy to do! You are free to write in other categories as well.

2.  Vote for your Xombyte or Xomblurb once you have posted it. Content is featured on the site, based in part on the number of votes it gets. In some cases it doesn't seem to take very many votes to get your byte or blurb featured.

3. Post lots of content. As I mentioned in my last post, it takes almost no time to write a Xomblurb. I estimate two minutes or less. If you look at my list of Xomblurbs you can see that their posting times are all 2-4 minutes apart. That includes the time it takes to copy and paste my eHow link, type in a title, choose a category, type in five tag words, type my 50 word description, and submit the blurb. In a few cases I even uploaded a picture.

You won't believe how easy it is to post a Xomblurb until you try it yourself. Consider doing ten a day until your entire eHow library is linked to.

That's really all I've done so far to generate $4.35 in earnings and put up backlinks to 70+  of my eHow articles in about a week's time. If my Xomba experiment continues to go well I will probably work on some other things like including affiliate links and linking my Xomba articles together to see if I can bump the earnings even more.

Remember, Xomba also rewards you for referrals to the site with 10% of your referrals' earnings. The 10% comes out of Xomba's cut, not the writer's so you can feel good about generating residual income this way as well. The links in this blog post are my referral links. I hope you'll consider signing up for Xomba using one of m y referral links, but either way, please request me as a friend once you're there!

The Xomba Experiment: Backlinks and Earnings

During eHow's recent publishing issues I was looking around for another site on which to write. Like a lot of people I've dabbled a little with other sites, but this time I decided to be a little more focused and pick one site and stick with it for a while. My goal was to build backlinks to my eHow articles while earning some money for my efforts.

I decided to focus first on Xomba for the following reasons:

1. Xomba has something called Xomblurbs, which are basically just bookmarks of other online sites. With a Xomblurb you can link to an eHow article. It requires a 50 word description of the article you are linking to, which I found can be done in a minute or less.
2. Xomba is looking for Featured Authors in various categories and it's very easy to become one. I applied for the Business and Entrepreneurs Featured Author and was approved and on site within the day. In order to keep my position I need only write a new Xombyte (150 word articles) in my category once every two weeks.

So, here are the results of my Xomba experience about one week in:

I've written 2 Xombytes (full articles) and 70 Xomblurbs (50 word links to my eHow articles). My goal is to have Xomblurbs with links to all 200+ of my eHow articles within the next couple of week. Xomblurbs honestly take me just a minute or two to write and they're actually kind of fun to do. And the publishing with Xomba is reliable and seamless...a nice change from eHow! :-)

I'm sure you're wondering about earnings. In the last week I've earned $4.35 at Xomba. That really got my attention! All of this was done primarily by building links to my eHow articles and currently I have links to less than half. Imagine when all my articles are linked. Again, I've found it takes about a minute (as in 60 seconds) to write a Xomblurb linking to an eHow article.

Here are what I consider to be the pros and cons of Xomba:

Pros:

• Easy (and free) to sign up.
• Reliable publishing and good customer service.
• FAST indexing. It's not unusual to see my Xomba content in the search engines the same day. Many times my Xomba results is right there alongside my eHow result.
• Ability to use affiliate links in Xomba content. As you may know, eHow just set a policy prohibiting this. I read of one person online who is having good results just writing short reviews on Xomba and linking to Amazon products with affiliate links. I think this has a lot of potential.
• Ability to become a Featured Author.

Cons:

• 50/50 Adsense split is not the most generous out there. (Having said that, I've been happy with my Xomba earnings.)
• Links on Xomba are not 'do follow' links. 'Do Follow' links carry more juice as backlinks so this is a drawback.

I'll update you with my continuing Xomba experiment over the next few weeks. As I said, my goal is to get all of my eHow articles backlinked with Xomblurbs and to write at least enough in the way of Xombytes to keep my Featured Author status.

It might be worth it to you as an eHow writer to conduct your own Xomba experiment by creating Xomblurbs with links to your eHow articles. The time investment is not great so there's not much to lose. You can sign up with Xomba for free here. (You'll need a Google Adsense account to earn with Xomba. If you don't have one, there are easy instructions on how to get one under Xomba's help tab.)

Disclosure: The Xomba links in this post are referral links. That brings up another way to earn with Xomba: you earn 10% of your referrals' earnings and the amount comes from Xomba's cut, not the writer's cut. It's another good source of residual income. I feel that I should point out, however, that none of my earnings listed above came from referral income because I didn't have any referrals during that week. So it is possible to earn income at Xomba just from writing and linking.

Choosing eHow Keywords with the Google Keyword Tool

Wondering how to write eHow articles that pay? Well a helpful guy named Nate (barrelroll on eHow) has written a free, one-page guide on how to pick profitable keywords with the Google Keyword Tool. Nate has been writing on eHow for less than a year and his earnings have grown to over $650 per month.

Take five minutes and see if you can't learn something from Nate's free article about using a free keyword tool. It's the most 'to the point' explanation I've ever read.

Write for eHow is Now on Facebook!

If you're a reader of this blog and also on Facebook, consider becoming a fan of my new Facebook page. And if you're not on Facebook, consider this an invitation to join. The social and professional networking possibilities are amazing! And it's a lot of fun too.

Write for eHow on Facebook

A Two Month eHow Earnings Update

I see that it's been two months since I've updated my eHow earnings on this blog. Like a lot of eHow writers, I suffered a dip in earnings during December and January. After two consecutive months (October and November) of $200+ earnings, my December earnings were $189.85 and January's were $158.54. Ouch.

How much of this was due to the UK fiasco at eHow, I'm not sure. With the earnings algorithm kept secret, we never really know. I do know that eHow has made good on their promise to give us a little bonus in earnings in January to make up for the lost UK earnings. My January payment ended up being $175.55, which amounted to a $17 bonus.

The good news in all of this? It's the same as always: residual income. I wrote exactly one article in December and one in January, which means my earnings for those two months, $365.40, were almost entirely passive income! I love that!

So despite the poor communication, and the buggy site, and the monthly rule changes, I plan to continue writing at eHow. It's still fun for me to come up with how-to articles and put them up on the site and see how they do. Some of the ones that become successful continue to surprise me.

Speaking of successful eHow articles, back in June I blogged about my first $100 article. Since that time, that article has almost reached the $200 mark. In fact, three more of my articles have now passed the $100 mark and three more are within $10 of doing so. So it shouldn't be long before I have seven $100+ articles.

There is no way I could have predicted that these would be the articles to cross the barrier and do so well. While I have learned a ton about key word research and still employ it, there is still a lot of mystery and luck involved when it comes to making money online.

So how's that for a silver lining for these past two dreary months? Residual income and $100+ articles are what we'll keep me plugging on at eHow. How have your earnings been?

Related info: Learn how to make money with eHow from one of it's top earning writers. This is the person who first showed me the earning power of eHow and how to harness it!