Monday, September 26, 2011

Blogging makes it harder to write content for sale to others

My affiliate earnings are slowly increasing. However the process is very slow, and I'm still not pulling in that much money. So I have been considering writing content for sale to publishers again.

Needless to say, with the dominance of the internet there are few offline writing markets left. There's no shortage of such opportunities online, though, of course. As well as all the webmasters looking for writers on forums and freelance job boards, there are some sites dedicated to the purpose of supplying content to individuals and companies.

Unfortunately the pay rates are very low for this kind of work. (That's hardly surprising considering that pretty much all the reading material on the internet is offered for free.) This fact, compared with the sharp deadlines that you often have to commit to make it pretty unappealing.

Having been blogging for ages, I'm more attached to what I write than ever before. I just don't like the idea of handing my work, along with all my claims to ownership, over to someone else for a flat fee. In any case, I think it could be used to draw in search engine traffic by being put on one of my blogs. And if not there, then it could be part of an article with a backlink to one of my blogs or websites. By using my writing to bring in more traffic, it could prove to be more of an earner in the long run anyway.

I've had this feeling for a while. It seems to be intensifying. And I suspect it's quite common amongst bloggers.

What are your thoughts? Does blogging make you more attached to what you write?

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Thoughts on making money from Google Earth

A couple of years ago I worte about how I used Google Earth to find clusters of apartment blocks to target when I go on flyer distribution runs. I've had some more thoughts on how to use this amazing program to make money.

One thing that really stands out when you look at some suburban areas is the number of swimming pools in backyards. I'm sure that pool cleaning businesses and the like would have already taken full advantage of this information and have been focusing on these areas with their offline promotions. But even if you weren't actually in the business you could still make some money from this.

You could build a basic website listing some affiliate programs for swimming pool supplies and related products. There are a few out there. Then you could do a flyer run advertising that URL in those pool rich streets.

You could also look for very big gardens with lots of vegetation. You could do the same with gardening, outdoor and "DIY" affiliate programs. Some of these programs have good potential. I've seen a couple of Aussie garden shed companies that will pay you five percent per sale, for example. Considering the actual products are often a grand or more, that could end up being lucrative if you kept going long enough.

And here's another idea: Google Earth will show you where all the brand new suburbs are. You could promote a home security website to them, since these are the kinds of products that many new home owners would be thinking about getting, but still be unlikely to have purchased.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Sooperarticles gets indexed by Google quickly

As I've mentioned previously I've been trying out different article directories. One of those that stands out is Sooperarticles.

It does sometimes take a few days or more to get your articles approved, but it's definitely worth the wait. Not only does it get a lot of traffic and have decent page rank, but your articles are indexed by Google very quickly. I just got an e-mail notification that my latest article had been accepted so I Googled the title and it was there.

It's much better that you wait a while to get an article accepted by a directory than wait for ever for it to get indexed.