Monday, November 24, 2008

How to Generate Passive Online Income Using Articles - Part 1

The webmasters and online marketers are seeking unique articles for their websites. You can write unique articles for them to get a one-time payment for each article you send them. It is nice to get paid for each article you write, but do you know that you can also use your articles to generate passive income.

If you weren’t already known about using articles to earn passive income, it is where you write and publish articles once and later they will earn money for you continuously. This means that you can make money from an article that you wrote 6 months ago.

There are a number of options of generating passive income using articles. Before looking at these options, it is important for you to know that the articles written for this purpose wouldn't earn you profit instantly. The earning will start coming in soon, but it may take some time (5 days, 10 days, 1 month, etc).

Publish Articles on Revenue Sharing Article Directories
One of the most common ways to earn passive income is by publishing your articles on the AdSense revenue sharing article directories. These are the article directories that let you place your Google AdSense ads on your article pages to earn Ad revenue. Usually the sharing term is your AdSense ads will appear on 50% of the page view of your article pages. So, once you published some interesting articles, these articles will attract traffic from time to time which will earn you AdSense revenue constantly. The article directories that share revenue are Articlesrevenue.com and Articlecodex.com and Shareyourexpertise.com.

Write for WorldVillage Bloggers Network
There is also a blog network called WorldVillage Bloggers Network that shares 50% of AdSense revenue. It is owned by the famous AdSense e-book author, Joel Comm. Joel has been building up his WorldVillage Bloggers Network for years and now it is generating thousands of visitors daily. If you become an author of WorldVillage and contribute informative and keyword optimized articles for some time, you might be enjoying nice passive income from those articles.

I was an author of WorldVillage Bloggers Network and published about ten articles on the network one and the half year ago. Those articles that I published really generate traffic and they earned me about $35 monthly AdSense for a consecutive of 6 months. If I have the time to write on a regular basis, then I may be able to earn tripple or more of that AdSense figure every month from this network.

To become an author of WorldVillage Bloggers Network , you may got to http://blog.worldvillage.com/sys/signup2.cgi to send your application. You need to include a sample of your work in the application.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

10 WordPress Plugins for New Blogs

Over the weekend I set up and launched my new Twitter Tips Blog - TwiTip.

Since announcing the launch of TwiTip here on ProBlogger I’ve been asked quite a few times about what WordPress plugins I’ve installed to enhance and add features to the blog.

I still need to add a few more but so far I’ve added the following 10 WordPress plugins:

  1. Akismet - a great comment spam plugin. Interestingly I had comment spam on TwiTip that Akismet filtered within minutes of launching the blog on Twitter.
  2. All in One SEO Pack - a plugin that helps to optimize a blog for search engines. It gives easy ways to set up title tags, descriptions, keywords (both for home pages but also on individual posts) and a variety of other settings that have an impact upon SEO.
  3. cforms - a powerful contact form plugin. It’s a lot more complex than other comment form plugins out there but has a lot more features (some that I’m yet to fully test).
  4. Google XML Sitemaps - a plugin to help Google and other search engines to find every page and post on your blog - good for getting a new blog indexed quickly.
  5. Simple Tags - extends the built in tags features on WordPress.
  6. Subscribe To Comments - a WordPress plugin that allows those leaving comments to check a box and be notified when other people leave a comment on that thread.
  7. Tweet This - ads an invitation for readers to Tweet a link to the post they are reading. While I wouldn’t put this on every blog - it seemed a no brainer on a blog about Twitter.
  8. WordPress.com Stats - I’m using Google Analytics as my main metrics tool for TwiTip but it doesn’t update in real time so this plugin helps to get a quick update of what’s happening on the blog at any given point in time.
  9. WP-Polls - an AJAX polling plugin with some nice features. I’ve previously used the Democracy Plugin but this one seems to be working really nicely so far.
  10. WP Ajax Edit Comments - this plugin allows those leaving comments to edit their comments for a short period of time after they leave a comment.

These are just the first 10 that I’ve already installed (listed in alphabetical order and not in order of importance). There are more to come. For example I’ll install Related Posts (pointless at this point as there are only 5 posts on the blog), WP-Navi (again, no point to install it yet as I don’t have enough posts to need a navigation tool) and WP Super Cache (I’m not doing enough traffic to really need it yet).

They are the 10 WordPress Plugins I’ve installed on TwiTip. If you were starting a new WordPress blog today - which plugins would you be installing?

WidgetBucks Offer New Publishers a $50 Sign On Bonus - Baseball Card Promotion


I’m doing a little promotion with WidgetBucks while at BWE this year.

They’re giving me some 70’s style ‘baseball cards’ with my face on them to give out (why they chose that picture I’ll never know) and are offering ProBlogger readers (whether you get a card or not) a $50 signup bonus if you sign up as a WidgetBucks publisher.

To get the $50 you need to sign up as a publisher and when you’ve earned your first $100 you get the bonus.

WidgetBucks is an ad network that give bloggers the opportunity to make money using their ‘widget ads’.

As with all types of ad networks WidgetBucks convert better on some blogs than others - but they’re worth a try, particularly if you have blog with any kind of products featured on it. They’re also expanding into more geo-targeted ‘travel ads’ (should be announced soon) which will have opportunities for a more international group of publishers.

PS: the baseball card picture is of me eating a New York Pizza while I was there last year. It’s not sweat dripping down my face either - I think it’s a ‘crease’ photo shopped into the card to make it look old (it’s a 70’s style card after all). The back of the card has a few of my ’stats’ on it. You’ll have to find me at BWE to see it.

There is at least one other blogger with their own cards at BWE - collect the complete set and they could be worth something on ebay one day (or it could just be an embarrassing thing that my wife pulls out to show the grandkids in years to come)!

AdSense


When I survey bloggers about the methods that they use to make money from their blogs Google’s AdSense is always the number one response. It is a quick and easy way for bloggers of all sizes to display ads that are relevant to their content.

AdSense is a ‘contextual’ advertising program where publishers simply add a piece of code to their blogs that helps Google analyze what your page is about so they can serve ads on that topic. This increases the chances of your readers clicking the ad which increases the chances that you’ll earn something from them.

AdSense also provide a variety of other income streams to bloggers including a site search tool (you make money by people searching your site) and referral tools (where you can make money by recommending Google products).

AdSense is how I earn around 35% of my income as a full time blogger and I would thoroughly recommend it as a way of monetizing a blog - especially for those just starting out.

If you’re not already an AdSense publisher sign up for it using the following button.