The Power of Twitter

A great way to promote your articles and gain backlinks is by using Twitter.  If you have a lot of Twitter followers that is an instant audience for your articles, but you can also get readers through the power of re-tweets.  One example of "the power of Twitter" that I have experienced recently is by promoting my The Real Housewives of Orange County lens by tweeting a poll on that lens regarding readers favorite OC housewives.  A couple of days ago, I tweeted that Tamra Barney & Gretchen Rossi were the most popular OC housewives according to the poll (I had already had a few responses) and was sure to use their Twitter names.  Tamra retweeted my tweet and since then, there has been a constant stream of people voting in the poll and visiting the link.  I have also gained more Twitter followers and other users have retweeted my tweet.  Today, I have had over 200 readers of my The Real Housewives of Orange County lens and hopefully they are sticking around to check out my other lenses as well.  This boost of traffic is great for increasing my lensrank on Squidoo (equaling higher payouts) and hopefully for resulting in more sales through the page.  My The Real Housewives of Orange County lens has already had success in selling products through Amazon.  So keep in mind when writing articles to be sure to tweet your article or a portion of the article (such as a poll or quiz) to your Twitter followers.

Examiner

A paid to write site I haven't written about much, but that is a great paid to write site is Examiner.  At Examiner you must apply to write on a certain topic, but then are unlimited in what you can write about on that topic.  You can also apply to write on additional topics.  Examiner pays approximately $0.01 per view and offers a Local Incentive Program of $1 per article (max $5 per year) if you are a neighborhood examiner.  There is a lot of money to be made with Examiner provided that you are dedicated and write consistently.  I unfortunately have been very lazy when writing for Examiner and have not written enough articles.  Particularly stupid considering I am a neighborhood examiner and am eligible for an easy $260 a year before performance views simply from writing articles for Examiner.  My goal for the rest of the year and in the new year is to regularly write at least 5 articles per week for Examiner so that I can get the bonuses and increase my passive earnings from my articles.  If you want to start writing for Examiner, you can sign up here.

Yahoo! Voices Changes

As I previously mentioned, Associated Content is now Yahoo! Voices.  As part of the change, Yahoo! Voices has apparently decided to go through and purge several of the articles on the site.  (Apparently 75,000 to start and more as times goes by.)  The strange thing is how they are going about it.  I have two articles that were published over one year ago that I received e-mails regarding stating that they were rejected for publication.  The e-mails were written as if I had just submitted the content for review so the wording was weird given they had been published for over one year.

With the first article, it was "rejected" but in reality de-published for taking content from other sources.  It was a list of the 2011 Oscar winners, so obviously that is content that is published numerous locations and there really aren't a variety of ways to write it a different way.  Annoying, especially given it had gotten a lot of traffic in the past few months with talk of the 2012 Oscars, but no big deal.

The second article was "rejected" for upfront payment because it was too short.  The ridiculous part about that is that I have already received an upfront payment for that article.  In fact, I received upfront payment for that article in January, 2011!  So again, what are they going to do? Take the money back?

The only frustrating thing is that when the articles are "rejected" they are not only un-published (just because the 2nd article wasn't good enough for an upfront payment doesn't mean it's not good enough to be published) but you don't have the option of going back & editing the articles to resubmit.  The only options are to view the article or delete it.  At least you can view it which gives the option of cutting & pasting the article and either rewriting it for Yahoo! Voices or submitting it to another paid to write site.  I haven't decided which I'm going to do.  The 2nd article is a local article and considering I am the local writer for my neighborhood on Examiner, I will likely edit the article to make it more timely and relevant and fleshed out and submit it to Examiner.  The Oscar article isn't really worth much, but I may try to publish it some place like Bukisa or Triond to get the occasional view.  If I were patient I could also create a Hub, Lens, or Page on Hubpages, Squidoo, and Wizzley respectively regarding the 2011 Oscar winners and use it to promote the DVDs of the movies nominated on Amazon to try to gain affiliate sales.  I already have a lens like that ready to go for the 2012 Oscars.

Has the change to Yahoo! Voices affected you? What are your thoughts on the change?

Associated Content now Yahoo! Voices

On December 2, 2011, Associated Content was changed to Yahoo! Voices.  All prior blog posts and references to Associated Content will be kept on this blog, but going forward the site will be referred to as Yahoo! Voices.  Further, I recently created a page dedicated to chronicling my Associated Content earnings on Hubpages, that hub will only include my earnings from 2010 & 2011.  Going forward my earnings from 2012 and in the future, will be chronicled in the new Squidoo lens I created on my Yahoo! Voices earnings.

Writing Tip: Think Ahead

When thinking of topics to write about, try to think 1 to 2 months ahead as to holidays or event that will receive a lot of traffic. For example, right now it is early December, therefore you should think of writing articles about New Year's, Valentine's Day, and even St. Patrick's Day. The reason being that by the time people are searching for info on these holidays, you will have had the opportunity to properly backlink and promote your articles and search engines will have had the time to find and index your articles. Thinking ahead will ensure that your articles are primed to get the most traffic as possible.
Didn't think ahead? It's December and you probably have Christmas on your mind but worry it's too late to write about it--it isn't! Lots of people are searching for Christmas stuff now so you can certainly benefit from writing Christmas articles in December and even if they aren't as highly ranked as they could be or don't have much backlink juice yet, don't worry! They will be primed and ready to go next year when people start searching for Christmas themed articles.

More Pages About My Paid 2 Write Earnings

If you're interested in learning more about how much money I am making writing articles online, check out my Squidoo pages about My Triond Earnings and My Bukisa Earnings.  Triond and Bukisa are both lower earning paid to write sites that going forward I plan to use to build backlinks for the more stronger earning sites like Infobarrel and Squidoo.  In fact, my short term goal for monthly earnings for Triond and Bukisa is only $1 per month because I am not concerned about making money with these sites as much as I am about using them to direct more traffic to my pages that have the potential to earn more money.