I am an attorney by day, writer by night. Follow my journey as I get paid to write online. Learn about all of the various websites where you can learn how to make money online simply by writing articles and creating webpages.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Places That Help Pay Rent
Monday, March 24, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
Make Money & Get Disney's Frozen on DVD or Blu-Ray for Free!
Disney, Walmart and TopCashBack are teaming up so that you can get a free copy of Disney's Frozen on DVD or Blu-Ray! (And for me--and probably you!, make a little money on top of that!)
The first step is to sign up for TopCashBack here.
Then search Walmart on the site and click the orange "cash back" button.
Once you get to the Walmart site, you will see that they are offering $17-$22 cash back and will offer you instructions on how to get the DVD for free. The instructions are also below:
- Click the orange "Get Cash Back Now" button to click through and shop at Walmart.com--this is key to getting the cash back & making some money!
- Once at Walmart.com, search for Frozen and select either the regular DVD for $14.96 the Blu-Ray for $19.96.
- Choose to have the DVD or Blu-Ray picked up at a nearby Walmart store or FedEx Office location.
- For the DVD you will get $17.00 cash back(to cover the purchase price & taxes--shipping is free) and for the Blu-Ray you will get $22.00 cash back.
I ordered the regular DVD (the Blu-Ray was sold out) and with taxes my total cost was $15.91. Therefore, I will not only get the Frozen DVD for free, but I will make an extra $1.09 in cash back!
If you want to get the Frozen DVD for free and make a little extra money, hurry up and get started here because it's only good today (Friday, March 21, 2014)!
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Year End Goals
I also became enamored with some new sites like Bubblews. Which is a great way to earn money quickly and get paid consistently provided you work hard. I was working very hard at Bubblews last week and then some life got in the way and Friday night, I fell off the Bubblews wagon and haven't gotten back on my 10 posts a day and frequent commenting/liking on the site.
This week, I have focused on trying to meet some very short term goals that will effect how my 2013 ends up.
Hubpages Goal
First, my goals was to reach $50 in Ad Program earnings on Hubpages so that I will get paid out next month and have a Hubpages payout for 2013. I have been working hard promoting my Hubs and am about $1 away...$1.02 to be exact. With 4 days left in November (counting today as I don't know today's earnings), I think I'm on track to reach my goal. For the past two days I've earned $0.38 and $0.48 and according to Google Analytics, I have more views to my hubs today than each of the last two days, so even with the holiday tomorrow, I think I'm in good shape.
You can help me out by checking out my Hubs here.
Adsense Goal
My next goal was to reach a total of $100 in Adsense earnings so I could get paid my Adsense earnings in 2013. With a balance of $99.00 in Adsense earnings by the end of last month and an average Adsense earnings per month of about 10 cents now that Infobarrel no longer uses Adsense, I figured that goal was not even worth pursuing. However, someone I must have lucked out as someone must have liked one of the Adsense ads with my Adsense code as I received a click with earnings somewhere under $2 and between that and impression earnings, etc... have a current balance for the month of $2.01 so I should receive payment next month!
Yahoo! Voices Goal
I used to be guaranteed that I'd reach the $1.50 minimum from Yahoo! Voices monthly doing no work either promoting my articles or writing new ones, yet in the past few months my earnings have dropped and I have been getting paid every other month. Right now my balance is $1.08 and given that I seem guaranteed to reach my goal with Hubpages, I plan to spend the next three days promoting my Yahoo! Voices articles in hopes I will be paid my November earnings next month.
You can help me out by checking out my Yahoo! Voices earnings here.
Bubblews Goal
Once I have complete the above goals, I plan to get back on the Bubblews wagon and get back to actively reading, liking, and commenting on my connections posts while writing the 10 posts per day myself. Based upon how I was doing, I should reach payout every other day and hopefully daily by the end of 2013.
You can check out my Bubblews posts here.
Miscellaneous Goals
If I have time after completing the goals ahead, I will then focus on my Examiner writing and at a minimum do they 7 slideshows (guaranteed $1 each plus views) and 5 articles with videos (another guaranteed $1 each plus views) each week so I stop missing out on $12 per week, which adds up to $624.00 per year. Not to mention how much money I would earn from views if I would to back to writing that many articles per week. Last December I earned over $700 from Examiner, I really need to be more active on Examiner.
Additionally, I will focus more on my personal blogs and using affiliate marketing and promoting products with those sites. There's a lot of money out there and I am missing out on it, especially with Black Friday, I could have potentially made a lot of money promoting sales and products.
Oh, one more goal I forgot. Ebates is currently offering a promotion of $50 in referral fees for every 2 new referrals you sign up who make a purchase at one of Ebates cash back shopping sites of $25 by December 31st. So far I have one new referral, but he has not made a purchase. I will continue to promote Ebates in hopes of getting those referral fees.
If you are not an Ebates member, it's a great site where you earn cash back for shopping online at your favorite stores. Please sign up with my referral link here. If you do, you will get a $10 gift card to the store of your choice just for signing up!
So what are your goals for the end of 2013?
Friday, November 22, 2013
Bubblews
Sunday, August 4, 2013
SirGo--A Squidoo Clone & My New Squidoo Alternative?
As Squidoo continues to undergo a number of changes and lock lensmasters' accounts, including my own, many lensmasters are looking for new Squidoo alternatives to transfer their old lenses to. While there are already many established sites like Wizzley and Hubpages that are great platforms to create pages, they don't have all of the same modules that Squidoo has. One module in particular that Squidoo has that Wizzley and Hubpages are missing is the "Black Box" module. It can be found in Zujava, but I'm currently in the Zujava Petting Zu and have been waiting for an editor to review my leaves for about a month.
I've lost patience with losing income from the dozens of lenses that I spent hours and hours working on. I have not received a response to my appeal and it is time to move on and publish my lenses elsewhere. Some of my lenses will go to Hubpages, Wizzley, and even new Blogger blogs, but a few are formatted in such a way that I want to be able to keep the same formatting and use a "Black Box" module. Enter SirGo.
SirGo has the "Black Box" module (although it is called the "Notice" module). I decided to use SirGo to republish my earnings lenses and started with my lens about my Yahoo! Voices earnings. SirGo is a bit slow to publish and is missing some key modules such as the link list module. I was a bit frustrated with SirGo as it freezes a lot and I found it did not work well with Chrome and it was better to use Firefox for publishing my SirGo page. You can see my first SirGo page here and compare it with the old Squidoo lens using the Wayback Machine here.
I'm not sure I am settled on SirGo as my new Squidoo alternative and I will probably test it out and see how some of my pages do on SirGo versus other writing platforms. You make money with SirGo with Google Adsense and Amazon Associates.
You an start making pages with SirGo by going here.
What is your Squidoo alternative?
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Squidoo Account Locked!
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Changes to Infobarrel
Infobarrel has now changed the system where you can be paid directly by Infobarrel. Infobarrel has gotten rid of Chitika entirely as well as an Amazon banner on the side. (Writer can still incorporate Amazon elements into their articles.) Writers will now make money through two tiers of ads on the site. I believe Tier 1 is Adsense and Tier 2 is Chitika, Amazon, and similar ads that they get on the site. Existing members have the option of keeping their Adsense IDs on the site as it was before.
The plus of using the Infobarrel payments system is that payout will be $50 from Infobarrel via Paypal rather than Adsense's $100. Therefore, writers can reach payout faster. Infobarrel also hopes that they will be able to get higher quality ads which will mean higher revenue for everyone. Revenue share will be split with the same percentages previously used.
I have decided to switch to the new program and while there will be a few hiccups for me. Some minor (changing the formatting of the spreadsheet that I used to track my monthly earnings) and some not so minor (being stuck below minimum payout at Chitika and Adsense), I will find ways to deal with it. With Adsense, Infobarrel was my biggest source of Adsense earnings and what was really pushing me towards reaching payout. My other sources of Adsense earnings: Triond, Hubpages, Wizzley, and personal blogs, are minor by comparison. I will have to amp up writing for these sources and promoting them in hopes that I can get Adsense payout at least once per year. On Chitika, Infobarrel is the only place I use Chitika and the earnings there are fairly low. My current balance is around $7.50 and their payout is $10. I hate to lose that money. I might have to incorporate Chitika ads here and on some of my other blogs in hopes of reaching the minimum and then I can either close my Chitika account and take the ads off or if they are some what successful, leave them on.
I will report back to see how the new payment system goes and I do have the option of switching back if I wish (although Chitka ads are definitely gone for good). I imagine I won't want to leave earnings sitting with Infobarrel, so I'll probably stick with it unless it's an utter disaster.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
My 2012 Earnings
My Squidoo earnings were over ten times my 2011 Squidoo earnings and actually twice my total earnings for 2012. However, the big sleeper was Examiner. I got a new Examiner title towards the end of the year and made $705 alone in December! The combination of Squidoo and Examiner ensure that in 2013, my earnings will far exceed my earnings for 2012, with my current goal for the end of 2013 being $10,000!
Wizzley was my big disappointment. If you'll recall, I was inspired by initial results at the end of 2011 and inspired to make more Wizzes in 2012. Well, I really dropped the ball on that. I made one or two new Wizzes, although I'm not sure I even completed them both to the point of being published. Anyway, as a result, my earnings from Wizzley was a whopping goose egg!
My 2012 Squidoo Earnings: $1,383.41
My 2011 Examiner Earnings: $801.50
My 2012 Infobarrel Earnings: $82.21
My 2012 Triond Earnings: $34.75
My 2011 Hubpages Earnings: $22.05
My 2012 Bukisa Earnings: $15.07
My 2012 Yahoo! Voices Earnings: $10.01
My 2011 Wizzley Earnings: $0
Total: $2,349
I have some goals for 2013, which I will share at a later date, but for now I wanted to at least provide this update which is about 2 months overdue!
Friday, June 1, 2012
May, 2012 Earnings
Squidoo Earnings: $79.84
Infobarrel Earnings: $2.01
Hubpages Earnings: $1.16
Triond Earnings:$0.93
Yahoo! Voices Earnings: $0.80
Bukisa Earnings: $1.03
Wizzley Earnings: $0
Total May, 2012 Earnings: $85.77
Sunday, February 5, 2012
My January, 2012 Earnings
As you will see from my Squidoo Earnings, I made over $50 from one lens alone because it was a Tier 1 lens, bumping my entire earnings for the month of January to $65.55. My goal is to find a way to keep promoting and creating lenses that will get enough traffic, likes, clickouts, and Amazon purchases to get as many Tier 1 lenses.
If you don't know, Infobarrel defaults that your ads are shown on 75% of the impressions of your articles. However, you can write articles of certain length to earn points (500+ = 1 point, 800+ = 2 points, 1,000+ + 5 points) to increase your percentage to 80% for 20 points or 85% for 30 points. For every article you write and submit to be featured (must be on a topic listed in monthly contest) you earn another 1% up to five for a potential total of 90% for the next month. I did not write any articles for Infobarrel in November of December; therefore, my ad rate was 75% and believe it or not, it makes a huge difference. My earnings tanked to $2.12 and $2.39 for December and January respectively. In January, I wrote enough articles and submitted enough potential features to meet the 90% rate and boy does it make a difference. On February 1st alone, I had 2 clicks on my Infobarrel articles worth $2.07--more than I made the entire month of January and then again, yesterday I had another click worth $2.22. In four days with the 90% of impressions showing my ads, I doubled what I earned in all of January, so clearly it makes a difference.
One note that is particularly interesting is that all of my February clicks for Infobarrel articles so far have been on my Fungal Ear Infection Treatment article, which is the first article I wrote for Infobarrel. Over the summer I had a particularly painful ear infection that turned out to be a fungal infection. You can read about the whole story in the article, but one thing I found myself doing while in excruciating pain was searching for different treatment and home remedies for fungal ear infections. Unfortunately, most Google searches turned up information about dog ear infections and other fungal infections such as yeast infections or Athlete's foot. Therefore, I took what information I learned from the limited articles about fungal ear infections and wrote my first Infobarrel article. It goes towards my previous advice to write what you don't know.
Here are my earnings for January, 2012:
Squidoo: $65.44
Infobarrel: $2.39
Hubpages: $3.18
Triond: $2.20
Bukisa: $1.70
I did not have any earnings from my 2 pages on Wizzley in January, 2012 and will not update my Yahoo! Voices earnings because I did not reach payout in January, 2012 and you cannot find your earnings by month until you reach payout. I also earned $0.38 from Examiner.
Total Earnings for January, 2012: $75.29
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Writing Tip: Write About What You Don't Know
Recently, I must have stepped on glass and ended up with a shard of glass buried deep in my foot. While some ways to get glass out of the foot is pretty common sense, I figured I would search for any other methods to remove glass from the foot in case there was anything I wasn't thinking of. After I searched several sites for advice on getting glass out of your foot, I wrote an article on Infobarrel about the various methods and ended up publishing How to Get a Shard of Glass Out of Your Foot. Next time you find yourself searching for the answer to a question online, think about whether other might be performing the same search and write an article to answer the question
Sunday, January 1, 2012
My 2011 Earnings from Writing Online & 2012 Writing Goals
My goal for 2012 is by the end of the year to be making $500 per month. A huge goal! I hope to become more diligent about promoting all of my articles and creating backlinks for them. I also plan to write, write, write. I hope to have at least 100 articles/pages for each site that I write for by the end of the year and will greatly increase the number of articles I write for Infobarrel. (I haven't written for Infobarrel in almost 2 months!) This year I received my first tier 1 lens for Squidoo: Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon. I plan to promote this lens so that it remains tier 1 all year and create at least 1 new lens that becomes tier 1. (Ideally, I would like to end 2012 with 5 tier 1 lenses). I also plan to create more pages at Wizzley, where although I have 2 very simple pages, I am pulling in strong Adsense earnings per page.
My 2011 Squidoo Earnings: $100.99
My 2011 Infobarrel Earnings: $20.38
My 2011 Bukisa Earnings: $11.81
My 2011 Triond Earnings: $2.14
My 2011 Associated Content Earnings: $94.62
My 2011 Hubpages Earnings: $2.61
My 2011 Wizzley Earnings: $1.76
My 2011 Examiner Earnings: $9.71
My 2011 eHow Earnings: $310.30
How did you do in 2011? What are your writing goals for 2012?
Thursday, December 22, 2011
The Power of Twitter
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Examiner
Yahoo! Voices Changes
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?
Monday, December 5, 2011
Associated Content now Yahoo! Voices
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.
