A few years back, all you had to do to make money online was sign up to Clickbank and Ezinearticles, write a few articles with a link to your affiliate product, and wait for the cash to come in. Really, it was as simple as that. Times have changed, though.

These days, it has to be more thought out than that. I admit that a lot of times, I didn’t even bother choosing a keyword for my article – I simply created a flashy title, wrote a 300 word article, included a decent resource box, and managed to make sales from the initial burst of traffic from the article directory itself. Read the rest of this entry

There is no doubt that article directories are taking a more aggressive position when it comes to ads and revenue. Gone are the days where you submitted your work and you could expect a 40% CTR without too much trouble. Today, you are lucky if you break 20% after your reader navigates through the barrage of ads designed to attract their attention, sell them something, or get credit for an ad click. It is too obvious the last thing the directory owner wants is for the reader to click the link in  your resource box.

I miss the good old days when there was a little respect for the author. Sure, you had ads, but they were also fair about it and they gave you a fighting chance to persuade your reader to click on your link. Today, just about every article directory throws whatever they can in front of the reader before they hit the resource box. Read the rest of this entry

There is no doubt that you are taking a chance when you sink a lot of time and effort into building web pages on sites that you don’t own. This post is not going to be so much a rant as a warning that you can lose your income in a second if you don’t take the time to diversify. And one of the smartest things you can do when it comes to spreading your real estate around is to try and get as much of your content on your own site first.

I just experienced a $400/month loss when Squidoo decided that my lens on “Cheating Husbands” went against their terms of service. It was 3 years old and was really creating some major traffic for the keywords “Cheating Husband” and “Cheating Husbands.” Read the rest of this entry