Make Money Bookmarking: Update With Two New Paying Websites

In a previous article I somewhat lamented that I could only find two active websites that had revenue sharing systems for bookmarking: Xomba and Infopirate. There are many old lists that drift around the net like flotsam claiming hundreds of adsense revenue sharing sites but one look and most of them have either died or have dropped the money-making side. However, there are two new ones I've found to add to your list of money-making bookmarking sites: Tagfoot and SheToldMe.

Tagfoot is primarily a social bookmarking website that shares its revenue 50-50 with its members. This is the same split as Xomba, with Infopirate's share being 80-20 in favour of its members. But Tagfoot has a very healthy referral commission with 25% of your affiliate earnings going to you. Tagfoot is comparatively new compared to the others but has lots of nice features that make bookmarking a very fast and painless process. SheToldMe sells itself as 100% adsense revenue share but this is not quite true. Yes, one Adsense unit on your pages is yours but the other two belong to the admin and your referrer. So your ad gets shown on 100% of your page views but you only get a third of the advertising space.

Now, I don't like cluttering my browser with too many toolbars but Tagfoot's 'Sidefoot' bookmarklet is just one small icon and works like a dream. Once installed just go to any website you wish to bookmark, highlight a piece of relevant text and click on the Sidefoot icon. You have various options as to which category to place your bookmark, such as under news, videos, images etc. The URL, page title and highlighted text are all automatically copied, leaving you to just write a few appropriate tags. In just a few seconds your bookmark has been added to Tagfoot! Compared to some other bookmarklets I have found this to be the fastest. SheToldMe also has a bookmarklet that works fine but doesn't pick up as much information from your bookmarked page and the server sometimes goes AWOL.

Comparing the four sites, Xomba is both an article directory and a bookmarking website, Infopirate has the potential to have full articles in their blog section but that seems currently under-used and is primarily a bookmarking site. In contrast, Tagfoot and SheToldMe are wholly devoted to bookmarking and the description field is limited to 500 characters. You can. of course, use it to promote your writing on other sites or, as I've suggested before, to make some money bookmarking the websites you are using in your research.

One major difference between Tagfoot and the other three is that there is a 'trial period' between you joining Tagfoot and having your Google Adsense code activated. This is no doubt to avoid spammers and other undesirables and also gives you a chance to know your way around the site and how to use the various features. The minimum requirement is to bookmark at least 10 pages in each category and to achieve a 'footness' of 1000. The latter is a kind of sociability index and it shouldn't take more than a few days to qualify, after which you'll need to request from support to activate your Adsense code. Once done, then all your bookmarks will be earning money, even those added during your trial period.

Although traffic to Tagfoot is not as yet as high as to the other sites, the ease of bookmarking and the overall site design means this is an attractive addition to the paid to bookmark sector. SheToldme is very new so has good potential to gain referral income as well as having increased visibility of your own bookmarks.

Writing for Adsense Revenue: Miracles do Happen!

There has been a lot of recent chat on Xomba about writing online and how to earn a decent amount from Adsense advertising. This shows, firstly, that there are a lot of new members, and secondly, that the advice from older members should be more accurate as they themselves gain in experience. There are, however, a few points that I don't feel have been aired enough.

Do you feel lucky?

There are times when one article will earn hundreds of dollars in just one day. There have even been articles that have made thousands! These are rare, but they do happen. Luck plays a big role in this. But like many other things in life, you need to work at being lucky. I wrote a similar thing about getting a book in print - luck plays a huge part but so does working to generate your own luck. Some things you cannot control and some things you can - concentrate your efforts on those things you can control and prepare to be lucky. This isn't to denigrate those writers who've earned big, but I'm sure they were both very happy and very surprised when an article went viral. They couldn't predict what would happen but they saw the opportunity and worked towards being successful.

Most lotteries like to advertise the obvious fact that if you don't play you can't win. the other obvious fact that they don't advertise is that most people lose. Writing online is similar in that if you don't write you won't earn, that your jackpot is also largely out of your hands, but the difference is that you can actually win something every day.

One of the things that attracted me to Xomba was that I made some money on the very first day - if memory doesn't delude me was 27 cents! - but was more than I was seeing on some other sites. I also found Xomba by accident as a link from a Google search. So, I figured, these people have done their SEO and they know how to place adverts, and they have a layout that encourages interaction and further reading. Not many other writing websites have all of those elements together.

Mix and Max

I must say, I haven't hit a jackpot as yet, however, I have recently had some success with one article generating a few hundred dollars over a couple of week. Firstly, to show what I mean about luck, the same piece was posted in three places - only one of them grew, the other two went to sleep. Why? I think because the audiences are different. We can't control what happens to our writing - who posts a link where - but we can work at analysing what works where. The other thing is that this article isn't even an article: it's a simple bookmark! Again, work at what works and prune the rest.

Writing original content takes time and skill. Whatever you're interested in, try to mix your output in order to maximize it. I've written in my On Writing Online blog that the joys of revenue sharing bookmarking sites is that you can be making money before you've even finished writing your article, just by bookmarking your sources. Don't worry, the chances of anybody following the same trail and duplicating your original article are minuscule. If you can write one or two good articles a day and bookmark maybe half a dozen sites then that's probably a decent day's work.

Drop those dead donkeys

Use your Adsense account data and Google Analytics to see what is working and what isn't. Different writing websites will develop their own communities and styles and what is popular on one site may not be on another. There are only about a dozen revenue sharing writing websites at the moment so worth trying 2 or 3 at the start and maybe drop one that isn't working and try one new one on the list. Use the revenue sharing bookmarking sites to promote your own articles as well as your other bookmarks. Use some of the popular social bookmarking websites to promote your own writing - mix in some of your other bookmarks so you don't get flagged for spamming (you often won't know it, but you will be!).

On the subject of pruning what doesn't work, if you decide to stop writing for a website don't delete your account. Those articles will still be listed and could still be earning. There is one website where I stopped submitting work as it didn't seem worth the time. I'd login once a month just to see if anything was moving and to my surprise found that my earnings were slowly increasing to the point where it was worth putting some effort into it again. Some long tails are longer than others.

Waiting for Lady Luck may not seem much of a strategy but as you can see, I'm not advocating sitting back and waiting for the finger of fate to stab you in the ribs! All your work is slowly but surely loading the dice in your favour. The point I'm trying to make is that the social web is a complex system and that trying to push it doesn't always work - sure, if you already have an army of followers it's easier but if you're reading this then I'd guess you're not at that stage. A better analogy is to scatter your seeds across the social web and, miraculously, some of them will grow and you will reap the harvest. I don't think there are any magic beans waiting to be found.

Wag that long tail

Most sites will also tell you that this is a long-tailed game: the more you write the greater the probability of having some articles do very well while others provide a steady income. What nobody tells you is how long the tail is! I suspect some people just get tired of seeing a few cents here and there and get disheartened. I had to stop writing last December because of travel and having to sort out certain things. I was expecting income from articles already published to trail off, and it did. But what was more worrying was that as I started writing again it just wasn't picking up. Was I doing something wrong?

Well, looking back and looking at the trend the income was actually growing again and steadily. (There was also the issue of advertising revenues across the net falling so this didn't help.) I was just looking at it too closely and on a daily basis there can be huge variations. Download your Adsense data into a spreadsheet and calculate something like a 50-day average; that will give you a good idea of progress. Going from an average of $2 a day to $3 a day doesn't sound like a recipe for giving up the day job as yet, but that's a 50% increase. Another 50% increase did actually take it to $4.50 per day, on average, for the following month, and that means getting paid every month.

So how long has that taken? Well, I'd say if you can hit that within 6 months then you're doing well - perhaps other writers have done better, only they can say. It also depends how much time you're willing to spend not just on the writing but also marketing and analysis. If you hit on a jackpot then these numbers will get blown away and you can start thinking about how to turn this into a decent income - or splashing it all on some object of desire!

Being lucky takes work. Be prepared for it.



Key points

Success = Work + Luck

Write about what you enjoy

Mix your output - articles plus bookmarks

Analyse what works where

Prune what isn't working

Spread yourself on the social web

Look at your long-term income growth

Enjoy the challenge!

Make Money Writing News Articles at AllVoices

AllVoices bills itself as "The first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere." It is thus essentially a citizen journalism website, so the focus is on news rather than general articles. Joining is free and there is an incentive program based on page views. However, they currently pay only by cheque. So if you don't live in the USA and don't have a US Dollar account you'll have to think seriously if the bank fees to process a dollar cheque are really worth the effort. If you do live in the USA then this could be a profitable string to your bow.

Go to AllVoices.

Paid to Blog at Today.com

Today.com provides tools for both new and experienced bloggers. For those new to blogging, we offer free blog hosting. We invite you to create a blog right now. For those with an established blog looking to generate more traffic, we offer free submission to our blog directory.

Today.com also claims to pay its bloggers but, without logging in, I can't find any indication of how much. Also note that applications only accepted from certain countries.

How to Find Which of Your Articles Are the Most Profitable

The question of which articles are the most profitable is one that crops up over and over again. It is wrong to assume it is always the most popular articles. There is also a balancing act between low traffic high cost per click (CTC) and high traffic low CTC keywords.

If you have your own website or blog you can easily use Google Analytics to get a wealth of data about which articles are doing best, how users come to your articles, which search terms your blog ranks highly on, and so forth. But writing for a third party website such as Xomba or Hubpages means it is not possible to use Google Analytics. The problem is that to enable Analytics you need to insert a special code into your page header, and this is only possible to do if you have admin access.

There is, however, a slightly time-consuming but nevertheless feasible way to get this precious data of which articles are winners and which are sleeping. The only way I can see how to do this is to create a custom URL channel in your Adsense account for each article.

Once your article is published immediately copy the article URL and create a URL channel in your Adsense account. You should already have a general URL channel for your writing site, such as xomba.com. Now you will have a channel for each article, such as:
xomba.com/my_first_article
xomba.com/my_second_article
and so on. Note that Adsense channels leave out the http:// and you can also leave out the www.

There is, however, one problem here, which is that you have a limited number of channels available in your Adsense account. Last I looked there was a limit of 200 channels available. If you are writing maybe just one article a week this is not a great problem, but if you are writing numerous articles across multiple websites that 200 is going to shrink very rapidly.

As the aim is to find the most profitable articles the only solution to this limited number of channels is to slowly delete those articles that just haven't been earning. You will then be able to see your best articles and be able to decide what to write next. Unfortunately this also means that if a "dead" article springs to life in the future you won't know about it.

It isn't a perfect system but seems to me the only way to get article-specific data on revenue sharing writing websites.

Let me know if it works or if you have any problems setting up Adsense channels.