Infobarrel and Tagfoot - two new ways of making money online

I have recently discovered a couple of cool new websites which I plan on making more use of when I have more time.

The first is called Infobarrel. It is another site where it is possible to submit articles, with the potential of earning money from it. As with Hubpages, it works on revenue sharing using Adsense. There appears to be more freedom to experiment with different formats on Infobarrel, and so this leads to more possibilities. I believe links from Infobarrel are Do-Follow, and so it is a good resource for getting backlinks. Also, revenue sharing is 75% for the author and 25% for the company, but if enough articles are written in May then this becomes 90% for the author and 10% for the company. This website definately seems very promising, and I would appreciate feedback on it. Sign up here.

The second webiste is one which I have slightly more experience with. This is called Tagfoot and is similar to Digg and other social bookmarking sites, with the only difference it is possible to earn money using Adsense. Practically anything can be tagged, from videos and pictures to articles. Revenue sharing is 50/50 between the tagger and the company, but in the case of the referrals the company's share is split. I also believe they give backlinks, and so it is a relatively easy way of getting backlinks, and possibly more traffic and revenue. This is definately something I would recommend using. See the tag of this page, and sign up here. Once again I would appreciate your feedback on Tagfoot, and why not add me as a friend and start sharing the articles you tag with me!

Thanks for reading and I wish you luck if you sign up with either of these schemes.

Wolfram Alpha

Recently a new website has launched, called Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine like no other, you type in a query and it gives you an answer in the results page, without the need to click through to another website. As such it is possible to loads of cool things, such as find out the weather in a particular location on a particular date (in this example the weather in London on Sunday 8th June 1997). However, the page does have some limitations. More detaisl on this new search engine can be found on a hub I wrote called simply Wolfram Alpha.

The feeling I have though is sites like this cause problems for internet businesses and those who rely on the internet to make some extra money. The reason being they get a lot of traffic from conventional search engines, and sites like Wolfram Alpha negate the need to direct traffic to particular sites to get their information. Even if Wolfram Alpha doesn't take off, it is worth noting that this is a factor which is starting to spread more and more into Google etc, and one can only expect such answers directly provided by Google to continue.

Hubpages increase Adsense ads

In the last week there has been good news for those people like myself who publish on Hubpages. Generally with Google Adsense there are limits to the number of adverts which can be displayed per page. However, recently Hubpages have been given permission to increase the number of adverts on each page. This will hopefully result in more income per page, especially when coupled with the update to the page layouts which was announced by Hubpages a few weeks ago. It will be interesting to see whether this is the case. It is only a shame it didn't happen when I had my massive traffic spike!

Surprise surge in Hubpages earnings

I was checking my Adsense account on Friday night and noticed that I had an abnormally large amount of traffic and clicks. At first I thought that this may have been to one of my two new hubs at Hubpages which i had written in the previous few of days (one was on great dance party songs and one was an opinionworld review). However, through the use of Channels I was able to see where the money was coming in and it was all to one particular hub, and all from one particular search term on Yahoo!. I was unsure as to what this was, but quickly discovered that it was due to the search term appearing on the Yahoo! homepage.

By Saturday night I was about $80 better off mainly due to this one hub, and so I was a very happy chap!

Monthly Update - April 2009

Over the last few weeks I have been out of the country, and unable to get internet access, and it is this which accounts for my lack of activity, including weekly updates. I apologise for this. However, I am now back in the country and will hopefully be able to update this blog more regularly.

During this time I have been unable to complete many online surveys, or many paid searches through Homepages-Friends. In addition, I have only been able to find the time to write one new article on Hubpages.

From now on I also intend to include percentage changes in income from all of the various sources, to see how they change from one months earnings report to the next, an idea I got from The Brainy Money blog.

April 2009 earnings:

Hubpages (Adsense): $13.49 (420% increase)
Home-pages Friends: £0.67 (75% decrease)
OpinionWorld surveys: £8 (400% increase)

Obviously the payments from OpinionWorld lag slightly, and so I would expect that it will take a while before I see the decrease in earnings from this due to lack of activity in April. My lack of activity on Home-pages Friends is very apparent, although hopefully my searches will once again start to increase now that I am back using my computer more. I am most pleased with my earnings from Hubpages though, since I have had a massive organic increase in earnings despite spending relatively little time on the site, and hopefully this is something that will continue.