Redgage and She Told Me comparison - which site is best for making money on the internet?

As regular readers of this blog will know, it is primarily about making money on the internet.  To make the money on the internet I use a wide variety of sites.  Primarily my income has come from Hubpages and Webanswers, but I am trying to diversify my income.  Two sites I have been using to diversify my income for a while are shetoldme.com (She Told Me) and Redgage.com (Redgage) and every month I provide monthly earnings updates which include earnings from these sites.  These sites also have another benefit - it is possible to backlink to my other sites using both Redgage and She Told Me, meaning improved search engine rankings (good SEO) and direct traffic.

I initially started using these two websites for the purpose of providing do-follow (dofollow) backlinks, since these are best for SEO purposes, with the added advantage of earnings potential.  They both work in slightly different ways and so I feel it is worth explaining this for new readers before going into detail on which one I think is best, so if you are already familiar with both sites I recommend you skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Redgage is webpage where an individual signs up.  Once they have signed up is possible to upload a blog, photo, video, document or link.  Whichever option is chosen, there is the possibility that Redgage will earn money from adverts shown alongside the content.  Redgage then recycle a proportion of this money to an individual.  In addition, they may give bonuses when they consider a piece of work to be particularly good.  Earnings from Redgage are earned within the site, and are paid through a Visa debit card once the amount in the account reaches around $25.

She Told Me is primarily about creating links to other sites and other content, primarily for SEO purposes.  Links have to be accompanied by a minimum volume of text.  Money is earned on She Told Me through Google Adsense revenue sharing and so there is a need to have a Google Adsense account before it is possible to make money from She Told Me.  On each She Told Me page there are a number of Google Adsense blocks, on all links submitted the submitter gets 100% revenue sharing on one particular block of ads.  She Told Me keeps the earnings from the other two blocks, unless an individual signs up through an affiliate link, in which case the referrer gets one of these blocks (meaning the content writer has one block, the person who introduced to them gets one block and Shetoldme.com gets the final block).  She Told Me also makes money from private adverts and Chitika adverts.

As can be seen, if initially starting out, Redgage may be the best site for making money as there is less need to sign up for external companies such as Google Adsense.  However, assuming you already have a Google Adsense account and are looking to use Redgage or She Told Me to increase income from additional sites which site is better?

I have signed up for both sites well over a year ago and have approximately the same number of links on each site.  Therefore I feel I can provide a reasonable overview of the quality of the sites.  Put simply, I have earned slightly more directly on She Told Me than I have on Redgage (about 30%).  Obviously this is in the form of Google Adsense revenue though and since I already earn money using Google Adsense elsewhere it is also much more likely I will get my She Told Me money before Redgage money (at the present rate it will take me about 2 years to reach each payout using Redgage).

There is another source of income which can be directly measured and that is the traffic from each of these sources to my other sites.  My Redgage.com links have provided about three times more traffic to my Hubpages articles as have my Shetoldme.com links.  Also assuming a typical earnings rate for each Hubpages impression, this will result in Redgage earning me more money.

Another source of traffic is much harder to quantify.  I mentioned that I used each of these sites for backlinking and SEO purposes.  It is very hard to measure how well each of these sites affects the search engine rankings of the linked to page and so I won't even attempt to.  The only thing I will say, is that for short, important keywords Redgage seems to rank higher than She Told Me for a given phrase (I assume this amongst other things is an indication of relative pageranks).  However, since links on She Told Me are accompanied by much more text, it is worth remembering that She Told Me generally ranks for longer tail keywords and a lot more.

So which one would I recommend using for making money on the internet, in particular in gaining backlinks.  Direct earnings are very similar between the two, but Redgage links are much quicker to create and so it is possible to create many more Redgage links in a given time.  However, there are definitely advantages to using She Told Me - earnings are paid using Google Adsense and so if you are already at/near monthly payouts with this system you will see the rewards much quicker than likely with Redgage where you will need to build up to $25.  All in all, I would recommend Redgage should be the first site to use (mainly due to it being much quicker to create links), with She Told Me being a good second.

If you want to get ongoing monthly updates on how much I earn from each of these sites (as well as a large number of other online money making sites) keep heading back here, or why not subscribe using the links on the right.

Have you used Redgage, She Told Me, or both?  If so what sort of experiences have you had?  Which one do you think leads to the highest earnings.  Use the comment box below.

Hubpages versus Infobarrel - Comparison number 2

Those people who have been following my blog for a long time may recall that about a year ago I decided to carry out an experiment to compare Infobarrel and Hubpages to see which one would get the best results financially.  I wrote articles for Hubpages on a number of subjects and then wrote articles on the same subjects and submitted them to Infobarrel.  At the time it was clear that the articles in Hubpages had much higher Google rankings for all keywords (although Infobarrel seemed to rank higher in Yahoo!) and so my conclusion was that it was better to concentrate my efforts on Hubpages.  I have every so often revisited this, but at all times Hubpages has come out on top, although Infobarrel seemed to be closing the gap.

I recently decided that with the recent Google algorithm changes it would be wise to review these conclusions to see whether they still held, particularly since Alexa seemed to show a decrease in Hubpages traffic, but if anything an increase in Infobarrel traffic.

Once again to assist with the comparison I used the Firefox add-in Rank Checker, which can be used to see how highly a particular website ranks in search engines for a particular keyword.  The results were quite surprising and showed that a complete reversal has happened over the last year - now Infobarrel seems to rank much higher in Google and Hubpages ranks higher in Yahoo!  I am not sure why the Yahoo! ranks have changed around but I have at least a theory as to why the Google results have changed.  Since writers on Infobarrel are pre-approved, this results in much higher quality content and the site having articles of a higher quality whereas on Hubpages substandard content is removed as and when it is discovered by Hubpages saff which probably results in a lot of dodgy pages slipping through the net.  As I say, this is only a theory, but it appears to tie in with the theory Kidgas came up with for why eHow may prosper.

Whilst I am impressed with the potential of the Hubpages ad program, it can only be successful if there is the traffic and at the moment I am thinking there is the potential to get more traffic on Infobarrel and so I shall start to concentrate a little bit more on Infobarrel and a little less on Hubpages and I suppose it is always good practice to have a diversified income stream.


If you are on Infobarrel and Hubpages have you noticed any changes in the earnings between the two?  Is it similar to my findings?  As always do let me and other readers of this blog know by commenting below.

Hubpages versus Infobarrel - Comparison number 1

In my February 2010 monthly update I mentioned that I would do a comparison of Hubpages, Infobarrel and Xomba. I created an article for Infobarrel and an article for Hubpages on the same subject but was unable to get enough information to create a third article which was on the same subject but still slightly different (but not too different) and as a result I decided to just leave it at an Infobarrel article and a Hubpages article. The article in question is very UK based and so I felt this would give a good comparison of how the respective websites coped in a foreign search engine (I believe both Hubpages and Infobarrel are based outside the UK).

These were both published about a week ago now, and so this is a quick update on how the Hubpages article has rated against Infobarrel. To start off with the Infobarrel article was published slightly ahead of the Hubpages article, but they appeared to both appear in Google results at the same sort of time (certainly it wasn't large enough to make a difference unless the article in question is a breaking news story). Neither got very high in the Google SERPs and in fact both articles were struggling to stay in the top 200 places, although the Hubpages article was positioned slightly higher. I placed a single link to each site on She Told Me (a great backlinking site) and this improved the search engine rankings. Again the Hubpages article is much better - in Google it is higher than the Infobarrel article for the chosen keyword. In addition, this difference is even more pronounced when using the British version of Google - with Hubpages far outranking Infobarrel. For both Hubpages and Infobarrel though the articles rank higher in the Google US than Google UK. The difference between the two sites in Yahoo is even more interesting. On the US Yahoo the Infobarrel article ranks 50% higher for the chosen keyword than the Hub. When using the UK version of Yahoo this is repeated - only the Hubpages article is even further behind the Infobarrel article.

So far this has been interesting - Infobarrel appears to rank higher in Yahoo and Hubpages higher in Google. At the moment this would suggest Hubpages is the better choice since Google is used more than Yahoo - particularly in the UK where Google accounts for about 95% of the total search engine usage!

Over the next few weeks I hope to increase the number of backlinks which I have to each article to see whether I can increase the point at which each article sits in the search results to a level where I can get decent traffic. From this, I hope to be able to do a comparison to see whether there is any vast difference in earnings (eCPM) and click through rate between Hubpages and Infobbarel - although obviously as per Google Adsense TOS I will have to be very vague!