WHY "MASTER DAYTON?"

"Master Dayton" might be humorous, (I mean if Ph.Ds are called "Doctors," shouldn't MFAs be called "Masters?") but in all seriousness I have made a living freelance writing and after several years I have tons of information I want to share to help out my fellow writers, regardless of age, experience, goals, situation, or background. This blog isn't pretty-but it will help if real freelance writing information is what you want.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Xomba Freelance Writing Review: How I Use Xomba

How I Use Xomba

There are several things to like about the freelance writing site Xomba.com, but as with many online writing sites there are definitely strategies and methods that are going to be more effective than others. Xomba offers a 50/50 AdSense split with their writers. On any article you write that gets a click, you are entitled to 50% of the profit. In addition, as of this writing Xomba does allow you to include affiliate links in your articles, from which they don't take a cut - you get the full affiliate amount the program offers you. Xomba is also unique in that not only can you write articles of 150 words or more (although longer articles tend to rank better in the Search Engine Rankings), but you can also link to websites, blogs, videos, or articles with a social bookmark, which only needs a description of 50 words or more.

Using an overall writing strategy that takes advantage of all of these unique aspects of Xomba, you're going to increase your chances of making some decent online income writing for them. So while this might not be your conventional Xomba writing website review, I'm going to go through what I think the major advantages of writing articles for Xomba can be and how I personally use their site in my overall online freelance writing plan. This doesn't mean it's the best way to do it, or the most profitable, but this is how I personally use Xomba in my own overall freelance writing efforts.

Using Amazon with Xomba Articles
One of my favorite methods of using Xomba is using text links from my Amazon Affiliate account to relevant products. This is especially effective with articles on topics that don't have a lot of traffic but don't make a lot of money from AdSense. There's about a million keywords about cooking or recipes that fall under this category. Those articles might not make a lot during most of the year, but when Christmas comes around and everyone is shopping, having a couple hundred visitors go to Amazon is a huge income boost. When someone uses your affiliate link to Amazon, you get credit for any sales that come from that computer for 24 hours.

The benefit of this is that if you have 1,000 people a day finding your article on Christmas crock pot recipes, they may be interested in buying a crock pot or cookbook, but even if they're not, if they go to Amazon and simply decide to do their online Christmas shopping since they're already there, you get your affiliate cut from those sales. Having high traffic articles with links to Amazon early on can result in a huge jump in income from affiliate sales from Christmas shoppers on hundreds of items you don't even have to promote.

This is an especially good hedge if you make a lot of income from AdSense, since those numbers generally plummet in December. Only one caveat: if you include a picture, do NOT link pictures. This is also against Xomba's TOS.

The Xomba Bookmarks
The social bookmarking that Xomba allows can really be used effectively to help Internet Marketing efforts if you know how to use it correctly. One of the hardest parts about building your sites up in the search engine rankings is that you may write 100 articles and blog posts to give your main site backlinks, but only 50-60 get indexed. That's part of the game: it is about numbers because not every backlink you create is always going to be found, but I've used Xomba bookmarks to drastically increase how quickly and how many of my articles get indexed.

For whatever reason, Xomba bookmarks seems to have a pretty strong push with Google. So by making a Xomba bookmark to every GoArticle, every Post Runner article from the Keyword Academy, every InfoBarrel article I write - basically a Xomba bookmark to every support article has resulted in me seeing a giant increase in the number of my support articles indexed, how quickly they are indexed with Google, and how quickly that affects my rankings in the search engines.

While it's fairly rare for me to get any AdSense clicks from the social bookmarks, it has happened on occasion and the huge boost in getting support articles (and their backlinks) indexed I believe has been a major part of my freelance writing income momentum, and in the huge and steady gains in AdSense income that have resulted from shooting up the search engines.

This is probably the single most powerful tool Xomba offers, in my opinion. When you have the power to get 70-90% of your support articles indexed quickly instead of 30-50%, it makes a HUGE difference.

Using in Combination
It is against the TOS of Xomba to bookmark your own Xomba articles, so don't do that. But you can write support articles that link to your Xomba article, and then use the social bookmarks on Xomba to link to each of those support articles. By steadily writing articles on high traffic topics and including Amazon links, and by using the social bookmarks to stack links to all of your support articles, you have the ability to make what might otherwise be just another run of the mill AdSense sharing site into something very powerful and very impressive.

So that's it. There's nothing fancy or huge or secret about any of this, although I'm sure I could have made a $10 or $20 "Secret Report to Getting Up To 90% of Your Support Articles Indexed" report, but I'm just not that kind of guy. This is a basic tip, so if it helps everyone out, great. I'm not charging for a one page tip sheet.

I hope some of you find that helpful. If you have any questions, or have any of your suggestions to share about how to use Xomba, feel free to share them in the comments section. Until then, keep on writing.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the post! Would you suggest Zomba is a good place to start when posting articles outside my blog? I have been sending some to ezine articles recently, with some result. Do you need to post original content on Zomba, or can I duplicate blogs that are on my website? Cheers!!

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  2. Hi Serena,

    Xomba's not too bad as far as posting articles, and you do get a 50/50 AdSense split. Depending on the topics I'd also look at InfoBarrel as another place to post. While some posts rank well, the thing I like Xomba most for is getting one article and one bookmark to backlink each of my blog posts, and using bookmarks to "stack links" on my support articles. So for example I would put a Xomba bookmark to each Ezine, GoArticle, or other link building article you wrote to help Google count all of them. It maximize your benefit. At this point I believe Xomba needs to be original content. If you have any other questions, let me know.

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