The Keyword Academy Review

Reviewing the Keyword Academy

This blog post is probably way past overdue, but with the now infamous "Panda Update" from Google and a little more time to see how some of the so called "content farms" panned out, there's been plenty to do and test. And seeing how everything works now, I'll be the first to say I was wrong with one of my last posts: HubPages is good for nothing other than backlinks now, and you shouldn't spend a lot of your time putting original content on their site. But I'll get to more on that in a bit. The reason I want to review The Keyword Academy now is because based on what I'm seeing, honestly the best way to make passive income is to go with your own site. It takes less effort now to build your own site in the rankings than it does a HubPage or a Squidoo lens...so why split the profits with someone else for your hard work?

Many of the advantages that Web 2.0 sites used to offer are gone or highly diminished. At one point I had no problem with advocating that individuals start on HubPages, learn how Internet Marketing worked as they wrote hubs (which was so powerful as to virtually guarantee rankings in the search engines) and then made some good quick money on the way to learning everything you needed in order to apply those lessons to your own websites. But based on what's happened since the now named "Panda Update" and perhaps even more importantly HubPages reaction (and that second one is truly the key), I don't believe they'll make a bounce back any time in the near future, and the fastest way to success is now through building your own website, BUT you need to understand exactly how to do it the right way.

This includes understanding:

• Keyword research
• Website set up (including the best WordPress plugins)
• Backlink building time line and strategy
• Monetizing methods
• Importance of consistent work/effort
• Knowing how/when to test ad lay outs

The reason I gladly promote The Keyword Academy (and yes, these are affiliate links but as I've said before, I don't put in an affiliate link unless I believe in it - notice the lack of HubPages affiliate links in this post) is because they teach all this in really clear video tutorials in addition to providing a wide range of services to members which really makes making money online much easier. In fact, if you're getting into Internet Marketing and you're competing against Keyword Academy members, you're at a huge disadvantage. So buckle in for perhaps the longest Keyword Academy review on the net.

Introducing the Basics
There was a time where I hesitated to recommend this program to pure beginners since I've been in a place where $33 a month seemed like a major investment, especially with another $12 for each domain name and another $10-12 a month for hosting. Especially early on when you could build up $100 a month in a few months using HubPages or writing eHow articles. However, now after a lot of testing the quickest way to get rankings is your own website, and that changes things drastically.

For the beginners, the keyword academy has a clear "First 100 Hours" plan which basically takes your hand and helps you go step by step through 100 hours of work to get you on the right track, get you building niche sites that rank, and earning money. This is a very labor intensive business, so having a 100 hour guide is a great help to beginners who can just look down, work the next step, and start seeing results as quickly as possible to keep from becoming discouraged.

In fact, there's even a "New Members Welcome Page" to get you all the e-mail support you'll ever need and to point you to the most important lessons for beginners to start out with. The e-book in the members area has chapters that come in both print and video form, giving you a very effective tutorial ranging from the attitude and perspective you need to succeed to specifics about setting up websites and videos giving all the technical details for those of you (very much like myself) who are absolute dunces when it comes to the technical side of things. In other words, you can re-watch set up videos again and again to make sure you learn how to set up a new WordPress site inside and out. I can't over emphasize just how easy and simple they make it for people to learn absolutely everything you need to set up your online websites and to build the rankings you need to succeed.

The Niche Refinery Tool
The niche refinery tool is one of my personal favorites among any online tool I've ever used. This tool uses the mathematical formula the Keyword Academy teaches to determine the value of keywords, but instead of having to hand check every single keyword and run the mathematical formula over every single keyword (a process that could take many many hours if you were checking out 100 keywords), the tool allows you to import several hundred or even thousand keywords from the Google AdWords tool and allow the program to run through all of them while you go and write content, gather new keyword lists, or do something else that's productive.

The information is then given to you in a spreadsheet format where you can organize all the keywords by difficulty level (judged on a number scale from 10 on up) or on the projected value of the keywords. These can be arranged from lowest to highest or highest to lowest, making it very easy to analyze the information and target the easiest keywords first, followed by the ones with the highest money making potential. This tool allows you to run multiple lists of keywords at once, meaning in one day you can easily run enough data through the tool to find more good keywords than you could possibly work on in an entire year.

This tool is not only an incredible time saver, but it saves on the tedium of having to do all the keyword research by hand and makes it very easy to see what keywords in a niche are the most worth going after, and what the "low hanging fruit" are that should be easy to pick off and gain rankings for. This tool alone is worth the monthly subscription, IMO.

The PostRunner Tool
The PostRunner tool is definitely the crown gem of The Keyword Academy's tools. Anyone who has been in SEO or Internet Marketing for any amount of time, or found a single accurate resource on the topic, knows the importance of backlinks. A few years ago outside of article marketing or investing the time and money to create your own long list of websites, getting those links could also be very difficult and very time consuming. The PostRunner tool puts hundreds, if not eventually thousands, of different blogs and websites at your disposal who accept guest posts. These are spread across hundreds of different hosting IPs, different hosting companies, and belong to over a thousand different people. In other words, it's a blog guest posting service on steroids, and unlike article marketing which only allows side bar links, most of these places allow two keyword anchored backlinks in the post - which are the most effective backlinks and also the hardest to get.

There are hundreds of niche sites which only take posts on specific topics, and as anyone who has been working towards passive income online knows, those types of links give the highest amount of benefit when it comes to ranking in the search engines. The site owners get free content in the form of articles, while you get two backlinks per article to your own sites.

Whether you call it guest blog posting on steroids or article marketing on steroids, the ending result is the same: you have hundreds and hundreds of sites at your finger tips just waiting to give you a perfect keyword anchored backlink. This tool alone is worth twice the monthly fee for the entire Keyword Academy, and a push for more niche sites and more high quality sites means that PostRunner is going to remain an extremely effective tool for ranking in the search engines.

Many people (including myself) have ranked niche sites in the top 10, top 5, or even the top of the search engines only using PostRunner and nothing else - including myself. This is an extremely effective tool, and if you combine it with article marketing and a few link exchanges then you might be amazed how quickly you can effectively rank a niche site high in the search engines and get those AdSense clicks or Affiliate Commissions coming in. You also have the ability to add your own sites to PostRunner and thus take advantage of the free content people are willing to provide.

Streamline and WorkTracker Tools
As if those two tools weren't already more than enough to justify The Keyword Academy's monthly membership cost (which really is pretty ridiculously reasonable for what you get) there are organizational and motivational tools as well. I know for me personally a chart tracking my daily word count really does encourage and motivate me - as odd as that might seem. Using the Work Tracker is simple: put in your daily word count and the graph charts it on a seven day rolling average while also telling you how many words you've written in the past month and during any of their publishing challenges. You can also join groups and make your graphs available to a number of other TKA members. This can be a great motivational tool for a group as you can compare your publishing rates to those of others in the group. This can be a great motivation to publishing more, and to prevent you from taking a few days off knowing others will see those 0 word days.

Streamline is a neat set up which allows you to assign main keywords and cousin keyword to the websites you're working on. Streamline keeps track of these, keeps track of how many articles you've written and how many keywords used, and then can be used to create a "Project Task List" which will show you how many more articles to write for each term as a basic start, and lists them so you can refer to it as a list of which articles to write next. Streamline keeps track of how much work has been done and shows the % completed for each cousin keyword and main keyword. If you tend to get overwhelmed when there's a lot to be done, this tool gives you the ability to make a very clear list telling you exactly which articles should be next and how many more are needed.

For the organizationally challenged, this tool along with Work Tracker, can be a life saver.

Webinars
There are monthly webinars provided from TKA (and if I call it KWA at some point it's the same thing, just and odd eccentricity of mine) which can cover everything from "what to do after 6 months," "how to hit the next level," or other strategies about link building and the importance of getting the most out of your PostRunner site. In other words, the excellent teaching and content doesn't stop once you sign up, there's new information and training coming every single month and you're getting trained by people who know the Internet Marketing process through and through. I attend most of them because I know there's always an additional nugget or bit of information that is going to help speed up the process for me.

The Forums
I'm with many people in this business who argue that forums can be one of the greatest time wasters of all online activity. That being said, a really good forum can also give you access to expertise, support, and ideas which speed up your ability to make a living online and give all the support you need to make it through the tough times. In my opinion, the TKA forums are the latter, as you will find many people on there making $10k to $20k or more a month who are still more than willing to give advice on how they did it, help out newbies, and also provide alternative information like other methods of getting ranked in the search engines, how to sell an e-book, or many other issues. While you should spend only a little time here and most of your time writing content, the forums are an invaluable resource and even provide an "Inspiration" thread with tons of stories of how KWA members started at $0 and made it to $1,000 a month or more. It's a great addition to the whole KWA bundle.

The Trial Period
Oh, yeah, the first month is free and you have UNLIMITED access to The Keyword Academy during that time. You can use all the tools, gain backlinks, do your keyword research, and if $33 a month just isn't feasible at that point (and I've been homeless twice so believe me, I understand) then you take your information, move on, and come back when you're stable enough to afford it. If you stay, the price is $33 a month although discounts are available if you choose to buy a yearly subscription which is $396 for 14 months, or basically 2 months free when you pay for 12 months up front. Either way, it's a very good deal.

Contests & Awards
There are often 3-4 publishing challenges a year, and these challenges often have multiple awards given out through drawings. You get so many entries into a drawing often based on number of words published, number of days you publish, or other similar measurements. In other words, the more you work on your business, the more chances you get to win a prize on top of everything else.

What makes this especially intriguing is that the prizes include $1,000 cash prizes, year long subscriptions to TKA, or even free credits to article writing services. All of these can be an enormous help to speeding up your Internet Marketing Career, and you get a chance at these prizes by working to build up your own business: that's about as win-win as it gets.

Affiliate Program
Current subscribing members to the Keyword Academy can enroll in the affiliate program, which pays very handsomely. For each person who signs up for the Keyword Academy through your affiliate link and stays subscribed, you receive 35% of their monthly dues, which comes out to $11.55 a month. So if you get a mere three people to sign up and stay with TKA, that will pay for your own monthly subscription.

So Final Thoughts
This is by far and away the most commercial blog post I've ever written, and will probably stay that way. However, if you want to win in the online world in making residual income, this is the way to go. I have tested out a lot of products and membership sites online, and several of them were very high quality but at the end of the day, this Keyword Academy review hopefully explains what I honestly believe: this is the best possible program online for Internet Marketing for both beginners and even for the experienced. This program brings years worth of education down to easy to understand videos and lessons that can have you on the right path in days. That's why I strongly suggest if you haven't become a member that you start out with The Keyword Academy Trial month.

I have more to say on why I've changed my mind about HubPages and why I would suggest a completely different strategy for building an online passive income now than I did 12 months ago. That's because this is a changing game, and while I'll get into more of that, I'm going to end this post as a Keyword Academy review and hit the rest later.

Writing for Passive Income: Small Steps for Big Goals

Small writing steps equal giant passive income results

Hard to believe we're already 16 days into the new year, but here we are! January 1st is a day when we all make goals and resolutions for our "new start" and then generally completely forget about them until months later when we get that "it's too late now" attitude. Freelance writing and writing for residual income are two areas that can make it very easy to fall into this trap since so much work is required before seeing any pay-off. Many writers become overwhelmed, and it's easy to try and convince yourself that reading 5 blog posts and doing some keyword research is a lot of work. It's not. I'm not preaching at you, I'm still often guilty of the same thing. So this is the first update, along with a very happy and special announcement at the end :)

In my last freelance writing blog post I talked about setting some of my own goals after realizing I needed to become much more efficient to reach my goals, and after getting some inspiration from re-listening to Timothy Ferriss's The 4 Hour Work Week (love it - and that is an affiliate link), getting re-charged from vacation, and also being inspired by Kidgas's effort to triple his online income. It's been a very effective trifecta for me and I put down my own goals and dreams, although in a more abbreviated form, and swore I was going to work my tail off to get them.

So how am I doing at this point? All in all, actually quite well. I'm especially impressed considering that I'm split working in multiple directions, no matter how much I wish it were otherwise. I have to drastically increase the amount of freelance work I'm doing to pay for a wide variety of medical bills, lawyer fees, those annoying student loans, and some other major one time (I hope) expenses that are all coming up this spring. In addition, ideally I'd like this to be the first year I'm going to buy a house and get out of the country for the first time in 12 years. So there's the freelancing....then there's the building the business my brother and I are starting, which is almost like three different business focuses in and of themselves, then there's my actual passive income I want to work on...which comes from multiple sources.

In other words, I'm ridiculously busy once again, even with 80/20 applied to my life. Still, I've made some very good progress and based on everything going on, my freelance and passive writing goals are going well so far. Just this weekend I published six new HubPages for myself, with some backlink work to each, finished $400 in freelance work and produced seven hubs for my brother and I's business, all also with backlinks. The outlines to a few e-books are just about complete and I have a very clear idea of what lies ahead for the next couple months. In the first two weeks of January, I've gotten about as much done as I did in any full month last year.

So why is this? Because I didn't let myself get overwhelmed with the sheer mass of things to do. Every single thing that needed to be done, I broke it down into the smallest, easiest steps possible and then I focused only on those small steps. Yeah, I'd love to write 100 new hubs in the next few months, and in my 100% dream scenario write 1,000 total hubs on HubPages this year (BTW - if you are completely new to the make money online or make passive income online, start by signing up with HubPages and making hubs there as you learn how to rank your pages and monetize them. HubPages is the best beginner's place to go by far, IMO).

Will I achieve that goal and many other equally as ambitious? I think so. 1,000 hubs is a huge number and if I try to think about it that way, it becomes overwhelming. What if I fall behind for a few days, how will I come up with 1,000 ideas, how will I find the time to check all those keywords, how will I have time to backlink them all, etc. It doesn't take more than a couple minutes looking at the big picture before it's sheer size is enough to crush you. So I don't worry at all about 1,000 because there's no point to doing so.

There are ALWAYS more markets and topics to write about, and one thing I do have now is a couple hundred good keywords. So I'm working on those one at a time, two to five a day depending on all other surrounding circumstances. Over the course of a year, this will add up to 1,000 hubs or mighty close enough and without the stress, worry, anxiety, and everything else that would come with trying to plan out every detail from the outset. I've also known from watching other people, as well as observing myself, that when you focus on the big picture and try to get a handle on huge goals or huge problems, you tend to not only NOT control the situation, but you get far LESS work done than if you just took the "I'll do 1-4 a day and not worry about the rest" approach to it.

I don't think about having to pay off those $10,000 or so in medical bills early this year, I just think about making an extra $30-50 a day above my average freelancing workload, and over the next half a year that will take care of itself.

Whether you are reading this as a freelance writer, or an internet marketer, or anywhere in between of those two broad terms, then maybe you'll agree with me when I say this is one of the most important lessons I've learned over these past few years: we are our own worst enemies because we overwhelm ourselves so much that we end up accomplishing so little.

The choosing to go for 1,000 hubs this year while doing the backlinking on my existing articles and websites is a decision I made very recently based on a stark observation I made on myself. Back in the winter of 2008 when my job in Austin, Texas, just disappeared, I tried to plan ahead, figured I had 4 months of expenses barring anything going wrong (which it actually did in spectacular fashion, but that's a story for another day), and I was trying to plan looking at the big picture without thought on how to get there or making goals that I couldn't actually directly affect (an example: make $3,500 by March - that's a terrible goal because it doesn't give any clue for as how to get there. A goal like "write for Demand Studios or Guru.com 8-10 hours a day" at least gives me a clear idea of what to do). Obviously even with the terrible economy and hugely changing markets I made my way back and then some, but then the thought hit me: what if I had just wrote 1 single HubPage, 1 single eHow article (until eHow was closed to writers), and 1 single Squidoo lens a day?

That's well under 8 hours of work a day, and on a good day is less than 3. The answer: I would have nearly 500 more HubPages, 500 more eHow articles, and 700 more Squidoo lenses than I have now. Based on the average of what each of those earns me, we're talking about over $2,200 in complete passive income more per month. That would have me in "semi-retirement" mode, living extremely comfortably and in position right now to only work on what I want to do and nothing else while traveling at will.

So how have I worked my butt off for three years to not be at the same place where 1 hub, 1 eHow, and 1 Squidoo lens a day would put me?

Because I made the same mistakes that many other people in this position have made, continue to make, and will continue to make. I didn't make room for that minimal daily effort like I should have, even when "life happened," and I was too easily overwhelmed and distracted by the large goals or big picture to get the daily work done. I'd recommend taking a good long look at your own efforts and see if the same is true.

This time around, I'm not going to make those same errors. This year, there is always time day to day to work on the hubs, to work on the supporting links, and to make sure that by the end of the year there aren't any more years doing work for others that I don't care for. Day by day I concentrate on the good and hit it out one step at a time, one page at a time, and don't worry about the big picture: because that will take care of itself just as long as I keep steady.

Now, the very happy and special announcement: most of you who know me personally or follow this blog know my overall feelings about graduate school and the years of my life wasted there. We'll keep it very understated and say that my overall experience was less than stellar. That being said, there were a few incredibly cool people I met during my time up there who have been very close friends of mine and like family. My life has been permanently blessed and made better simply from having known them. One of these people is Ashley Cowger, who consistently was one of my favorite writers in the program. She started her first year in the MFA program in Fairbanks Alaska when I was finishing my third and final year. Her brother, Justus Humphrey, is a good friend and actually put me up for a brief six week period when I would otherwise have been homeless during the winter in Alaska. Still very much obliged, bro.

Both are remarkably wonderful people, and both are great writers, as well. I'm happy to announce that Ashley's first novel came out this week: "Peter Never Came." I'm waiting for my copy to arrive in the mail, and the next 10 I'll order for friends and family who love good stories and good reading - and even without seeing an advance copy, I can tell you from seeing a dozen plus of her stories or more that I WHOLE HEARTEDLY and without reservation recommend her book. Ashley was an incredibly talented and hard working writer when I first met her, and she continued to get better and better. I can tell you right now when that book shows up, I won't by doing ANY work. I'll be kicking up my feet and enjoying some great fiction.

It's a small press publication and a collection of literary short stories. If you want to read great fiction, buy Peter Never Came. If you want to support an amazing collection of short stories, buy a copy of the book. If you want renewed faith in an amazing up and coming young writer, read Ashley's book. If you love supporting quality literature from a small press, buy this book. Here is a link, it is NOT an affiliate link: http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Never-Came-Ashley-Cowger/dp/1932870466/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295243965&sr=8-1

I've tried to think what I could do to encourage people to buy a copy of Ashley's book, and I think I've come up with something. This is going by the honor system, but there's a good group following this blog so we'll do this on the honor code. Over the next month I'll be putting together a guide on freelance writing & earning residual income online. This isn't an A to Z complete guide, but it will include a lot of my "tricks and tips" for making passive income, how to set up a HubPage that converts (the set up is huge in determining whether they make money or not), how to maximize results from your online work, and basically sharing my tips and knowledge from six years online in about 20 pages. It's not an encyclopedia of knowledge, but if you're a beginner or just getting started, this will speed up the learning curve quite a bit.

Buy Ashley's book, e-mail me at masterdayton [@] gmail.com with the words "bought Ashley's awesome book" or "peter never came" or anything along those lines. When I'm done with my guide, anyone who buys Ashley's book and sends me an e-mail gets the guide for free. I'll e-mail it right to you.

I'm not going to give a BS sales pitch with a fake "valued at" number, but I will tell you that this is going to have far more value than most of the multi-hundred dollar e-books out there. Hopefully that deal will help move a few more copies of Ashley's book, and I really am ecstatic over her recent success. Sometimes good things do happen to good people.

Hope ya'll liked this post. Now I have a couple more hubs to hit before bedtime, but keep on keepin' on, devote some daily time to your business, and if you enjoy a good book, grab a copy of "Peter Never Came" to celebrate the emergence of a wonderful writer.

2011 Writing Goals: Looking Ahead

Full Time Passive Income x 2 , No Freelancing, and a $15,000 December?

Hello everybody! I have to say, I think the Europeans have it right as far as the minimum of six weeks paid vacation per year. I'm back from 4 weeks and change of traveling, and another week of just being lazy and enjoying re-acclimating myself to winter weather once again :) While it is definitely very cliched and maybe even passe (that's an annoying fashionista word, isn't it?), this time of year it simply makes sense to not only look back on the past year, but also look forward to making your goals and New Year's resolutions for 2011.

I'm no different, as I've been spending the last week in the exhausting task of recording every top 10 page keyword ranking for every passive income article, website, URL, Hubpage, Squidoo lens, blog posts, or what have you that I have online. When combined, this is over 1,200 pieces at some level. While some are much more valuable and thus much more time-worthy of working on then others (Associated Content articles are pretty much ignored and Squidoo lenses are way down vs. HubPages, all of which are lower than my 100% own blogs), I like having numbers and I want a clear list of everything there is to work on.

This is part one of my 2011 goals: Taking away all excuses to delay or procrastinate because I don't know what to do next. The beauty of this long master list is that if I don't know what to do, I take a look at the next keyword on the list and just keep going. There's no chance now for me to waste time or get frustrated because I'm drawing a blank. Basically I'm preempting one of the major issues I've run across throughout my writing career, and one that because of that I'm sure to run into again.

I'm a firm believer that the reason most people don't achieve their goals isn't because it's not possible - not even the most overconfident of us knows what we're truly capable of - but because making the goal is only part one. The even more important part is planning out in specific and very detailed, easy to follow steps how you are going to do it.

One great example of this I've already seen online is Kidgas's hub on tripling his online income in just one year. What does he do right?

• He sets a goal that is ambitious but realistic, one that is going to force him to work but isn't going to become an anchor because it's unrealistic.
• He clearly identifies the best way to get from point A to point B (tripling traffic)
• He clearly lays out his plan of how to get there, not with a general "write x number of hubs," but an even better weekly plan of one Saturday, one Sunday, and one during the week - as well as some specific steps on building backlinks, since this is a crucial part of ranking in the search engines and getting more traffic
  

If I was a betting man, and I am, I'd put my money on Kidgas not only making his goals, but even surpassing them by the end of 2011. That is a good plan. And yes, a few simple tweaks or additions will make his backlinking efforts much more powerful (more on that in a bit), but the point is that all the bases are covered. This is someone who is putting the clear planning and effort behind his goals to succeed.

So for this post I'm going to do two things:

1. I'm going to announce my own goals (public pressure and all to keep me on track) for the next year and how I intend to get to them, including some major potential pitfalls I can see.
2. I'm going to give some simple steps/advice to Kidgas (not picking on him or singling him out - but I know he reads this blog and I'm eager to help him hit his goals; I'm a firm believer in paying it forward) that can help improve his backlinking strategy to help him reach his goals.
   

In all fairness, it might be that Kidgas didn't mention everything he did with backlinking, so maybe I'll just be talking to myself and running a refresher course, but some well intentioned good advice certainly can't hurt.

But first, my writing and passive income goals for 2011. The subtitle of this post, while appearing somewhat sensational, is actually pretty accurate. My three main goals for 2010 when it comes to writing and passive income are:

1. To no longer have to freelance write for clients at all - and I mean NADA
2. To have two full-time incomes (in my mind app. $36K a year) from passive income by the end of the year: one from just my own efforts and one from my brother's and my business
3. To have a $15,000 month (minimum) in December solely from Amazon's Affiliate Program

So starting off with #1: it's not that I don't enjoy freelance writing, I love the lifestyle and there is little else I'd rather do, but the prospects of having full time passive income and being able to work on my passions and my own creative projects is FAR more appealing, not to mention that an end of the year Pareto Principle look at my life indicates that the majority of my work stress (all of it, actually) comes from freelancing for clients. Don't get me wrong - many of these clients are great and many of these jobs I enjoy, but at this point I have to do a pretty decent chunk of freelance work to make ends meet, pay student loans, and try to save up to improve my current lot in life. And with this comes stress. While I can weather the storm of any major recession, the sooner I don't have to freelance at all, the sooner I have total control over my financial life.

So how to get there? Obviously I need much more passive income to make up for the freelancing income. The first step for me is counter-intuitive. I want to take on more work the first three months of the year to save up an extra 3 to 4 months of expenses - something I've never had before. With that much saved up I can take the next 4 months off from freelancing, only take on the easy, high-paying, and fun jobs that come along (if I so choose) and use all that extra time to focus hard core on the passive income side of the equation.

I'm very confident that if I had 4 months where I didn't have to worry about making any income at all, and ALL of my attention was focused on the residual build up, then the progress on that front would be exponential compared to right now.

To do this I plan to spend 4 hours a day writing for Demand Studios, 3 hours a day writing for jobs I win from Guru.com, and 1 hour a day finding new work. I know intermittent work will come in from some former employers, but I choose not to count on it and anything I get is just bonus.

Now for #2: Getting not only one, but two full time passive incomes by the end of 2011. This definitely might be considered over-ambitious considering I haven't fully earned one yet, but I'm feeling good about this. Part of it is from the fact that the business my brother and I are partners in did very well in December - about $1,700 well and counting from only online sources. Yes, the Christmas season throws the numbers way off since a lot of that is Amazon, but it still shows what is possible, and we got started late and were not anywhere close to putting in 40 hour weeks...if only we had.

One of my first steps is making the SEO master list of all my sites and pages, and the company's sites and pages. There are more than enough good topics, keywords, and online real estate that I think I would already be making at least one, if not both, incomes if all these pages, sites, or articles ranked in the top 5 (preferably top 3) in the search engines. So getting there is step one, and with the voice software, I can do 10-12 articles a day for backlinks pretty easily now, in fact in three hours or less - so 300-400 backlink articles a month on the really low side won't hurt at all. If I spend 10 hours every Saturday doing nothing but backlink articles, I can do upwards of 40 to 50.

Next is to create a minimum of 200 new hubs for both my personal account as well as the business account based on continued keyword research, and using the optimal layout we found for selling Amazon products, in addition to still converting for AdSense. These will all get backlinks, including from revenue sharing sites like Xomba, InfoBarrel, and Squidoo. I also need to get my butt in gear and get some of those e-books and online reports done like I've had on the "To Do" list for over a year now and make sure all of my domain names have active and hosted websites - which means a lot more work to get up from the 25% or so where I'm sitting at right now.

This means going back to old pages to "properly" monetize them based on what I've learned the past two years and also being very selective about what I spend my time on. I'm very much naturally a "scatter-shot" sort of person as opposed to the "sniper focus" and my efforts the past few years have reflected that: very broad but rarely very deep. To complete this goal, I don't have any other option. I need to focus heavily on the pages that are showing the most return, the most potential I can actually turn into earnings in a reasonable time, and the projects with the highest upside.

I'm also going to "cheat" and count 2011's Amazon earnings as part of the "average" for the year.

Finally, I've had some really cool ideas for e-books and online courses that I've been working on just a little bit throughout the past year, and it's time to get those out. While not completely passive, they will definitely help with no longer having to freelance and over time some of them might become very profitable passive income streams. One of the appeal of e-books is if you can get an audience and provide information that really is worth $40 a pop versus 50 cents a click or $1 a commission.

Which brings us to #3: $15,000 December. This I actually think is very achievable. Basically I didn't heavily figure out Amazon until this year, and it's been mind-blowing for me. Using only HubPages (so think 60% of what we could have earned) and starting on the 15th of August, we made 67 HubPages, each with an average of 3-5 articles backlinking to each one. Considering there's 116 days between then and Christmas, this isn't that much work, especially for two people. In fact, we pretty much stopped doing anything the first week of November.

The end results? By changing which keywords we shot for slightly and testing to find the best layout for hubs to sell Amazon products, our company (which right now is the two of us just working together) earned $2,783 in commissions, well over half of which came in December. My personal account jumped from $10 a month to $70, and tallied nearly $200 for December, and mostly just from me revising and changing 5-10 hubs I already had to make them more Amazon friendly.

At the end of the day we could have done so much more - even doubled the work without feeling all that stressed out or rushed. So knowing that, and having figured out how to take advantage of Christmas sales and how to design HubPages and sites that actually convert for Amazon, with an entire year to go making $15,000 in December 2011 does not seem that far fetched at all...especially since it's not like this year's hubs disappear. They'll rank even higher by next year.

The goal here is 2 campaigns per month, and at least 2 backlink articles per hub or per website page per month aiming at Amazon, with a huge push in July through October 2011 when we'll have a much better idea of what's hot and what's not during the Christmas season, and what words will be achievable versus which won't be. This goal is actually the one I consider the easiest of the three based on experience and my confidence in what I know and how to do it.

So those are my goals and how I intend to achieve them. For anyone looking at making goals for the next year, I'm personally a fan of aiming for challenging goals that force you to "step up" to achieve them. Getting to new places and reaching new goals means pushing yourself to accomplish things you haven't done before.

Next, hopefully this helps pay it forward and helps Kidgas (who seems to be a cheerful and thoroughly outstanding individual - you can check out his "My Online Income" blog here) reach his goals with some advice, which is always my two cents and nothing more, that hopefully will help his backlinking efforts and in achieving his goals over the next year. And actually, these can be used by anyone, so anyone else go ahead and take notes and enjoy!

Well I guess we could just go back to my old blog post on backlinking for beginners, but since none of us are going to do that, let's move on to just a few basic steps that Kidgas could take to make his back linking more effective.

By all means, I agree with bookmarking at Xomba, Snipsly, and SheToldMe. This is a good start. I would also say, if you don't have an Ezinearticles account, get one! Regardless of what people have been saying for 5+ years, the demise of Ezinearticles is greatly exaggerated. Even 2-3 Ezinearticles (don't use the exact keyword you're shooting for in the title - use a related one) per hub can add 4-6 good solid backlinks. Learning the "a href" language to get backlinks in your author box is not difficult, and I get solid traffic directly from my Ezinearticles...and if they're willing to click once, they're willing to click again once they get to my page.

So I obviously encourage adding Ezinearticles to the mix. You can use the bookmarking sites on these to add extra "juice" to your links.

The next step would be to look at InfoBarrel if you haven't already done so. This is a very good AdSense and Amazon revenue sharing site that also allows you to have backlinks in your "signatures" of the article. InfoBarrel articles tend to rank fairly well, and you can make money off of them, as well.

Finally, in each new hub make sure to link to other recent hubs that you produce. This is a very smart move, as those "internal links" can actually be an enormous help in outranking other pages.

This is an extremely basic "how to get started," for Kidgas or whoever else needs it, but even by adding just a few Ezinearticle, InfoBarrel article, or other links you might be surprised how quickly your rankings in the search engines improve. HubPages is an incredibly strong site, and it often doesn't take very many backlinks to push the hubs up in the rankings for targeted keywords. Once you get the hang of this and start seeing the results, take a look at the backlinking for beginners post I made as it will give you a list of other places to get backlinks from (including sites who have an AdSense share program) and the default order in how I do things if that type of structure helps you out.

If you haven't tried it already, down the line consider looking at a Keyword Academy Membership (this is an affiliate link), which last I check offered a free trial month. The tools and teaching they offer is incredible and has shaved months off of my journey, if not more. The regular price is $33 a month, so it is a commitment, but it's not a bad idea to sign up when you have some time to watch the teaching videos, get a feel for their tools, do some research and get some backlinks, then if you can't afford $33 a month you can decide whether it's worth it for you to come back at a later time. Definitely hold on this until you know you have time to look at the videos and take notes: it's incredible information and even if now you can only do the free trial run, do it. What you learn will speed up the passive income process immensely.

So hopefully that will help you out to really get the most out of your backlinking efforts. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to leave a comment and ask. You were brave enough to mention your goals, so I want to be able to help you reach them and then some.

As to everyone reading, hope your holidays are great, feel free to share your goals or thoughts in the comments section, and I really encourage you to challenge yourself to really go after those big time goals in 2011. Cheers!

Backlinking for Dummies (or Just Beginners)

Backlinking Basics for Beginners

Welcome to the freelance writing blog post featuring the most alliterate title to date. Recently I've been helping some friends get started not only with freelance writing, but specifically with the real basics of passive income. HubPages, keywords, and backlinks all come to the front of the discussion, and it's easy for me to overlook the basics because I have been working on passive income for some time now. I believe for a lot of us this could be the case. Even after a short time working for passive income online it can be easy to not think about things like keyword research or finding backlinks, because it's all become second nature after even a short time.

Also, after a certain amount of time you get used to being able to take short cuts. I've done so much keyword research I can take an educated guess at this point and with about 60 seconds of research decide if it's worth going after or not with a pretty decent rate of accuracy. But it took a lot of time to get to this point. And now more often than not I simply use the tools at The Keyword Academy to REALLY shorten up the process. Ditto with collecting backlinks (and if you're serious about your online business and have the time and money to invest, the $33 a month subscription for The Keyword Academy is ridiculously good resource. That is an affiliate link, but I believe the first month is only a $1 and if you don't like the affiliate link, then type "keyword academy" into Google).

So for someone who is a true beginner, who knows only the most basic information about making money online and SEO (Search Engine Optimization if you're really a noob...aka getting ranked high in Google), doesn't know where to get backlinks, and doesn't have the time or money to make a $33/month investment at this point, then this post will walk you through a nice simple template of actions I used early on to get backlinks to everyone of my money pages - and I still use this with new pages when I don't want to think too hard about it.

If you're a veteran at the passive income, you can probably skim or even ignore the rest of this. For anyone who feels lost as a beginner and wants a solid way to build several good backlinks to their money sites, read on or feel free to print this post out as a starter's guide.

Caveats: Many of the links further down are affiliate or referral links, but I only use these links when I get a cut of the website's %, not yours. This is also going under the assumption that you're building HubPages as opposed to websites when starting off. I'm doing this because HubPages is by far and away, in my opinion, the best way for true beginners to learn how SEO and Internet Marketing works and to see some early results to stay motivated.

If this isn't the case, I'll explain more about how that changes things (actually very little) later on in the post. Also, have a safe place to keep copies of all your log in information as you will need to open accounts in several places to build your backlinks.

First of all, you will need to open accounts at several article directories and websites. Some split income with you (InfoBarrel, Xomba) while others don't (Ezinearticles, Buzzle, Articlesbase). This doesn't make one better than the other: you need backlinks to get your money pages ranked, and the more good links, the better.

• Open accounts at Ezinearticles, Buzzle, Articlesbase, InfoBarrel, Xomba, Olive Articles, Blogger.com (gmail account needed), Wordpress.com, RedGage.com, YouSayToo.com, SheToldMe.com, A1 Webmarks.com, & Theinfomine.com
  

1. After publishing a hub, the first step is to write a Xomba bookmark for your hub. Although there is a 50 word minimum, I strongly recommend 75 words as this almost guarantees your hub (or whatever you're bookmarking) will be indexed by Google within 24 hours.
2. Find a high PR blog that gets a lot of attention (like the 4 Hour Work Week Blog) and make a relevant comment, only linking your name to your site. This isn't for a keyword - this is to get Google's attention, index your site, and get a "natural crappy" link to make the link building look natural and honest.
3. Write 3-5 original articles for Ezinearticles and submit them.
4. Write 1 original article for Buzzle
5. Write 1 original article for InfoBarrel
6. Write 1 original article for Articlesbase
7. Write 1 original article for Olive Articles
8. Write 1 original article for Theinfomine.com
9. If the topic is something you're going to right a lot about, start a Blogger.com blog and a Wordpress.com blog. You'll eventually want a minimum of 5-10 posts each, but each post can have a link to a hub or article (not even including the blogroll for each blog).
10. Bookmark your hub at RedGage.com, YouSayToo.com, SheToldMe.com, & A1 Webmarks.com.
11. Create a Xomba bookmark to every single one of the articles on this list with a 75+ word description.
12. Use the 4 social bookmarking sites to bookmark every one of the articles on this list.
13. Write a Xomba article (not bookmark) that links to your hub or site. 400+ words is best but not mandatory - this will give you a "no follow" bookmark, which is always good to have a few.
14. If you want a few more links, Google "KeywordLuv" and spend 20-30 minutes gathering blog comment backlinks using a variety of keywords related to your hub.
    

That's it. Is it a lot of work? Yes - but everything online for making money is. Is it difficult or hard or confusing? No. This is very easy, and you can completely skip the Blogger.com and Wordpress.com steps if you feel like it. If you're a true beginner, I might even recommend that. When you're further along with Internet Marketing you'll understand how to use those better, anyway. If you have a website or blog as opposed to HubPages, then just follow these steps, except add a HubPage and then go through all these steps for the HubPage, too, to make that a much stronger page, which will make it a stronger link.

This outline is very basic, it uses basic social bookmarking, blog commenting, and article marketing to get a solid group of links. HubPages is a very strong website that tends to rank very well right off the bat and FAR better than an independent site or blog starting from scratch. If you follow this group of instructions, you already have 15-18 backlinks, even with no Blogger Blog, no WordPress blog, no Keyword Luv commenting. A decent amount of these directories even split any AdSense earnings that your articles might earn. Aside from Xomba and InfoBarrel this rarely happens, but every little bit extra helps.

Most of those are do follow, with just enough no follow to make your site look really good to Google. With a HubPage, this can often be enough to start ranking well, especially after some time passes. The steps are ordered by importance, so if one article directory is ranked in step #3 and the other is step #8, then the backlink you get from #3 will be stronger than the one you get from #8.

I'm not saying this is the best way to gather and build links, but it is a great backlink starter template for those of you who want to learn about Internet Marketing and SEO but don't have a lot of guidance. Now there's no excuse. Go make some hubs, and use this guide to get them all some backlinks. Remember that the sheer number of hubs and money pages you have does matter, and time is a very big factor when it comes to ranking a page at the top of Google, which is how your pages will make you the most money online.

By all means, keep learning and keep reading from the many incredible resources that are online, but there's no excuse now. Go to HubPages, start building hubs, and use this template to gather backlinks. No fear!

I'm not saying there won't be a learning curve, and as you learn more online you'll almost certainly go back and touch up your old sites and/or pages (I still do), but when you really know what you're doing and understand down the line from having more experience, you'll definitely be glad to already have a great base of backlinks. It makes everything much easier! Hopefully that helps out and if anyone has any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Good luck and enjoy the extra results this work will bring to your efforts!

How I Turn Demand Studios Rejections Into Passive Cash

Rejected Demand Studios Articles Can Make a Mint if You Know What You're Doing

One of the most important aspects of creating a successful freelance writing career is knowing how to get the most out of your articles, and knowing how to ride through the rough spots. I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a fan of writing for Demand Studios as a way of supplementing a writing income, especially for beginners, part-timers, or college students. Even if you're not particularly skilled at typing or researching, you should be able to write at least one article an hour, which translates to $15 an hour at a minimum. If you're very good at quick research, typing, and writing to format, there's no reason you can't make a lot more. When I'm really distracted I make about $22.50 an hour. When I'm not distracted, I make $30-$40 an hour. If you're other option is unemployment, or if you're a college student saving up an emergency fund, that's not bad scratch.

But I'm not a sunshine pumper, either. I try to be as honest as I can about what a freelance writing career is like, and to give the pros and cons of various freelance writing resources that are available online. Because of that, I'll also fully admit that Demand Studios can be a complete and total pain in the ass. And by "can be" I mean "eventually will be." You can count on that just like death and taxes.

Normally revision requests from the copy editors are reasonable, and early on it's a little bit more of a headache as you learn the guidelines and nuances of each form. But sometimes there are just completely off the wall or unreasonable requests from the CE that make it abundantly clear that the article is no longer worth your time. For me, this falls into the 8%-11% range, depending on the month. That includes articles rejected after revision (>1% in my case) or articles where I abandon the rewrite because it's either impossible or not worth my time (7% all time, about 12% in recent months).

To give you an idea of what my overall stats for Demand Studios are:

Approved No Rewrites: 74%
Approved Rewrites: 18%
Abandoned Rewrites: 7%
Rejected Articles: 1%

And that's from over 700, almost 800, articles so it's a pretty solid base of comparison. So the question comes up, what do I do with the abandoned rewrites? I hate wasting time and research, and 65 articles adds up to quite a bit of writing and research that I'm not getting paid for. Rejected articles the text stays there for you to copy, but abandoned rewrites disappear, so make sure to copy and paste your text into a notepad or word file so you don't lose it. There are a few strategies you can use when dealing with an abandoned rewrite or rejected article:

1. Throw a hissy fit, refuse to work anymore, and not make any money (not recommended).
2. Just move on with life and forget about it (fully acceptable, but still wastes that time and effort you made on those articles)
3. Use Demand Studios' keyword research on the article and take your information to your own blog, InfoBarel, Xomba, Squidoo lens, or HubPage. (CHA-CHING!)

The ONLY obligation you have as a writer based on the Demand Studios contract is to NOT use the EXACT title of the article. That's it. All that information and research belongs to you, so if you want the most out of your article rejections at Demand Studios, look at it as a chance to build up your passive income.

We can sit here and argue about how effective Demand Studios really is in finding profitable markets and doing keyword research and all that jazz, but the point is that DS is willing to pay $15 or more for these articles because they believe there is money to be made. So if they're not willing to pay you for your work, then you mine as well profit from it yourself!

Some recent examples for me:

Speargun Regulations becomes Speargun Fishing Regulations
Russian Restaurants Near Worchester, MA becomes Worchester MA Russian Restaurants
Flathead Catfish Fishing Tips becomes Flathead Catfish Tips or Tips for Flathead Catfish Fishing or Fishing Tips for Flathead Catfish

See the difference? This is all legal based on the agreement - just change the title of your article or HubPage to use the same keyword but a different order. Then you can expand on your article without having to worry about all the really annoying restrictions that DS puts on the articles and how sources have to be cited, and you can use that blog of the guy who has been a professional fill-in-the-blank for 20+ years as a source that you couldn't use for DS because it's a blog, and therefore unreliable as a source.

So write for Demand Studios, and make a lot of money doing it, but when a rejection comes along or you think a rewrite request just (for whatever reason, and there are many) just doesn't work, go over to HubPages, open an account if you don't already have one, and put your articles up there. Throw on some Amazon and eBay modules that can earn you affiliate commissions, add your AdSense code, and enjoy the extra passive income you can earn from all of these sources. If you don't want to put up a whole HubPage around a subject, consider editing the text to make a good InfoBarrel or Xomba article. Each of these still gives you the opportunity to make some AdSense income from your work, which is far better than just throwing that time away.

Personally, I make a HubPage out of most of these articles, as I find the topics are ones that a HubPage can rank well for, especially when I double the text, add some links, and set up a good hub around the topic. In fact, it's almost a guarantee that you will outrank whatever article they eventually approve on the topic, even if you do an absolute minimum of backlink and SEO work. This is why I don't let unreasonable rewrite requests from Demand Studios get me down anymore. If I receive one (especially when it's obvious I know 100x more on the topic than the CE calling me out), I simply go to HubPages, create a new hub, and then gather some basic backlinks later on when I'm working on building my passive income.

Some of those hubs have made a little bit of income for me, several have made nothing. And one or two have done very well and consistently bring in per month about the same amount that DS offered me upfront for those articles. Just like with any online venture, some work really well while others bomb completely. But at least this way my words don't disappear into oblivion and all that work goes unpaid. It's making the most out of a given situation, and even better in my case it means that 10% of my freelance writing time ends up becoming passive income work that will keep working for me long after the initial pages are up.

So for those of you writing for Demand Studios because you need the money, and who are frustrated by the rejections or the rewrite requests that are too ludicrous or time consuming to even consider, then build up your passive income. If you haven't been building any passive income before now (bad writer - hit yourself on the head with a newspaper), this is the perfect time to open an account on HubPages, get approved for Amazon affiliate, eBay affiliate, and Google AdSense, and start building passive income. Even if this wasn't your original intention, if you write 50 DS articles a week and abandon even 5% of the articles (way less than I abandon, btw, and I make what amounts to a full time living from DS) then after 50 weeks of writing over the year you would have 150 HubPages earning passive income for you. It doesn't take long for just a little bit of backlink work to turn that into an avalanche of passive income.

So that's my advice for you guys today. It's a great way to write for Demand Studios for freelance writing income now, for building passive income for the future, and to set yourself up in a way that the occasional rejection or really unreasonable rewrite request won't get you down - but can actually end up exciting you as it gives you yet another 300+ word head start on your next passive income page.

So keep writing, guys, and as always I look forward to hearing from you! Keep following the dream.

Residual Income Freelance Writing: Made A New AdSense Mark!

Hit the $200 AdSense Mark

This has been a pretty good day for me, as this Sunday marks the first time I have reached the $200/month using AdSense. I'm all about celebrating the small achievements and enjoying the little victories, although in honesty this doesn't feel very small at all! I have been using AdSense for just under 2 years, although the first 3 months I did next to nothing, and I've never been able to work a full time schedule on my residual income - which definitely has hindered progress.

That being said, this freelance writer is thrilled with hitting that mark, and still having time to pass it by even more before the end of the year. While because of the TOS I can't give information like CTR, average CPC or things like that, I can say that without giving any numbers I am allowed to tell you what my personal income percentages have been this year. Breaking down the amount for average per day, my worst month this year saw an 8% increase in average monthly income from AdSense alone, and I'm averaging 14% growth in income from AdSense every month, and this month is already looking to match that average, unless tomorrow is the worst AdSense day I've had since 2009. I'm betting I'll be fine.

Part of the freelance writing and Internet Marketing process is learning how to enjoy the small victories, and being able to get fired up about them. After all, $200 as a number isn't a big deal at all. I can easily make that in a single day, on any day I have an Internet connection and choose to do so. But $200 for a month in AdSense is a pretty good mark, and I've done the most work by far on my passive income the past three months and change. This is doubly exciting, because as people who have been in the residual or passive income for very long know, you reap the benefits of your work months or even years down the line. If I'm seeing 14% average jump for 5 straight months and counting, just how much better is my AdSense income going to look by the end of this year? Or the end of 2011?

This doesn't mean I've just hit $200 in passive income. I've been over that number for quite some time, but AdSense is by far and away one of the best models for getting serious residual income - the type that leads to a 4 Hour Workweek lifestyle and serious full time online passive income. So while have a diversified income stream is always a good idea, the quicker AdSense gets to a full time income for me, the more quickly I can diversify my income and spend all of my time on projects and work that I'm most passionate about.

To give a screenshot of what just a few of my passive income sources look like for this month, and these are approximates since it's not the end of the month yet:

Associated Content PPV Bonus: $37.00
Constant Content Referrals: $30.00
eHow earnings for May: $118.00
eBay affiliate earnings: $32.00
Amazon affiliate earnings: $38.00
Squidoo $75.00
Google AdSense (app.) $214.00
Other $485.00

I'm not putting this up to brag (okay, maybe a little), but hopefully to encourage people to see that there are a lot of options out there, and if you start out knowing absolutely nothing but stubbornly work on while very slowly (because some of us are better workers than learners, myself included) and you try to learn, no matter how long it takes for it to make sense, then even on a part time basis of only a couple or three hours a day, you can get to this point.

In fact, there's more here not listed. I occasionally get a check from Commission Junction, just not every month. Ditto with Clickbank, ejunkie, Elance, and a couple of other programs I have an affiliate account with.

The beauty of this? I know enough now to speed up how quickly I earn passive income with new articles, new sites, and new pages. This means it takes less work to get from zero to wherever I want to get to. In addition, the more passive writing income I make, the more bills I can pay with that money and the more of my time that gets freed up in order to work even more on my residual income projects. That speeds up how quickly I can earn more passive income, which then lets me outsource. Outsourcing increases the amount of work I can get done in a short period of time, more work = more money, and we're off to the races again.

In the first few months I used AdSense, getting a $2 day was amazing and rare, and it took me over half a year to go from $3 to $45 in AdSense. But I kept at it, I kept learning, and the few free moments I had from freelance writing and fighting my debt load was used to build the base for future earnings.

If there's any piece of advice I can give newbies, or the frustrated, it's keep at it. It took me 14 months to go from $0 to $100 in one month. It only took me 9 months to go from $100 to $215 (approximate). I bet in 4 months, 5 at most, I'll get past $300. In fact, this would happen much quicker if I didn't have so many other projects on my plate, but that is life. Still, reaching the $200 AdSense is a great accomplishment, and one that is definitely lifting my spirits and firing me up to sprint to the next obvious marker: $300.

So I wanted to take one post to demonstrate how important it is, in both freelance writing and in Internet Marketing, to celebrate the small victories. This is a good one for me, and I'll spend about 20 minutes enjoying a soda and smoking half of a congratulatory cigar.

After that, it's back to work again. Fame, fortune, and retirement won't make themselves happen :) If anyone you have a recent success, no matter how small it seems, share your victory. Creative writing or freelance. I know a lot of you are doing some very impressive things right now, so feel free to share, brag, and encourage!

EHow & Demand Studios: How Do I Like Them Now?

Demand Studios & eHow: What Does It All Mean?

A few weeks ago eHow made the sudden announcement that they were ending the Writer's Compensation Program, and would only accept new articles now through their parent company, Demand Studios. You can read the post that announced it here at Jade Dragon's Writing Blog, but the gist of it is that eHow has basically frozen out its current writers and any new ones. It was a heck of a spin job, but in the end Demand Studios decided to make more money by funneling articles through a system that's more profitable for them and most likely less so for the writers. In theory, any old eHow articles will continue to earn passive income for the writers, but there is a general consensus that with how poorly (and outright shady) all this was handled that eventually all those articles will be removed or they'll stop paying. There's no solid evidence of this yet, but the fact that so many writers feel this way tells you how badly the entire situation was handled. This was also done shortly after my Demand Studios review, and I've yet to address it from that side of the fence, as well.

Obviously with eHow only accepting articles through Demand Studios, it's hard to recommend eHow to anyone since they can't sign up directly - which is a shame because when it appeared they were trying to work with the writers, it was a really good place to write and make some passive income. Further making things complicated is that I think Demand Studios definitely has a place in the online freelance writer's overall freelancing strategy, but this is the same group that also created the entire eHow fiasco, so now it definitely complicates what I think of them.

First of all, before I get any pro-capitalism comments, I am the first to openly say that as much as I hated the move, Demand Studios has the right to do whatever the hell they want. They are a company, they own eHow, and as such if they want to treat all the writers who built up that site like total garbage and kick them to the curb, they have every right. Would I have done the same? Absolutely no way in hell. But Demand Studios can do with their sites whatever they want...and observant writers noticed months in advance that a strong shift towards Demand Studios and some very questionable practices were already being implemented. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

That said, they should have come out and said so. Up until days before the announcement the overwhelming response from eHow editors was that absolutely nothing was changing, the WCP would stay around, and there were no major changes in the works so writers shouldn't worry. They should have come straight out and told everyone exactly what was going to happen instead of blatantly lying and then more or less closing down angry forum discussion.

Maybe it's because I was raised in a really old school family, so I grew up in a home where the word "honor" wasn't some nebulous word, it was the distinct understanding that there was a right way to do things, and a wrong way. And even if it sucked and made your life miserable, you did things the right way. And since I'm an Iowa State (I-State) Cyclones fan, I'll link to this video where Head Coach Paul Rhoads does a fantastic job explaining doing things the right way. You have to go to 2:19 to see the speech, but this will make you wish every high school and college coach believed this and taught our kids this way.

But I digress. Demand Studios had a passive income article set up before the eHow mess, and I assume that this is the same thing that former eHow writers are being encouraged to use in order to submit passive income articles now. I've never tried it, and so I'm going to be very straight forward and open at this place in saying I have NO idea at this point how it works - but there are many great discussions going on at Jade Dragon's Passive Income blog through the comments sections about the formula for passive income being slightly lower for Demand Studios than it was for eHow.

So what do I think? I don't know. My overwhelming feeling is that even if the passive income articles from Demand Studios to eHow work and provide some income, I'm not sure after seeing how this company handles itself whether or not I would actually want to take the chance of investing a lot of my time into passive income writing for Demand Studios when their track record for treating writers is spotty, to say the least. For true beginners, maybe this is still a viable option, but I think for people who are really serious about building a major passive income while they're freelancing, there are better ways to spend your time.

So that brings us back to talking about Demand Studios. Do I still like them as part of a freelance writing portfolio? The answer is yes, I do, but for flat fee articles and not for writing eHow articles. At some point in June I will likely throw up 20 or 30 keyword researched articles, with backlinks from article directory articles (so I can always edit and switch the links to non DS and non eHow sites I own if I'm not happy with the result, or if the article gets swept but they try to keep the URL) and give it a couple of months to see what the results are. I've done enough writing for eHow with keyword research that I have a pretty good idea of what the articles I'm looking at posting should have as far as potential. Once I get to that point, I'll let everyone know what I think.

But for now, especially for writers who want to make cash now, Demand Studios with their flat rate articles still needs to be considered as a viable option, just be wary of the passive income options.