Hey Guys,

We’ve wanted to be able to put Amazon product ads in with your articles for quite a while now and today we’ve put it together.  You are now able to ad in an Amazon ad by choosing an Amazon product category and then by typing in some keywords to help select the products that will appear on your article page.  You can ad in these new options on any existing article as well as any new article.  To add in the keywords and category go edit your article(s) and you should see and Amazon Products Link box on the right side.

You also need to signup and attach your Amazon Tracking ID to your account.  You can Sign up for Amazon here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/.  Once you have signed up, log in and grab your Tracking ID, located on the left hand side of the page when you log in, and paste it into your My Account page on Infobarrel.

Enjoy, and, as always, let us know if you have an comments or issues and we’ll help you out.

Hey Guys,

Thought I’d give everyone a heads up, we’ve changed how articles track viewers.  There was a lot of confusion when comparing our view numbers with the numbers on Adsense or Analytics, so we came up with a new system to record article views. Here’s how it used to be and how it is now:

Before

Any and all views of the page increased the view count.
- This meant that if a search engine bot looked at your article (which happens quite a bit) or someone refreshed the page a bunch or a viewer stopped or left the page before the article finished loading, your article view count would go up by one.

Now

Only viewers with Javascript enabled increase your view count.
- This keeps out the bots.

Only one view is counter per IP (essentially per computer) every 12 hours.
- This will remove the refreshing issue.

The view is counted much later in the article load.
- This should cut down on the partial loads increasing your view count

After dozens of requests to build an Infobarrel community, we’ve finally spend a few weeks coming up with the first version of the Infobarrel forum.

Keep in mind this is a custom forum that integrates your current Infobarrel account to our forum, so there are bound to be some minor bugs over the coming weeks.  If you do have any issues either post them in the bugs forum or contact us using our contact form!

To enter the InfoBarrel forum, click here!

We originally only opened up Google Analytics to preapproved members and everyone loved it.  So we’ve decided to open it up to any member that has written 10 or more articles.

To add your Google Analytics ID

1. Make sure you are signed up for Google Analytics- Sign up here
2. Add a new website profile. Make sure the URL you use is www.infobarrel.com
3. Once you’ve set up the website profile, grab the UA number for that site (ex UA-1234567-8)
4. Open up your “My Account” page here at Infobarrel
5. Click the [change] link in the the Google Analytics Site ID box
6. Paste your UA number into the text field and click Save Changes

Enjoy your news traffic tracking abilities!

We’ve got some great news here at Infobarrel.com

We are going to be expanding the ways that authors can make money here on Infobarrel in the very near future.  In the coming days you may notice Chitika ads on your content.

Don’t worry, we are just testing it out.  Provided the ads are capable of earning some money, you will soon be able to add Chitika to your Infobarrel profile and earn 75% of the revenue generated by the ads!  This means more money for our writers!

What else is nice about Chitika, is they can pay by Paypal or check.  As long as you make at least $10, you will get a check every single month!

If you want to signup for Chitika now, and have your account ready for when we launch, you can sign up using this link.

Today is a monster milestone for Infobarrel.com as we finally surpass the 10,000 unique article mark!

We launched July 31st 2008, and didn’t crack the 1000 article mark until late March 2009, but the site is growing at an amazing rate.  Hopefully six months from now we will be blogging about reaching the 100,000 article mark!

Here are some fun facts about InfoBarrel and where it stands as of today:

Official 10,000th article: Hitachi 18V

Total Members: 4283

Average articles per user: 2.33

Average articles per active user: 10.24

Total written words across all articles: 5,070,365

Total Comments: 3042

Comments per user:  0.71

Comments per active user: 4.39

Current Alexa Ranking: 18,267

Current Technorati Rating: 1993

There you have it ladies and gentlemen, over a years worth of hard work has led to this milestone.  I’m excited to see what the future has in store for us.  Keep up all the fantastic work, this place wouldn’t be where it is today without your hard work and contributions!

Hey guys,

Moving forward we are looking to start creating a little more buzz in the blog community.  To do so, we are going to create a a page dedicated to those who blog about InfoBarrel.

Want to get your site mentioned?  All you have to do is write about InfoBarrel on your blog, link to any page on the site, then fire us an email telling us where we can find your blog post.  We’ll post who blogged about us as well as a snippet of your post to give your some exposure.  I’ll also acknowledge your post on the InfoBarrel Twitter account!

Follows InfoBarrel on Twiter

Hey all,

We’ve made some additions to your My Content page.

We’ve added a new tab called “Pending Articles”.  Under this tab are your articles that are currently in the queue awaiting approval.  We’ve had a few emails over the last couple of weeks from users wondering where their articles went after they hit the Publish button.  Now you they will be able to see them under the aforementioned “Pending Articles” tab.

Also by popular demand, we have added a [reason for denial] button under your “Denied Articles” tab.  If you click the button you can see the reason your article was denied, allowing you to make the changes necessary to your article so you can submit it again.  This feature will only work going forward.  None of the past denied articles will have a reason attached because we we’re storing that data before today.

Hope everyone likes the new additions.

Kevin