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!

Since I thought it our office might interest a few of you, I’ve snapped a few pictures.  It is located in beautiful Port Moody, British Columbia, roughly 30 seconds from the inlet.  We’ve got a Starbucks within 100 feet of the building and Rocky Point is only five minutes away.  Whats especially great about this office is we have plenty of space to expand if need be.

On top of two bathrooms and a kitchen, there is also a board room with a giant 46″ LCD screen for slide shows and stuff.

Front Desk

Waiting Area

Main Office

Hey Look! It’s Kevin! (I sit to the right of him)

The good ol’ Kitchen

No office image collection would be complete without the token bathroom shot!

Hope you like our new office!

We have officially enabled revenue sharing through Chitika on top of our current Adsense sharing.

How does Chitika revenue share work on Infobarrel?

We’ve spent the last two weeks testing earnings and click through rates using Adsense and Chitika in different positions.  After a few different tests we’ve come to the conclusion that combining both Chitika and Adsense in the current layout provides greater earnings than just Adsense alone.

Simple signup for Chitika, add your Chitika login to your Infobarrel account, and as soon as we verify your account you can begin earning money with Chitika

Benefits to Chitika

One of the really cool things about Chitika, is members can get paid via paypal after accumulating just $10, so making the monthly payment minimum will be much easier.

Things to know about Chitika

After getting your Chitika account fully functioning with Infobarrel, you will start seeing ad impressions in your Chitika account the following day.  It will not show earnings for roughly 3-5 days as Chitika’s earning’s reports are all audited.

That is about it! Signup for Chitika today and add another passive revenue stream to your content here at Infobarrel!

After placing Chitika ads at the bottom of our articles, we’ve noticed the click through rate for this position to be extremely high.  So since Google Adsense generates substantially more than Chitika, we’ve decided to replace the right Google rectangle ad found on most pages with a Chitika ad, and we’re going to place a Google Adsense banner below every article.

We are hoping this increases the Google Adsense CTR by a couple percent, resulting in more money for our writers.
Chitika and Revenue Sharing

As you may or may not have noticed, we’ve been experimenting with Chitika over the last week.  Our goal is to add it in conjunction with Google Adsense without having it reduce Google Adsense CTR.  Rest assured if we decide to keep Chitika on the site we will be applying the identical revenue share to Chitika as we are using with Adsense.  In order to see if it is financially viable we need to test it across our entire inventory or articles.  We should have some solid numbers to base our decision on by the end of this week.

In the mean time, signup for Chitika so when we launch their ads to our users you are ready to go!

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.

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!

I just wanted to chime in here and let everybody know that after we moved servers last week, we had an issue with our mail server which resulted in no emails coming through to us.

We apologize for the issue, and hope it didn’t cause anybody any problems.  Aside from the mail not working, the server has been running great and we are close to reaching numerous milestones which we are all really excited about here at Infobarrel.com

So, moving foward you should no longer notice any issues sending us any emails.

If you wrote a blog post and wanted to get in on the Blog Buzz we started, please re-email us!
Thanks!

Ryan

Over the last month we were starting to run into some server issues thanks to the tremendous growth we’ve been seeing.  You probably noticed the server was running slower than normal and issues were popping up left, right and center.

In order to allow for substantially more growth we’ve completed a major migration to a MUCH more powerful server.  Double the CPU cores, double the RAM and double the hard drive space.  What this means for all the members of Infobarrel should be much quicker load times, and hopefully more people sticking around reading your content.

If you do happen to run into any bugs, please make sure to contact us.  We’ve taken every precaution to make sure this goes as smoothly as possible (outside of the mysql errors yesterday), but sometimes things slip through the cracks.
Thanks!

Ryan

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

This weekend the approval queue got a little bit backlogged due to the fact that it is labor day weekend.  Some of us went away for the weekend and  I’ve been battling some form of nasty cold for nearly a week.  We normally have a pretty quick turnaround time on article approval but due to the Holiday articles have been getting approved a little slower than normal.

I’m working today (yes on the holiday) to try and clear things up a bit and get things running back to normal!

Hope everybody is having an awesome Labor Day long weekend!

Ryan