It has been awhile since we’ve done an InfoBarrel success story.  Lots of adjustments have been taking place here over the last few months that have kind of taken precedence.  Moving forward we will continue to showcase members who heavily contribute to InfoBarrel and have experienced some success.

This month, I’d like to congratulate Ernie, one of our long time members for being the InfoBarrel Success Story or July 2011!

Ernie, tell us a little bit about yourself

I am 34 years old and live in Idaho. My real name is Daniel, but I go by the nickname of Ernie. I graduated from Highland High school in Pocatello and currently live in Twin falls, Idaho. I love riding bicycles. I have been writing full time for about a year now.

How did you get started on InfoBarrel, and how did you hear about it?

I have always been interested in writing. I had begun to write for a website that paid for pageviews. I was having a lot of success with this site but I did not fully trust them. The revenue paid to the writers kept dropping and I looked for additional places to write for. I attempted to write for another writing site that was extremely popular at the time, but I continued to get errors when I wanted to publish an article. Their publishing tool was horrendous as it kept failing. I only put 4 articles up with them and gave up. It was good I gave up this popular site as they ended up changing their terms and ending the royalty program.

I kept writing for the original website I was writing for but I wanted to find a company that was fair and not out to rip off the writers. I checked back on the website where I had only published 4 articles after a couple of months and was surprised to find I had earned over $30.00 even though I had done nothing with the website for a long while. I was instantly hooked on building up my passive income through writing.

I dabbled with a handful of other websites and experienced some minor earnings but none of these websites felt right to me. I discovered InfoBarrel from reading a forum. I believe it was the EHow forum, but am not sure. I came to InfoBarrel and was initially not impressed with the look of the website. This was before InfoBarrel 2.0 was introduced.

I did more research on content sharing websites and I kept coming back to InfoBarrel. I spent some time on InfoBarrel and realized it was exactly what I was looking for.

What is your writing strategy, how do you decide what to write about?

I don’t like to backlink and I rarely use keyword research, even though it would drastically add to my earnings. I like to write about a wide variety of topics. If a certain niche earns consistently then I will write more articles within that niche. I have a lot of articles dealing with Las Vegas. I like to write about Las Vegas because that topic has proven to be a valuable topic to earn money with.

Not all of my Las Vegas articles earn money consistently each month, but the ones that do earn are “Cherry” and earn a few dollars each month.

My overall goal with InfoBarrel is to get 4,000 articles published. I like to write and hate to backlink so I will focus most of my attention on simply writing articles.

My monthly earnings per article average is much lower than the average here on IB. A lot of this has to do with the lack of backlinking and keyword research on my part. I know if I was to focus more on backlinking I would earn more, but I instead choose to simply write more articles.

I write a lot of articles for clients each month and I must write to their specifications. InfoBarrel is my release where I can write freely and not have to follow a client’s direction. The more I earn with InfoBarrel then the less I have to write for up-front payment for clients. Q- What do you like to do in your free time?

I love to ride bikes, go camping, swimming at in lakes, photography, playing cards, reading and of course writing. Q- Of all the articles on InfoBarrel, what article are you most proud of?

Top 25 Most Visited Tourist Destinations in America

What advice can you give new writers just starting out on InfoBarrel?

Stick with your writing. At times it can seem like your efforts are not paying off, but they will. Keep writing and adding new articles to InfoBarrel on a regular basis. If you want to learn about keyword research and how to maximize your earnings per article then take a look at an InfoBarrel member such as JCMayer777. He maximizes his earnings per article by using great keyword usage as well as backlinking.

In the beginning I would simply recommend to begin writing and adding articles on a regular basis. Once you have a larger portfolio of articles you can see which article topics tend to earn the most for you and then focus on writing more articles within those topics.

Don’t get bogged down trying to follow the exact methods that any established authors use on here. Each writer will develop their own system and methods of doing things that work for them. You can however learn a great deal from many of the members here. The InfoBarrel forums are a great place to ask questions and learn new tips and techniques. I am constantly learning new things in the InfoBarrel forums.

As a new writer it is imperative that you connect your Adsense and Analytics account together. You can use Adsense channels, but you are limited to only 200 channels which will quickly run out once you get serious about writing for InfoBarrel.

Connect your Adsense and Analytics account. Create a custom channel for InfoBarrel in Analytics. Create a channel for InfoBarrel.com/media. Add your Amazon and Chitika information to InfoBarrel. Once you have done this simply write a lot of articles and see what works well for you.

I emphasize the steps above as I use Analytics as a primary motivator to continue writing for InfoBarrel. I look at the overall pageviews on my InfoBarrel articles and try to improve them. I can see when old articles are suddenly trending and find out why they are suddenly popular. I also use Analytics to find what search terms people use to find my articles, and then I write more articles around those terms.

You can never be sure as to what articles will consistently earn money. I have written well researched articles using keyword research and backlinked the article and earned a few cents while on the other hand I have written a short article using no keyword research and threw it together in less than 20 minutes and it earns consistently each month.

When you publish an article on InfoBarrel then interlink it with related articles that you already have written on InfoBarrel. Internal linking of your InfoBarrel articles can increase your pageviews.

I also suggest you use images with as many articles as you can. An image helps to break up the monotony of static text and also gives you gives you the potential for additional revenue.

What was your best month on InfoBarrel?

It was December 2010. I earned $142.64 with InfoBarrel. For 9 of the last 10 months I have earned over $100.00 each month with InfoBarrel.

If I was to quit writing for InfoBarrel I would still earn around $100 each month. I have built up over $1,200 a year in passive income using InfoBarrel. I will continue to receive my InfoBarrel earnings check from Google and Chitika each month regardless of if I continue to write or not. I could quit writing for InfoBarrel today and over the next 5 years continue to earn around $6,000. The power of passive income is truly awesome! Q- What are your plans/goals with InfoBarrel in the future?

My long term goal with InfoBarrel is to eventually get 4,000 articles published. I really enjoy the flexibility in being able to choose to write what I want to write about.

Hey everyone,

As you may or may have noticed we’ve been testing a variation on the ad layout that has the top leaderboard ad being removed and doubling up on the cube ads at the bottom of the article.  We’ve had better CTR with this ad layout than the other so we’ve decided to switch it up so everyone can benefit from it.

Please leave any feedback you have on this forum post.

Enjoy everyone!

Hey guys,

Yesterday, Google announced that it is going to start utilizing the authorship markup to identify author bio pages.  (read more about it here)  What this does is identifies who the author is for every article written on the site and shows Google (and other engines that utilize this) where it can find that author’s bio page.  This should help author’s who write quality content build up their own reputation in the search engines, which should increase the rankings for more of that author’s content.

Another thing you can do with authorship is identify other sites or bio pages that are about you.  By including the tag rel=”me” in any links to pages about you, you are identifying those pages as about you.  For example, if you have a personal blog and you link to it from your about me here on InfoBarrel with the rel=”me” attribute set, Google will now understand that this site or page is also about you and use it to build your Authorship profile.

We’ve implemented this on all your article pages already so that they now identify to your bio page.  If you have any blogs or profiles on other sites, we suggest you add the rel=”me” attribute to any links that you have that cross link your bios.

Just wanted to drop a quick note that we’ve added Google’s +1 (plus one) to article pages.  You can see it in the by line and at the bottom of every article page.  It functions pretty much like Facebook’s Like button, except it also has some search benefits.

To learn more about +1 check out this article: http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1047397&p=sign_up_about_plusones

It looks like stuff has mostly calmed down after the Google Panda update and people earnings are starting to return to normal.  Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing how we can best secure InfoBarrel from these updates and algorithm changes in the future and the thing we kept coming back to is credibility.  By increasing the credibility of the site and the authors, readers will continue to come back regardless of what happens with Google or any of the other search engines.

So, over the coming weeks and months we’re going to be introducing, different tools that should help everyone here build up their web-cred.  One of these tools will be a References or Work Cited element that you can use to cite sources you’ve referenced for your articles.  We’ll also be trying to encourage people to start using their real names or pen names in their byline, so that readers can identify a real person with the article they are reading.  Some of the other things we have planned we’ll be keeping under wraps until they are closer to launching so they can come out with a bang.

I’ve set up a forum post so that everyone can get their say in and offer any other ideas they may have.

Note: We won’t be doing any article sweeps, so no need to worry about that.

To make everybody’s lives easier, both you as writers, and us as editors, we’ve implemented a new spelling and grammar checker.  Previously we had a spell check system that was very basic.  We’ve updated the system and have now implemented a much more complex system.  The new system not only has a much better spell checker, it also has an advanced grammar checker and a natural language checker.

This will help improve the overall readability of your content and is right in line with our goal to constantly improve the quality of the content on the site.

To use the new tool, simply click the button illustrated in the image below within the text editor element.

It has been nearly two months since we last posted on the blog and a lot of things have happened.

We’ve launched IB 2.0, Google updated their algorithm impacting our traffic slightly and we’ve been feverishly trying to fix every last little bug that has popped up with IB 2.0.

The Launch of InfoBarrel 2.o

Looking back at the launch of IB 2.0, things could have definitely gone smoother.  We didn’t expect there to be as many glitches in the software as there was, but unfortunately it was something we had to deal with and it definitely put a strain on everybody.  We have now cleaned up the majority of the larger bugs and are now focused on tidying up little problems that are less prominent.

In the coming weeks and months, we will begin moving forward with some exciting new features that will help further distinguish InfoBarrel from other sites in the vertical.  Expect to see more elements available when creating content. These elements will give you the ability to create content that is media rich and interactive giving readers an overall better experience.

Google’s Panda Update (Farmer)

As most people are aware, Google rolled out an algorithm update on February 24th code named ‘Panda’.  This update is intended to reduce the volume of low quality thin content within Google’s search index.  As a result of having 60,000+ pieces of content online, we did feel the affects of this update and lost roughly 20% of our overall search traffic. While this was an unfortunate situation we were affected much less than some other major sites that saw their search traffic drop by 50% or more.  We can attribute this to the fact that we are one of the only crowd sourced web sites that has an in depth editorial process.  By continuing to manually approve articles and tweak our quality guidelines we can dramatically reduce the chance of spammy or thin content being published on our platform.  With that said, we have watched our traffic climb back up over the past month, and would estimate we should pass where we were prior to the update by mid April.

Search engine updates are always going to play a large part in online business.  We have been involved in online marketing and business for over ten years now and have seen dozens of other major algorithm roll outs.  Rest assured we will do everything in our power to always stay within the guidelines of the search engines, and will always evolve to make sure we meet or beat the criteria set forth to be considered a quality site.

While people are nervous about the algorithm change, if you are creating high quality content you should have nothing to worry about.

We are still extremely excited about the future of this site and look forward to watching it evolve over the years.

I’d like to personally thank each and every person that contributes for making this place what is is today.

It has been a long time coming, but InfoBarrel 2.0 will be launching tonight at around midnight.

InfoBarrel will be unavailable for a few hours starting tonight around 10:30pm PST (1:30am EST) and will be down until we have the complete conversion setup.

There will probably be a number of hiccups over the next couple of days, so make sure you create any content locally in a word processor to ensure no content is lost.

In the mean time, if you would like a sneak peak at the upcoming version of InfoBarrel, take a look at our preview over at Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income.

As some people are aware, Google is beginning to crack down on content they believe to be low quality.  As a result we are going to start being more strict on what we consider quality content.

Moving forward all content published on InfoBarrel must be high quality and must provide actual value to the user.  Articles created to be doorway pages for search engine optimization will not be published.  A contextual link within an article that provides value to the reader is not a problem, however an article that talks about “Tips for purchasing pink rugs” that rambles on common sense about pink rugs and fails to deliver on it’s title will no longer be accepted.

Our goal is to create a very high quality database of content that is helpful to people of all walks of life.

If you come across an article that appears to be a doorway page for SEO, please flag it so we can keep this place the best place to publish content.

We are not planning on doing any mass deletes, or anything along those lines, however if one of your articles becomes flagged we will send you an email with the article in question and ask you to resolve the issue within a reasonable time frame.

For more information on what Google considers a doorway page, please see the following page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355&hl=en

As promised we are going to try and push out at least one InfoBarrel success story each month. This month, we’d like to recognize a member who has been with us since January of this year.

She is a frequent poster on the forums and has racked up nearly 650 forum posts while stringing together 233 articles.

Everybody congratulate MommyMommyMommy!

First of all, we’d love to hear a little bit about you, give us an overview of who MommyMommyMommy is and what she is all about.

Before I begin, I want to thank you for asking me to be an Info
Barrel success story! I honestly did not think of myself as one
until you asked me. It is truly an honor.

As for me, I am a minivan driving suburban mom who has been
married to my college sweetheart for twenty-three years. We
have three great kids-a fifteen year old daughter and eight year
old boy/girl twins.

I am proud to say that I am a teacher. Ever since I was a little
girl, I wanted to be one. I have been teaching in some capacity
for my entire life. For twelve years I taught second and third
grade, then I taught parent/child classes and preschool at my
synagogue, and I have been teaching Hebrew School to first and
second graders on Sundays for the past eight years.

I am also a published author. Although I sold my first magazine
article to Instructor Magazine in 1988, it would be another sixteen
years before I tried writing again. A story request in Twins
Magazine about miracle twins led me to write about my children.
Stories about my son and daughter have been published in three
books- It’s Twins!, Twice the Love, and Chicken Soup for the
Soul, Twins and More, all edited by Susan Heim.

How did you originally wind up writing on InfoBarrel?

I needed to find a way to make money at home so I am available
to my kids and my mom. I saw a story on my local television

news about ways for moms to make money at home, and writing
online content was one way these women earned an income.

I found out about Info Barrel on another online writing forum. I
liked what I saw and decided to give it a try. I am so glad that I
did! One of my favorite quotes is “Bloom where you are planted.”
It took a year, and my patience has paid off! I hope that other
writers can read my story and give it time…plant yourself at IB
and see what happens!

When you aren’t writing for InfoBarrel what do you do
with yourself?

Taking care of my family is my number one priority. I love to
be with my kids and we do crafts, play games, go bike riding,
and love to snuggle and watch movies together. We eat dinner
as a family every night of the week. It can get noisy, but it is
important that we all touch base every day.

I am an exercise fanatic and work out five days a week. I get up
at 5:30 in the morning just to make sure I get it in. In fact, I do
my best writing when I am exercising! Ideas just pop into my
head.

I love to read all kinds of books when I get the chance.

When my twins started elementary school, I was able to ramp up
my volunteer efforts. I became my younger daughter’s Girl Scout
leader and love to be with my troop. Our school’s PTA is always
needing volunteers, so I joined some committees and have made
new friends by doing so. I have also recently joined a committee
at my synagogue.

Was InfoBarrel your first attempt at building a passive
income stream?

Info Barrel was my first serious attempt at building a passive
income stream. For 2011, I plan on learning how to do more

online to earn passive income and diversify my writing portfolio.
I wrote about my goals in this article.

I also have a Girl Scout blog that is a pet project of mine. Many
moms who volunteer to be leaders have a hard time starting
out. Creating a successful troop meeting is much like creating a
successful lesson plan for the classroom. I am using my teaching
skills on many levels with my blog.

What do you like about InfoBarrel?

I love the freedom to write about any topic in a variety of styles.
In particular, I like the other writers and how helpful they have
been to me. If they weren’t, I would not be writing this now! I
knew absolutely nothing about earning money online by writing
before coming here.

The great revenue share and the ability to earn more money
with contests and is a major plus for all the writers here on Info
Barrel.

I also like how the administrators respond quickly to the
questions and concerns of the writers. It means you listen, which
is a rare thing in business.

What features would you like to see in InfoBarrel 2.0?

I would love to see a private messaging system, as well as a way
to search for my own articles and the forums in a much easier
manner. I would also like a way to save my favorite articles.

At what point did you realize that you could make a
serious income on InfoBarrel?

Thanks to carrying my twins around all the time, I injured my
left rotator cuff. After being in pain for six-and-a-half years, I
was finally able to have much-needed surgery. I wrote very few

articles while recovering this summer, but over July and August,
I earned more than enough to make payout! This proved to me
that Info Barrel was a very real way for me to earn an income at
home.

How much are you currently making and what are your
goals for the future?

Since August, I have made payout every month. I went from
earning $4.78 cents in February to earning $176.93 in November.
I am even earning about twelve dollars at Chitika each month.
To date, I have made no Amazon sales!

My goal for the future is to optimize everything I have written
so I am earning at least $1,000 a month or even better by the
end of 2011. I learn so much from the IB community, I want to
do it all and make enough money to pay our mortgage and my
daughter’s college tuition, which is only two years away

I am planning a year-long series of articles about my goals and
sharing what happens. It is my intention to make the most of all
of the online opportunities available to me.

What is your favorite article that you’ve published and
your favorite article from another IB writer?

It’s hard to pick a favorite article of mine. My article on
Overcoming Adoption Fears speaks from my heart. I am a
mother through biology and adoption, and I love all of my kids
more than anything in this world. I know many people who have
only children who never considered adoption to grow their family.
I wrote my article to address the adoption fears that people have,
and hopefully provide them with some answers.

My favorite IB article has to be jcmayer777’s entitled Sears
Online Employment Application – Get Hired Today! The reason

for that is I remember reading it and finally figuring out what SEO was! It was my light bulb moment!

What would you do if you won the lottery ?

Hmmm… that is a tough one, because there is so much I would
love to do! Besides permitting my husband to quit his job and
securing fully funded college educations for our three children, I
would love to help some special people in my life who could use
it.

I would gut my house and redo my kitchen, put in an awesome
underground pool with all of the extras, and put in a media room.
I would also love to travel first class anywhere and hire a cleaning
company so I would never have to clean my house again!

There are organizations that I would love to donate to on a large
scale, like my synagogue, my children’s schools, and the adoption
agency from where we grew our family. I would also want to start
my own non-profit organization. I would make sure that children
have lots of books to read, because reading is a pathway to
dreams, as well as and plenty of food to eat and clothing to wear.

I want to thank you for giving me an opportunity for sharing my
Info Barrel experience.