The Holiday season is quickly approaching and what better way to get everybody inspired than another InfoBarrel Success Story?

Our success stories give you a glimpse into the personalities behind the most successful people on InfoBarrel. We publish these success stories to give you an idea of what you are capable of if you put your mind to it.  In this particular case, we have one of our long term members who has been around since April of 2009.  She is not only a great support on the forum, but she creates tons of great content and has had a pretty successful ‘career’ as an online writer.

If you participate in the forums, chances are you know her by DKRunner, but she formally goes as Kelli.

Hey DKRunner, Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself ?

My real name is Kelli. I am a twenty something who is determined not to spend her entire life in a cubicle slaving away for someone else. I am entrepreneurial, adventurous, and I can’t sit still for more than 60 seconds. I have bachelor’s degrees in both psychology and sociology and a few years of experience in education and career counseling with both youth and adults. I have a husband who I adore, a very loving family, and one exceptionally fat cat. I have dreams of living on a large piece of land with a view where I will have a garden and a fruit tree collection that is plentiful enough to feed me all year around.

How did you choose your user name?

I put very little thought into choosing the username DKRunner (about 3 years ago, originally on another writing site), because I had no idea that I would be “stuck” with it for so long! The D is for my husband’s first name, mine starts with a K, and I really love running. The name is as simple as that but it ended up really growing on me.

How did you get started as an online writer?

In early 2009, we stumbled on a site that paid a passive income structure for submissions on any subject. I wrote two articles and checked on it the next day to find that I had made a dime. Others might laugh at such a feat, but I saw the potential and I kept writing, usually for an hour or two each day. In my first two months, I elatedly shared my small successes with friends and family who kind of laughed and gave me the “ok, but don’t quit your day job” sort of look. Roughly six months later I had built up a library of revenue share articles and was making enough money each month to pay my mortgage and then some. There were months where my passive online income was actually earning more than my full time job as a counselor.

The funny thing is, I never spent any of that money- except once, for an all inclusive ten day trip to Cozumel. I didn’t trust the company that I was writing for, or their promises of never ending the revenue share system, and so I saved nearly every penny that I earned from them. In the end, I was happy that I didn’t depend on that income coming in every month!

How did you come across InfoBarrel?

I found InfoBarrel shortly after delving into the online passive income world. I liked the site but was seeing so much success at the place I originally started at that I didn’t spend a lot of time writing here at first. Over time, it became clear to me that this was a much friendlier and more ethical place to write. When I had questions regarding the site or my account, I could get prompt answers directly back from admin – that would have never, ever happened at the other site.

InfoBarrel also had a community of people who were not abrasive or hostile, as I had seen with some other writing sites. They were welcoming, helpful, and put a great deal of time and genuine effort into answering questions for both new members and veterans. Due to work on other projects, I haven’t written much on InfoBarrel recently. Even so, when I had questions regarding that unrelated online project a few months back, I came to this forum and got a wealth of support and good advice from IB members. There are a lot of great people here.

What do you attribute to your success on IB?

I would contribute my success partially to being diligent and consistent with creating content, partially to the support of my husband because he believes in me and supports me whole heartedly in anything that I feel excited or passionate about, and partially to my being just plain stubborn – I want a “real” job to be an option and not a necessity.

I know you run a web site, how is that going for you? Did anything you learn here carry over to your other online endeavours?

FitnessBlender.com is doing very well. We are really excited because we just added a new feature for our users; full length home workout videos. They are anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour in length and range from Pilates to boot camps, and everything in between.

I feel very fortunate to have stumbled into my online earning endeavors because if I hadn’t, I would have never found a venue through which I could take something that I feel so strongly about; working out, staying healthy, clean eating, etc, and share it with the world in a manner that creates income for me and my family.

My husband and I have good intentions with Fitness Blender (it’s cost & gimmick free, the way that health ought to be) and we want it to thrive so that we can spend more time together. Life is short and I don’t want to spend 40 or more hours a week at a job that I hate, away from the people I love the most. Online writing sites are what made me aware that there are less conventional and more rewarding options out there for earning a living.

What is your favourite article you’ve written and your favourite you’ve read on InfoBarrel?

An article of mine that I like is about how to write CNA resumes.  In one of my last jobs I was counseling recent nursing graduates (CNAs, LPNs and RNs) on how to find jobs after they were done with school. Often times people finish college courses and are still unsure of how to get a job in their field. Having experience in job coaching and resume building, I was excited to be able to share that information on the web so that others could possibly benefit from it and land their first jobs.

I like AJ Walton’s “How to Come up with Unlimited Article Ideas” . I like his simple and effective approach to beating writer’s block, and it’s the same principle that worked best for me when I was really cranking out a large quantity of articles everyday.

What do you do in your free time?

I am always picking up new hobbies and interests to keep myself engaged. I spend a lot of time gardening, hiking, painting, cooking, working out, reading, writing, watching movies, playing guitar (trying anyways), and traveling. Aside from all the hobbies, I value the days where I get avoid doing anything constructive whatsoever and be completely lazy.

What advice do you have for existing IB members and new and upcoming members?

I believe that consistency is key. Anything worth doing takes time and effort and online writing is no different. I also believe that making small goals is paramount to tackling the big ones; everything can be subdivided into attainable goals that are less intimidating and more approachable, which makes it more likely that you actually pursue them.

Something that I wish I had known from the beginning is regarding keywords. When I started I had no idea about how keywording worked. When I learned about how they functioned and could be beneficial I went through a stage where I unintentionally went completely overboard, which I think is evident in some of my older articles. There is a careful balance that you have to strive for that is keyword-aware, but not so keyword dense or obvious that the reader feels like you are trying to sell them on something as they read your writing.

I also recommend writing about things that you either know well, or feel passionate about as then the articles just spill out of you and it doesn’t feel as much like work.

Thank you for thinking of me for this acknowledgement, I really appreciate it and I’m flattered.

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.

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.

Happy Birthday InfoBarrel!

For those of you who didn’t know, two years ago today InfoBarrel.com opened up our doors to the public to begin writing. Over the last two years the site has experienced tremendous growth, attracting just shy of 20,000 writers and publishing over 35,000 articles.

InfoBarrel’s growth has been phenomenal and it has been an amazing ride watching it grow from a tiny little site with a few writers, to the thriving writers community it is today. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited we are to continue watching InfoBarrel mature into one of the largest web sites on the Internet.

So, in the spirit of InfoBarrel’s second birthday, I think I will share some fun statistics with everybody

1 Year:

Alexa ranking: Roughly 60K (global)
Published Articles: 4341
Articles per day average: 56.61
Writers: 2497

2 Years:

Alexa ranking: 7342 (global)
Published Articles: 35,200+
Articles per day average: 130+
Writers: 19775+

As you can see, we’ve made some pretty big strides in the last year. We would like to thank everybody who has participated in the site for all their hard work and we look forward to growing with all of you in the future.

Happy Birthday InfoBarrel!

This is another thing that has been a long time coming.

You guys have been asking for some InfoBarrel banners for awhile. Even though it has taken us some time to get them done, we did listen, and a few have finally arrived.

The few we have so far are basic but are prepped and ready to occupy a little corner of your blog.

We have three sizes available right now, 120×120, and 300×250.

InfoBarrel Banners

120×120

300×250

It has been a few months since we last featured a member for their successes on InfoBarrel.  It is something we’d like to do a little more frequently, so if you think you’d be a good candidate for a success story feel free to send us an email!

In this edition of InfoBarrel success stories we are featuring long time member Travis_Aitch.

Tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well, I’m 24 years old, and I have a 5-year-old son who’s about to turn 6 in August. He is my little buddy and he looks just like me. Smart little guy too, he has an amazing vocabulary for his age. I work in a factory 6-7 days a week where we produce welding wire. It’s a pretty laid back job, but the inside temperature in the summer is usually at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit and we are required to wear full-body suits and big full-face powered respirators. I enjoy working there because the company is world-renown and over the last 90 years they pretty much built the city I live in. Plus the pay is nice

In my spare time I love to skateboard. I have been skateboarding for 10 years and I don’t have any plans to stop until my legs can’t take it anymore. It’s my favorite hobby and I love how it combines fear, concentration and skill all in one sport. In my opinion it’s the most difficult and most fun sport at the same time.

I also enjoy Mixed Martial Arts a lot and I am a huge UFC fan. From ages 8 to 18 I took a martial arts class that incorporated a lot of Taekwondo, Judo, Jiu-Jitsu, and Kickboxing. My friends call me a human encyclopedia when it comes to MMA. I would love to take the sport up again but it’s pretty expensive and time-consuming. Maybe if this writing thing works out, one day you’ll see me in the UFC…if they ever have a 135-pound division anyway.

I started searching for ways to make extra money online last summer when my girlfriend and I found out we were expecting. I wanted to save up a bunch of money before the baby was born so I wouldn’t be in a bad financial situation as I have been in the past. I started writing for eHow and Bukisa around October of 2009 I believe, but I didn’t like either of those sites for a laundry list of reasons. I started looking for a new place to write around December and eventually stumbled on an InfoBarrel vs. eHow type article and it convinced me to sign up.

Around Christmas, my girlfriend ended up having a miscarriage. My mom has always told me since I was a kid that my writing will take me somewhere. In the back of my head, I still know that the pregnancy is what lead me to this world of options to make something of myself using my writing skills. As they say, everything happens for a reason, and apparently it wasn’t time for another baby yet, but maybe it’s time for me to find success doing something I’ve always loved, and make mom proud in the process. (it’s working so far).

I have seen quite a bit of success on InfoBarrel in a wide variety of aspects. It’s not even just about the money, either. I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized I have had a lot of success on this website. As of the date of this interview, in the 7 months I’ve been a member here, I have:

- Earned $282 from AdSense
- Earned $35 from Chitika
- Earned $22 from Amazon
- Won 2 contests for $200 in Amazon Gift Cards
- Had 3 Featured Articles on the Front Page
- Currently #3 on the Top 100 list for Achievement Points
- Currently #2 on the Top 100 list for Forum Posts

My best month was in May where I made a total of $115 between AdSense, Chitika, and Amazon. This was also my least active month so far, so the earnings are that much more rewarding for me.

The best advice I can give a new writer is to not get discouraged. I think this is by far the most important thing new writers need to keep in mind. You can’t expect to get rich quick doing this kind of work. Sure, it does happen for some people, but that’s the exception, not the rule. You have to look at this as an investment. Each article you write is like a share of a hot stock. They may not make money today, but they can only get better with time. If you get discouraged, you’re likely to stop writing. If you stop writing, how can you expect to succeed? I have the skateboarding mentality when it comes to this. When I can’t land a skateboarding trick, I don’t quit skateboarding. I keep practicing it until I land it, even if I get hurt in the process. Basically, don’t give up on your goals, and don’t stress out about low earnings. Hard work always pays off in the end.

My ultimate goal is to be able to make about $1,000 per month consistently, but I would be ecstatic with even $300-$500 per month. I also plan on continuing to help out new members in the forum and answer as many questions as I can to help our community grow even more and make sure the newbies have an enjoyable experience on this site.

I have set a personal goal to get at least 500 articles published before the end of the year, and I still think it’s very attainable. The more articles I write, the more money I make. The more money I make, the less overtime I have to work. The less overtime I work, the more time I have to write; so it’s a pretty nice cycle I got going.

This is a hard one. I can’t decide between my article on the Origins of the Easter Bunny and Easter Eggs, and my article on the Top 10 UFC Prospects of 2009 (1-10).

For the Easter one, I had a lot of fun writing it because I actually had no idea what the origins were beforehand. So it was an awesome learning experience for me. Plus, it was my first featured article, it got a ton of views, and it’s one of my highest rated articles.

The UFC article was the very first one I wrote for InfoBarrel. I like that one because I think I did a good job for the most part and so far the majority of my top picks are proving me right. I also spent a great deal of time and effort on that series, and I got a lot of positive comments on it here on InfoBarrel and also on a couple of MMA websites I shared the link to.

Oh wow, this one is really hard. Hmmm…I think it would have to be jcmayer777’s article entitled My InfoBarrel Experience. It was one of the first InfoBarrel articles I remember reading and it gave me a huge boost of motivation to take this seriously and really try to succeed. If that article didn’t exist, it’s very likely I wouldn’t even be considered for a Success Story right now.

For those of you who aren’t constantly monitoring the InfoBarrel forum, I’d like to introduce to you a bunch of changes and updates we’ve done to the site.

This week has been very busy here and we have plenty of cool new things to announce. So without further adieu, here is what we’ve done.

UserVoice Feedback Button – Gone
After a year of complaints about the Feedback button on the side of the site either interfering with functions of the site or slowing the site down we’ve decided to remove it.  Between our community forum and our contact us form, we feel there is more than enough options for providing feedback.

Navigation Bar
We’ve received a lot of feedback that having the expandable navigation bar at the top of the site made it difficult for new users to figure out how to post content.  To rectify this, once you’ve logged in, the navigation bar will now stay open.

Forum Speed
The forum was running kind of slow before so we tweaked a few pieces of code to dramatically speed it up.

Forum Post Count
Interested in knowing how many times you’ve posted on the forum? We now have a  statistic to show you exactly how many posts you’ve made.

Duplicate Image Titles
Previously when uploading an image to the site, if a similar image with the same title existed, you would have to reupload your picture with a different title.  This feature has been updated so even if an image exists with the same title, it won’t stop you from creating another.

Category Functionality
In the past, people were having issues finding the correct category to publish their articles in.  The method we employed to hunt down you category was just plain difficult to use.  We’ve implemented a new method that shows you your category structure in a treed out view.  We’ve also provided a search function that will give you numerous suggestions if you type in a keyword.

Auto Tweet
One of the keys to making money on any web site is exposure.  Our goal at InfoBarrel is to supply our contributors with the absolute largest arsenal of tools to maximize the traffic and revenue to their content.  Our latest feature allows you to authenticate your Twitter account with InfoBarrel and whenever you publish an article, InfoBarrel will automatically post a link to your article with the article title on your Twitter page.  This might only take a minute or two to do by hand, but we believe the more time we can save you in the promotional department, the more time you have to focus on creating great content.

Hey everybody,

This is just going to be a quick update, but important none the less.

We’ve had a few people concerned about their age being listed on their profiles and wanted a way to not show it for privacy reasons.  Instead of spending a bunch of time creating a function to hide your age, we’ve removed it altogether.

After a little deliberation we’ve concluded that there isn’t much value in knowing how old somebody is.

Hopefully this makes everybody a little bit more comfortable when publishing on InfoBarrel.

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!

Great news everybody!

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!