February 23, 2010

My Xomba (Boomarks) Xomblurb Experiment

What Is Xomba?

Xomba is a website that’s been around for a while that is basically an Adsense sharing content website much like InfoBarrel. The difference is that Xomba doesn’t let you send dofollow links around the web, only nofollow links. Not only that but the Adsense ad share program is only 50/50 compared to a base rate of 75/25 at InfoBarrel. Of course I naturally thought yeah right; why would I do that?

Well it turns out there are some reasons which are good. For one, this site lets you write very short articles. Articles are called Xombytes and are at minimum 150 words. That’s all you have to write. And if that isn’t short enough for you, you can write Xomblurbs which are at minimum 50 words long.

Xomba Is Worthwhile – I Think

At first I thought to myself that Xomba wasn’t worth it because of the nofollow links and the low Adsense share split. But recently I’m second guessing myself. You see as I’ve been balancing my time reading and learning about how to work better and make more money online I’m also trying to experiment a ton and see what works.

I previously mentioned (in my last post on GeoTargeting San Diego) that I was experimenting based on the teaching of Vic from Blogger Unleashed on the GeoTargeting topic. Well as it turns out I’m actually working my way through all of his archives and thought I’d give another idea of his a try. For a while Vic was highly promoting a free service that was basically a social bookmarking service that was designed more for SEO purposes rather than its social features. As far as I know the service he was plugging doesn’t exist anymore but it was nofollow at it’s core.

The point was that you would use the leverage of the bookmarking site to funnel search engine traffic to your article on your blog. In many social bookmarking circles the first paragraph of the linked article populates as the “blurb” or "description" for the bookmark, and the title of the linked article auto-populates as well. This is how many people social bookmark. The thing is though that all of that bookmarked material that auto-populates is duplicate content and only one version of it will show up in the SERPs.

He tought however that if you changed the title to be a related keyword and rewrote the "description" or “blurb” to be keyword rich that you could rank well in the SERPs for your bookmark too. Then at the end of the bookmark you present a “call to action” persuading someone to click through to the linked article on your blog. By doing this you could funnel traffic to your blog that you wouldn’t otherwise get without a lot of keyword authority.

For instance if your blog is about “Residual Income Ideas” like this blog is but you wanted to write an article about “masking tape”, because I don’t have keyword authority for masking tape, I could write the post here and then a separate keyword focused “blurb” that links to this post. The bookmarking site has some authority for just about everything thus it will rank in the SERPs well for "masking tape" and visitors to the blurb will click through to my post. Indirectly my post gets search traffic even though it doesn’t rank for the keyword on it’s own.

My Xomba Experiment

Xomba is not the site mentioned by Vic a couple years back but it’s basically the same if you write Xomblurbs. You can write a 50 word description of the article you’re linking to; subtly suggest the reader click through to your post, and tag the article with up to five keywords. I try to use all five.

In my Xomba experiment I’m going to “bookmark” with Xomba every single one of my posts from my Longevity Tips blog with an SEOed “bookmark”. Most of my traffic to that site comes through search engines to roughly 20-30 posts and I’ve got over 300 total so I’ve got a lot of pages not getting any search engine traffic. If Xomba can funnel some of that traffic to those posts then my targeted page views will go up dramatically.

Even better is the fact that I can theoretically make money on Adsense clicks from Xomba at the same time so if the search traffic doesn’t click through to my site then they might make me some good residual income from Xomba by clicking through to the ads.

The Big Question About Xomba

You might be wondering the big question that I was by now. Will Xomblurbs rank well in the search engines? Will they rank better than my site? Well, I wrote a Xomblurb using the exact same keyword as a recent InfoBarrel article that I had posted a couple weeks back which already has about five backlinks pointing at it and within one day and no backlinks the Xomba Xomblurb was already outranking my IB article in the SERPs for that keyword. My InfoBarrel article currently sits in 20th spot while my Xomblurb using the same keyword exactly sits in the number 12 spot. That alone makes me think there is potential.

The other question: Is it worth my time? Let’s put it this way, if I see results it will be worth my time but is it better than just doing what I’m already doing, obtaining dofollow backlinks? Well, for me obtaining dofollow backlinks takes a lot of work. Every article I write takes about 20-40 minutes and I usualy only get about 3-5 articles up a day. With Xomblurbs however, I’ve posted 32 Xomblurbs in less than three days so far. I plan on getting as close to 200 as I can by the end of February. I know that sounds crazy but they’re that easy to write. I probably won’t get to 200 but I’m going to do as many as I can. If I can do 32 this fast then I should be at 100 or so by Friday at least.

As for my goals with this challenge: I have surfed around looking for Xomba success stories and I don’t see as many as I do for other sites but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places. Maybe a commenter can point us to some success stories or tell one of their own.  I have seen a few people with thousands of Xomblurbs reporting earnings for them in the range of $1 per month for every 5-10 blurbs on average. For now until I try it myself.  I’ll stick with that rule of thumb but honestly I want to see if I can simply funnel this search traffic that I'm not getting back to my blog. That’s my goal. As of this writing I have zero referral traffic from my Xomba to my blog; at then end of March I look forward to seeing if that number goes into the hundreds or even… heaven forbid, the thousands.

BTW: Xomba has a referral program... I cannot vouch for the site yet as a money maker or targeted traffic generator but if you want to give it a try then feel free to sign up under my referral link.  It's also located in the left sidebar at the top as a nice friendly reminder for you readers at all times. :)

And hey... why not send me an anchored backlink to this article or my main index page to say thanks. :)

Update 3/23/2010: I just posted an update on this Xomba Bookmarks Experiment. It is a one month review; check it out for more info.

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13 comments:

  1. Hi Brian,

    I'm Nick Veneris the owner of Xomba.com. I wanted to take a few minutes and address your blog entry about Xomba.

    Thanks for writing about us by the way, we appreciate it.

    Xomba's payout is 50/50 because it costs money to run Xomba and we're currently spending lots of money on new development and features to grow our community. I can't vouch for what other sites offer, but we spend lots of money every month to make sure your articles and bookmarks rank very high in the SERPS. We seem to be improving all the time.

    As far as "funneling" traffic I challenge you to post the same articles on Xomba and see how they compare in the SERPs.

    We use NoFollow links because we do not validate every link on Xomba. Search engines pay special attention to who you are linking to and base your "rep" off that. We've considered adding a special user role to allow trusted users to post DoFollow links.

    Please feel free to contact us with questions and comments. We look forward to watching your success.

    Take care,
    Nick

    ReplyDelete
  2. One more thing...

    You asked for success stories.
    Check out -
    http://www.xomba.com/xomba_testimonials

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Nick, thanks for adding to the post here and thanks for the link to the testimonials. If this site works out for me I'd love to offer a testimonial myself.

    I understand the nofollow attribute especially when publications are not manually checked for quality. It sounds really interesting the thought of a tiered membership where trusted authors get dofollow. That is quite unique.

    Also, only 5 days into using Xomba I already see the SERP ranking power in action. . Some of my xo0mblurbs there are ranking well right out of the gate no doubt based upon the authority of the Xomba site itself. I will continue attempting to funnel visitors through Xomba to other articles that don't receive search traffic and see how it works.

    In the future, if things go well I will continue to expand on my budding knowledge of Xomba. In less than a week Xomba has made me believe it can be worthwhile and I hope it is. You can be sure I'll post my honest results in due course. Thanks for stopping by.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've been using Xomba for about 2 months with about 275 points so far (blubs, bytes and comments).

    I'm not getting huge traffic on most of my bookmarks but I am getting decent blog traffic from Xomba. I set up a sig line that gives me two links to my blog (one anchored/one just the link) on every post and comment I make on Xomba. I'm not getting rich off adsense yet but the earnings are a nice bonus.

    So the benefits are:

    1. Links that count on Alexa/Google etc
    2. quality blog traffic from real people that usually look at multiple pages
    3. Actual serious traffic on a reposed article that ironiclly ehow axed as a clone (it was not a clone).
    4. Some adsense revenue

    I also really appreciate how open and friendly the staff seems. Can you imagine anyone from eHow coming to comment on your blog?

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Jade - I know seriously, it's asking too much of them to answer you email or your post on their own forum let alone my blog. :)

    Yeah, I see some good things with Xomba. In five days I've gone from 4 blurbs to 70. I've already started to see some referral traffic to my blog which I'm boomarking on Xomba page by page but no earnings yet. I'm sure they'll come in time; we'll just have to see how much. As I said in the post, this is an experiment; but I hope it works out.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I am a relatively new user to Xomba and I'm using it to create backlinks to my eHow articles. I agree with everything you wrote in this post. I started doing that during the publishing woes at eHow but I've enjoyed Xomba so much I'm still spending lots of time there and I've been very pleasantly surprised with my Xomba earnings.

    Oh, and Nick, if you're still reading comments here, I would LOVE to see a special user role for do follow backlinks.

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Julie - Hey Julie, thanks for the comment. I've been reading your blog for a while now and I saw that you too have taken up the Xomba experiment almost at the exact same time as me. I've been meaning on getting in touch with you about it and comparing notes.

    I'm up to somewhere in the 125 Xomblurbs range already. It's been 11 days. I made my first earnigns on the site on day 8 and made my second earnings on the site on day 10. This week (week 2) my adsence views are up very noticably from week 1. I assume you are noticing the same trends.

    I plan on writing a complete update post on this experiment before long as, like yourself, I'm finding the site to be really nice. I like it there a lot and I second the special user for dofollow designation.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you for your detailed comment Anon; maybe next time give some reseaoning; you might be taken more seriously.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I started with Xomba in March and made just over $100. This month, I made a bookmark (used to be xomblurb) for all of my Info Barrel articles. I've been adding tons of bookmarks this month, trying to do a little experiment.

    I'm on course to clear $200 this month on Xomba.

    ReplyDelete
  10. That is really cool Chris and I don't doubt it. I see potential with Xomba. I thinkit's easy to pump out 15-20 Xomba Bookmarks a day and assuming they are keyword focused on the right words I'm sure good earnings can be had fairly quickly. I've slowed on my Bookmarkeing but intend on pushing closer to 1000 bookmarks in the coming months. I'm curious how many you've posted since you start in March.

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  11. Such a very good site. I see some good things with Xomba. thanks for adding to the post here and thanks for the link to the testimonials. thanks for sharing the good ideas...

    ReplyDelete
  12. Xomba is the most remarkable site.I hope Xomba bookmarks will provide good earnings provided they are well-written without any error of grammar and spelling.I find the site very comfortable to work with. One final word-in giving our comments we should not make any derogatory remark as done by an anonymus person.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Thnx for sharing, i was in search of websites which pay to write..

    ReplyDelete

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