At the time I was still pretty new online and I wasn't very experienced. I started picking keywords based on a spreadsheet I built that was similar to the teachings of the old (should-be-defunct) Keyword Academy.
I researched a bunch of money keywords and then posted a bunch of articles on those keywords. That was cool. I then interlinked the articles a lot. This was also great. I then proceeded to backlink them heavily. For some time this was the way to go about things but by Spring 2011 low quality content filters started weighing on my articles and by Spring 2012 my backlink profile was detrimental to the health of my articles.
Needless to say with my emphasis on niche sites in the 2012 era my InfoBarrel traffic and earnings began to falter and then eventually plummet.
Somewhere in mid-2013 Infobarrel started noindexing articles with low internal scores. This affected a number of my articles because I wasn't tending to them like I should have been. A lot of my stuff is still on IB but just isn't getting PV any more.
What does this mean?
I dropped from peak earnings on Infobarrel in December 2011 to December 2013 by 87%!
December 2011 - $1,201.03
December 2012 - $463.48
December 2013 - $160.82
By last month (12/13) roughly 2/3 of my IB income was from the internal ads program and the other third came primarily from a mix of Amazon and Shareasale.
Ehh.
So what's a guy to do?
I've decided to see what I can do to revive a bit of my former glory on IB by adding better content, re-purposing older content, adding media pages to articles that have little to no graphics included, and most importantly promoting my graphics on Pinterest.In case you didn't notice. I started showing my face in my avatar. I joined Google+ (circle me if you're into that). I created a LinkedIn account. I connected Twitter to everything. The plan is to use social to boost my older stuff up and create new stuff to increase the quality of my entire portfolio incrementally.
I wouldn't be surprised if I even start deleting some older stuff that just doesn't cut it any more.
In the next few days I'll go into greater detail on my Infobarrel/Pinterest strategy either here, on the IB forums or over on The Pond IM forum. I hope you'll find this series of experiments as interesting and worthwhile as I do.
Sounds like a solid plan. I never got into infobarrel. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteThanks Jason, IB is basically where I started so I've got a bit of a soft spot for the site and the guys that run it. I also know it's always been a stable place with a good relationship between both advertisers and writers. That's a big reason to spend at least some time there.
DeleteThank you for this candid update. You just brought up something I wasn't aware of. Can we use our affiliate network links on Infobarrel?
ReplyDeleteYeah absolutely, just stay in line with IB rules. They want only contextual links (no call to actions) and you shouldn't link out with affiliate links a whole bunch of times in every article. You should be fine. I have three articles on a different IB account that are monetized primarily with a single share-a-sale program. Those three articles have made me just over $250 over the course of 2013. Not a ton but a very reliable $20 or so every month.
DeleteThanks a lot for this article, I was very curious about how you were doing. Good luck with the updates!
ReplyDeleteNP - This has been a long time coming. I used to do very well on IB but that was with Pre-Panda techniques. Times have long changed and I need to bring my older stuff back in line with what works today.
DeleteThanks Chezfat, this is definitely something to explore and thank you for explaining. I'll visit a couple of your articles to see how you're using it.
ReplyDeleteNP but I don't think I'm using shareasale on my chezfat account, it's on one of my niche accounts. It's just a contextual link though so just treat it like you were linking contextually to amazon and you'll be fine.
DeleteI think that a lot of Infobarrel articles were unfairly hit. From what I see, there are a lot of other sites with far poorer content.
ReplyDelete