ClearView Writing

I have just spent an immense week in Amsterdam with my fiancée.  Amsterdam is in itself a beautiful city.  Despite it’s reputation, it seemed perfectly safe all the time, even the red light district was thronged with families and old women walking past teh bikini clad girls in the windows.

The week, paid for by my Google Adsense earnings, did bring some new ideas in to my focus however.  There is no real information available on Amsterdam, theres things  here and there, but nowhere does it give specifics on teh red light district and so on.  A website aimed at this could be a real time and money saver for new visitors to the city.

There is also a myriad of different tour companies, on land and water.  Choosing the correct one can be difficult at best, so an Amsterdam Tour Guide raiting Website could also be a real hit.

Alas, I have plenty of projects already on the go, so these may have to wait for now!

As most of you are aware, I run and operate quite a few websites on many different platforms.  Surprising though it may be, some of my most profitable works are hosted on FREE websites, or written work done on sites which are freely accessible.

If you do not have much money in which to start a writing, or website management career, free websites can be a godsend.  These do have drawbacks, some advertise their own services, some take a cut of your advertisements, and others can be slow. Despite this free websites are completely free.  This does mean that you can earn money online without spending a penny, and all you need ot do is put in a bit of elbow grease!

In the following run down I will give you my top 4 free money making websites, and I will tell you how to use each one to leverage a huge income, which with luck, will allow you to quit your day job to work online!

4) Textbroker

Textbroker may have low payout rates, and a lot of the articles on it can be tedious.  However, Textbroker does have some major advantages.  Textbroker is basically an online marketplace where people offer writing jobs, and the first person to accept gets it.  The articles are categorized in to classes, on which the payout rate is based.

Textbroker is good because it quickly weeds out the poor writers, allowing you to earn money quickly on easy articles, without competing with poor competition who consistently undercut prices.  The work is very regular on Textbroker, with hundreds of new writing jobs being posted every day.  The downside is that since the payout rates are low, you will probably not be able to earn enough online with Textbroker by itself.  However if you mix this in conjunction with the other two free services I will tell you about, there may be hope yet!

3) Hubpages

Hubpages is a great way to boost your own sites, and earn some money on the side. While the gents at Hubpages will take around 40% of your income (They display their own ads 40% of the time) there are some huge benefits.  For starters hubpages is made up of a very intricate network, meaning your hubs can gain high PR quickly, as well as high search engine traffic.  This PR and traffic can easily be transferred on to your own sites, since hubpages does not use No Follow links!

Be warned, Hubpages does not like spammy content, so keep links to 2 or 3 per article!

The page builder in Hubpages is unique, and easy to use.  With the Hubpages editor you can quickly create pages on the content of your choice, and link them to related pages you own on hubpages, even creating groups.  This makes it VERY easy to join a generic page about a type of product with loads of niche pages on specific products.

By building networks like this you can create steady flows of traffic, which will earn you cash through various advertising options which you can run on your website.

Yes that’s right, Hubpages makes advertisiing on your site a doddle.  With module features you can quicly insert adverts from the following publishers in and around your Hubpage.

• Google
• Kontera
• Amazon
• Ebay

While Google is automatically placed, and Kontera ads are automatically linked on keywords in your text, the Amazon and Ebay ads can be placed anywhere. For the record, Amazon adverts do earn me more than Ebay, however Ebay products tend to be more varied, so can pick up a sale which Amazon would have missed.

With Hubpages you can quickly build a profitable network of websites without spending a penny, remember though, that they do take a large cut, so when you look back in retrospect youn may wish you had gone with Blogger.

2) Squidoo

Squidoo is very similar to Hubpages, and is just as good at helping you make money online. it takes a little more cash, and in fairness is a joint second place with Hubpages.  While it does take more cash it is more relaxed on promoting personal websites, and allowing more varied content (Including x-rated material for adult webmasters)

Squidoo to me is a little harder to use, so I do tend to go on Hubpages more often, however there is equally as much cash, traffic and PR to be gained on a Squidoo lens as their is on Hubpages!

To gain the best results you should create similar but unique articles on both Squidoo and hubpages for hte best results!

On a side note, Hubpages was created by ex Google staff, and it shows.  i easily get more rankings with Hubpages than I do with Squidoo, I don’t know what hubpages does, but it’s working!

1) Blogger

Yes that’s right, my number one way to make money online for free is with blogger, I have been using it for years and it really does work!

The trick to making money with blogger is to simply put the time and effort in, don’t create a quick spammy blog, work hard and you will get good SERPS, Traffic, and money online!

Making money on Blogger is not always easy, it does take time, and patience.  The good news is that with Blogger you will earn 100% of your advertising revenue, as well as enjoying fast, trouble free, reloading times.

Blogger allows all kinds of content, although anything too promotional, or spammy will be flagged and removed.

The important thing to remember on blogger is content, content, content. Keep up writing high quality content and before you know it you will get hundreds of quality visitors every single day.  These visitors will click on your Google adverts, buy off your Amazon and Ebay links and earn you hundreds of dollars online every single month!

You can also quickly build up a blog network which will help increase your daily earnings and cast a larger net to pull in visitors to your site.  Building up a blogger network is a great free way to earn cash online without spending a penny in hosting or domain costs.

By using all four of these free online services you can greatly increase, or begin, earning cash on the internet.  If you are new to the game this is perfect, since there is no risk attached!

It looks like hubpages really can work for you, I posted my stats update on my visitor count for hubpages, and will show you an updated version just so you can see how a little work can drive success.

As most of you will be aware, traffic does not necessarily mean profit. However I have noticed a fairly steady home income of around $10 a month on adsense, $5 a month on ebay $30 a month on Google and $5 a month from Kontera.  Sure, this is no real major income, but considering how little work I have put in to it, I think I could be on to a winner.  In the near future I plan to work on more hubs, over a variety of topics, to see just how much I can earn off hubpages.  If 30 hubs can earn me $50 a month, and I focus on the topics tht work, 300 hubs could earn me $1000 a month!

And of course, the monetary value is not the be all and end all.  Many of my hubs are PR 3-4, all of these link back to my sites, giving me PR juice and traffic!

You can find out more from Hubpages Here

Servage, my host, was hacked yesterday, fortunately the hacker simply went through and replaced index files, making it simple to replace for my wordpress blogs.

Unfortunately some of my websites are pure HTML coding, and these it appears are lost forever.

I was pretty surprised to find that servage, who are pretty good hosts in many respects, do not have daily, or even monthly backups.  While normally I keep hard copies of my websites on my laptop, my laptop has just bitten the dirt as well, leaving me well and truely up the creek.

I recently made a post about my success with hubpages.  Today I thought I should back up my constant increases with some factual data.  For this reason I attached the graph above, here you can see how a little work produced months of dividends.  I have started creating some more hubs on hubpages to increase earnings and traffic to allow me to work from home.

From this graph you can see how building hub networks gives me an exponential increase in organic traffic, which I can use as I wish, to feed my own websites with traffic, or page rank.

An interesting aspect of this graph is that it shows how a group can not only improve, but deteriorate with neglect.  For this reason it is important to build groups and networks to provide constantly increasing traffic and PR to your own websites.

Remember that the traffic on these hubs is not only feeding my websites, but providing advertising income through Adsense, Amazon, Ebay and Kontera.  Building well structured Hubgroups can give you targetted sales with affiliate earnings through these suppliers.  This will give you a great source of additional income, all for free!

For those of you who have never heard of Hubpages, check it out Here!

Until recently I had dismissed Hubpages as just another article submission service. recently however this site has given me a new source of income.  Sure it is not my largest source of income, but it is by far my most worthwhile.

In the last few months I have submitted 32 articles to hubpages, these vary between PR3 and PR4 all of which give No Follow links to my websites, giving me traffic and PR for free!

On top of that I earnthe following, directly from my Hubpage Account!

Google Adsense – $30 – $50 a month

Amazon – $10 – $20 a Month

Kontera – $10 a Month

Ebay – $5 – $15 a Month

As you can see, it’s not a huge amount, but for just 30 articles this is a pretty good source of extra income! On top of the extra income, I find the extra PR invaluable!

For this reason I have started up a Hub Page creation service. This gives you a hubpage of your very own on My account, giving you a much higher PR, this can have up to 3 links to different websites you own and I will write these up for you at only $1 per hundred words! I am willing to write these so cheaply myself because I will be receiving the direct hubpages income. You will however receive a lifetime of high quality PR juice!

If you want to write your own hubpages, and get the advertising income then sign up to Hubpages today!

I guarentee that you will not be disappointed!

While it is quite hard to use this in a freelance writing job, I have found that I have built quite a large client base in recent months; not by searching online, but by visiting real businesses.  Over the last few weeks I have been visiting local businesses in person and commenting on tehir websites, how I can improve and optimize them.

In these few weeks I have pretty much been able to name my own price, since in these local markets I have ZERO competition!

So get your boots on, walk around your town, find local businesses and do some research, figure out how you would improve their website, and THEN sell it to them!]

Ou may be surprised by just how much business you can get.

Page rank may not be the ‘be all and end all’ of a websites success, but it is undoubtedly relevant, and can help leverage valuable link sales to help supliment your income.  Therefore it makes an increased PR for your website a valuable commodity!

So how do I increase my page rank for free? Well to start with I have a complex spiderweb of site links between the sites I own, but each of those needs to gain PR somehow too, and I have three very simple steps to do that!

Link Exchanges – Every day I scour the internet for websites in similair genres to my own sites and offer link exchanges to high PR sites.  I can have hundreds of rejections, but the few that come through make it more than worthwhile.

Directory Submission – I am not talking about submitting to every directory I can find here.  Directory submission should only be to high quality submission websites such as DMOZ and more specific directories such as the one on my site My Vegan Planet. These targeted directory submissions can help improve your PR and SERPs quickly and easily, as well as offering some great site advertisement!

Article Sites – Whether its Hubpages, Squidoo or EZine Articles, these pages can get anything from PR1 to PR6, and all of them will feed traffic to your sites!

So there you have it, my three basic steps to increasing the page rank of my websites without spending a penny!

In my earlier post I announced the new that I had handed in my notice at my day job to move to America and become a full time freelancer. my last day will be the 24th of April and I have to admit that I am just a little nervous!

In the next couple of weeks I need to create articles stretching one month into the future on all my websites, since it is unlikely my new place will have any internet access, I have to inform all my clients that I will be out of action for a month and somewhere between all that I need to actually pack up my stuff and move over to America as well!

Don’t get me wrong though, I am hugely excited by the prospect of my impending future, I have always like excitement travelling and risk, I think quitting my job during a recession, leaving the country and leaving fish and chips behind pretty much covers those three points!

When i first decided to quit my day job to become a full time freelance writer and website manager it seemed like a dim and distant prospect in the future, now however the date is heading towards me like an electric train, swiftly, silently but hopefully not deadly.

Wish me luck.

Link building is a technique employed by many webmasters to promote their website, increase search engine visibility and increase their Google Page Rank (PR).  Link building definitely contains a huge amount of benefits, but it does come with some draw backs that the unwary should keep an eye out for!

But first things first, if you are new to link building there are several different kinds of links that you should be looking to obtain!  Be warned though, Google has been known to blacklist websites that buy or sell links!

One Way Links – One way links are the most valuable kind of link you can gain, especially if they are organic (Not paid for) and generated solely by people interested in your content.

One way links can also be bought and sold on sites such as the Digital Sales Forum or Digital Point!

Reciprocal Linking – Reciprocal links are usually formed with link exchanges between sites of similar page rank.  Sometimes you may pay a subsidy to form a reciprocal link with a site that his a higher PR.

Three Way Linking (a, b, c linking) – Google has cottoned on to reciprocal linking, for this reason sites with large amounts of reciprocal, or suspected purchased links, may be penalized  This is where three way, or a-b-c linking comes into play.

This kind of linking creates a link network between three different sites, usually between two owners.

Say for instance Owner 1 has two websites, a and c.  Owner 2 has one website, site b.

Owner 1 could link site a to site b, in return Owner 2 would in return link site b to site c.

Four Way Linking – This is similar to Three Way linking except it can be much more complex.  Four way linking can provide a wide selection of one way links to each of the fours sites!

Link Networks – In some situations you may partner with another webmaster with a network of sites similar to your own.  With these kinds of link partners you could have a near unlimited number of link partners.

You can get some websites which arrange these link networks, many of these have now been black listed by Google though!

The other downside to participating in these networks is the complexity and organisation required to keep everything up to date.

Choose your Link Building Partners Carefully.

When you first start link building you may get stung a few times by people scoring free links off people.  Unfortunately this never stops but you may become a little better at spotting the fraudsters from the legit link traders.

There are three techniques that fraudsters regularly use to scam links off you

The first, simpler to spot scam is when people put your link up, put a link up to you, then after  a week or two delete your link.  This can be avoided by some kinds of Link Management Software

The second, harder to spot scammers technique is where you are offered a three way link exchange.  You will be offered a high pr link in exchange for you lining to a lower PR site.

The high PR site generally has been bought or stolen however, and you will often find the pr dropping to PR0 within weeks.  These deals often sound too good to be true, and often are just that.

The third and final scam is a simple one to spot, but often overlooked.  Always check the source code of a site you have made a link exchange with.  Ensure that the link does not have the nofollow attribute attached to it.  If the link has nofollow then you will not receive the PR benefit from this link!

Site Value & Outgoing Links

When you are looking for link partners you have to remember that links from some sites have a ‘lower’ value than others in Google’s algorithm.  Also remember that to increase your own page rank you should be looking to link with sites that have a greater PR than your own!

The two factors used in Google’s algorithm to determine page rank are Site Value and Outgoing Links.  Outgoing links is rather self explanatory.  The more outgoing links there are, the less PR you will get from the link to your site.  Be warned this can go into the negatives, at which point it will adversely effect your page rank!

Site quality is much more complex, but spam content, duplicate content and poor English content will lower this score.  While this will not go into the negatives a poor quality PR8 link could be worth a tenth of a PR1 link.

For this reason you must closely investigate both these factors of any website you are preparing to link with to ensure you are getting value for the trade.

Social Bookmarking Links

Social Bookmarking can be a great way to improve traffic over a short period.  Unfortunately the traffic is generally poor quality and gives low conversions. The links from social bookmarking sites are also, for the most part, no follow.  This means you get no PR from these sites

Promoting social bookmarking on your site is, despite my outlook, not a bad thing.  While it takes time to do it yourself if you can get your visitors to do the bookmarking for you it can create a steady flow of free organic traffic to your site.  This will increase your income and site value, if only by a small amount.

You do also get, on occasions, what has become known as the Digg effect.

The Digg effect can increase visitors to your website a thousand-fold.  It basically occurs when one of your stories hits the front page of a major social networking site.  This instantly gives you an insane amount of traffic.

The pro’s of this are more traffic, profits and exposure.

The downside is if your server cannot handle the traffic, or your provider limits you, then your account may be suspended for a day for breaking the fair usage policy.

The Difference Between Do Follow and No Follow

In any link you create you can add a tag to the HTML called ‘ref’.  This attribute is an integral part of link creation, and there are a wide range of values that can be attached to this attribute.

Most of them however hold no interest to us, except that is, no follow.  Just to clarify, a Do Follow link would be a link with no ‘rel’ attribute

No Follow basically means that Google will not pay attention to the link.  This means that your site will not get PR for the link and Google will not crawl your pages through the link. For this reason No Follow links are of significantly lower value than do-follow links, and rarely used by webmasters other than in comments sections on their websites.

Putting your Link on Do Follow Forums and Blogs

Putting your link on do follow forums, or even on comments in do follow blogs, can be a great free way to increase your own websites PR.

Do follow blogs and forums exist in nearly every niche on the internet, remember to check for quality however, as many of these are spammed to hell, have a 0PR themselves and have next to no quality material on them!