The Xomba Experiment: Backlinks and Earnings

During eHow's recent publishing issues I was looking around for another site on which to write. Like a lot of people I've dabbled a little with other sites, but this time I decided to be a little more focused and pick one site and stick with it for a while. My goal was to build backlinks to my eHow articles while earning some money for my efforts.

I decided to focus first on Xomba for the following reasons:

1. Xomba has something called Xomblurbs, which are basically just bookmarks of other online sites. With a Xomblurb you can link to an eHow article. It requires a 50 word description of the article you are linking to, which I found can be done in a minute or less.
2. Xomba is looking for Featured Authors in various categories and it's very easy to become one. I applied for the Business and Entrepreneurs Featured Author and was approved and on site within the day. In order to keep my position I need only write a new Xombyte (150 word articles) in my category once every two weeks.

So, here are the results of my Xomba experience about one week in:

I've written 2 Xombytes (full articles) and 70 Xomblurbs (50 word links to my eHow articles). My goal is to have Xomblurbs with links to all 200+ of my eHow articles within the next couple of week. Xomblurbs honestly take me just a minute or two to write and they're actually kind of fun to do. And the publishing with Xomba is reliable and seamless...a nice change from eHow! :-)

I'm sure you're wondering about earnings. In the last week I've earned $4.35 at Xomba. That really got my attention! All of this was done primarily by building links to my eHow articles and currently I have links to less than half. Imagine when all my articles are linked. Again, I've found it takes about a minute (as in 60 seconds) to write a Xomblurb linking to an eHow article.

Here are what I consider to be the pros and cons of Xomba:

Pros:

• Easy (and free) to sign up.
• Reliable publishing and good customer service.
• FAST indexing. It's not unusual to see my Xomba content in the search engines the same day. Many times my Xomba results is right there alongside my eHow result.
• Ability to use affiliate links in Xomba content. As you may know, eHow just set a policy prohibiting this. I read of one person online who is having good results just writing short reviews on Xomba and linking to Amazon products with affiliate links. I think this has a lot of potential.
• Ability to become a Featured Author.

Cons:

• 50/50 Adsense split is not the most generous out there. (Having said that, I've been happy with my Xomba earnings.)
• Links on Xomba are not 'do follow' links. 'Do Follow' links carry more juice as backlinks so this is a drawback.

I'll update you with my continuing Xomba experiment over the next few weeks. As I said, my goal is to get all of my eHow articles backlinked with Xomblurbs and to write at least enough in the way of Xombytes to keep my Featured Author status.

It might be worth it to you as an eHow writer to conduct your own Xomba experiment by creating Xomblurbs with links to your eHow articles. The time investment is not great so there's not much to lose. You can sign up with Xomba for free here. (You'll need a Google Adsense account to earn with Xomba. If you don't have one, there are easy instructions on how to get one under Xomba's help tab.)

Disclosure: The Xomba links in this post are referral links. That brings up another way to earn with Xomba: you earn 10% of your referrals' earnings and the amount comes from Xomba's cut, not the writer's cut. It's another good source of residual income. I feel that I should point out, however, that none of my earnings listed above came from referral income because I didn't have any referrals during that week. So it is possible to earn income at Xomba just from writing and linking.