Seeing as this was a problem for this, we thought we’d build a basic system to track movies we wanted to see. Now, if we are going to build something and share it with the world, we figured we should probably build something that is ACTUALLY worth sharing. What if the system not only allowed you to keep track of what you want to see, but actually provided you awesome recommendations? Not recommendations based on what Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB ranked a movie, but based on what people similar to you liked? Born was the concept of a brilliant movie recommender.

Sounds pretty complicated right? Well you are right, there is so much math involved it would probably make your head spin. Made mine at least. Thanks to the math work of D’Arcy Gregoire,  we were able to get unbelievable results in only a month.

Right now in order for ApeFlix to recommend you movies, you need to rate at least 30 movies, after that the magic starts to happen.  If that isn’t enough for you, another awesome feature will be launching soon.  This new magical feature will allow you and a friend who are both users to make a group, and it will compare both of your seen lists, and find movies that you will both want to check out.  Pretty awesome right?

So if you are looking for something to watch this weekend, head over to Apeflix and sign up and give me some feedback.

So after an extended period of minimal posting I’ve decided to try and make an effort to finally get back to blogging.  I’m not going to set lofty goals where I ramble on three times a week, but instead aim to post one high quality post once a week.

Content Moving Forward

While a lot of the content in the last few months has been geared towards InfoBarrel updates, I’m going to try and focus more on helping people begin building passive income streams.  While I will probably talk about different philosophies, I will also do my best to always give real life examples to give people something real to chew on.  I also plan on building a few case studies in an attempt to teach people start to finish how they can achieve success online; in these case studies I will always be as transparent as possible.

Sorry About The Mess

I’ve updated the theme on here to try to make things a little more useable.  The previous theme I had on here didn’t allow comments for some reason, which really limited the ability for people to participate in the topics I discuss.  Hopefully this new theme doesn’t have any issues, but since it is new, I haven’t really spent the time making it pretty.  Clearly, my logo needs to be made larger and I need to work on picking images that fit better in my featured content section.

Bringing Back IBTP

I haven’t posted an update for IBTP for a few months here, mainly because I haven’t added any new content.  I will be trying to add at least a few articles a month moving forward so I can further demonstrate how easy it is to generate money on InfoBarrel.  By the way, in December IBTP made the most money yet without adding articles for over a month.

If anybody has any subjects they would like me to write about, feel free to drop a comment!

Over the last few months, I’ve been talking about InfoBarrel 2.0 quite a bit.  We’ve been hard at work trying to take make sure we take every bodies input into consideration.

So we’ve been talking a lot about IB 2.0, but not really giving anybody anything to chew on.  As a gesture of good faith, we’ve decided to release a little sneak peak of one of our new features.

This isn’t going to be our only glimpse at the site… In early December, we will be pushing out a sneak peak video on a popular online marketing blog… which we will reveal in the weeks to come.  So stay tunes.

A Glimpse at InfoBarrel 2.0

The following screen shot is of our new feeds section.  Essentially, feeds are somewhat similar to what Facebook has.  You can break your feeds down into a number of categories, but essentially it is going to make it much easier to join in on conversations and track what your friends are doing on InfoBarrel.  Forum posts, comments, and publishing of articles will all show up in your feeds.  If things go as planned this should dramatically increase users interaction on the site.

As a result, I was only able to publish three articles in October for the InfoBarrel Transparency project.  To be honest, I have done absolutely no promotion of any of my articles outside my first four to five.

Either way, I’m still seeing progress with very few new articles.

My total for the month of Oct was $18.84, which is over $1.50 higher than the previous month.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I will be able to really get back to growing this project at the rate I’d like until the New Year.  It doesn’t mean the project is dead, just that it won’t have 15-20 articles a month again until we launch the new IB.

Wow, where did September go?

September was an absolutely hectic busy month. A number of things have been going on at our office and they are all great.

First of all, we are feverishly working on releasing InfoBarrel Version 2.0. The site is being completely recoded, redesigned, and we are adding in a ton of new features that will (hopefully) make everybody super happy.

Also, we’ve really been trying to develop Environment911.org. If anybody wants to write an article and contribute to saving the environment, pop by e911.

Chances are by now, you’ve figured out I prefaced this post with how busy I am because I never accomplished as much as I wanted to with the InfoBarrel Transparency Project.  While I did manage to publish a few articles, I didn’t publish nearly as many as I had planned.

IBTP Articles Published in September

Because I was so busy I didn’t manage to publish as many articles as planned.  After everything was said and done, I published a total of 9 new articles on InfoBarrel.  I have another seven or so articles ready to be published which I will publish this month along side my Ocotber articles.

IBTP Article Promotion

I really dropped the ball on promotion.  I have a spreadsheet with all the spots I want to bookmark my articles.  Unfortunately for me, I never had the time to do it this month.  I will try and sit down for  a solid couple hours this month and bookmark everything the way I had originally planned

IBTP Earnings

Another month, a few more dollars!  By the end of the month I had 22 articles published and generated $17.29 in total revenue with Google Adsense.  I’m pretty confident that if I was to leave these articles alone, they would average $1/article each.

If you want to take a look at the InfoBarrel Transparency Project account, you can check it out at InfoBarrel under the user name IBTP

Why was the site down?

So you are probably wondering what happened to my blog over the last week. Well, about six years ago the company I was hosting with held a crazy sale on domains and I snatched up a whole bunch of domains with them. That accompany eventually went through a crazy merger with another company and one thing led to another and their domain platform was deprecated.

With the changes, my login and passwords got moved to a new system and I no longer had access to login.  A few months back we had all the login information sent to my business partner and it was conveniently tucked away for future renewals.   He took a little holiday over the long weekend which prevented me from being able to locate the login information which resulted in four or five days of down time for the blog while I patiently waited to renew the domain.

To prevent this from happening in the future I ticked off auto-renew and bought the domain for an additional two years.  So we have at least two more years without domain related interruptions!

So what is going on with the InfoBarrel Transparency Project?

I’ve been running around for the last week trying to tie up loose ends on a million different things including signing legal documents for a new company I’m part of as well as babysitting InfoBarrel while some of the guys that manage the site were on vacation.  Even while managing all these other things I’ve managed to publish 13 articles and I have a few more ready to publish as soon as I get a few minutes to breath.

I had all my  articles up before the end of August and posted my first article on August 24th.  The best part was I was actually able to generate a click on the first day after I published my first article!

IBTP Earnings August and Stats

Total Articles Published: 13
Total clicks: 4
Articles with Clicks:3
Total Earnings: $0.43

How Did Promote My Content?

I haven’t finished my basic promotion on everything yet but I will definitely break down what I’ve done.

Of my thirteen articles, I’ve published 11 of them on SheToldMe.com.  Two of these articles I also linked to from folkd.com and redgage.com.

This month, I plan on posting another 15 or so articles as well as finishing posting all my articles on these three sites.  I’m also considering adding Kirtsy.com into the mix.  Overall my earnings haven’t been that impressive to date, but we are only just beginning.

September has already more than doubled August, but I will wait until the end of the month to reveal exactly how everything does.

Hope everybody had a great Labor Day Weekend.

Learning to generate a passive income online through writing can seem like a daunting task.  To date, roughly 22,000 people have signed up to InfoBarrel with the intention to start building a passive income through their writing.  Of these 22,000 people roughly 10% of them have tried their hand at writing articles.  Less than 100 people have contributed more than 100 articles.

With that said we have a number of writers making over $100 a month as well as a couple that I know of who are over $1000/month.

So why am I rambling on about these InfoBarrel statistics? I want to demonstrate that it IS possible to build a rock solid passive income stream with InfoBarrel.

Instead of just saying that it is possible, and not backing up anything I say up with actual examples, I’ve decided to take on an experiment.  In this experiment I will publish a bare minimum of 15 articles a month, possibly more and document the progress I make with these articles.

The Project

Each month I will publish a bare minimum of 15 articles; if I have the time, I will try and publish more.  At the end of each month, I will disclose exactly how much money these articles made me and what techniques I used to get them ranked well within Google.

When Will The IBTP Start?

I fully intend on starting to publish tomorrow.

What Username Will This Experiment Be Under?

In order to make this a from scratch experiment, we will be using the account IBTP, short for InfoBarrel Transparency Project.

I have already announced the experiment on the InfoBarrel Writer’s Community, if you don’t frequent the forum, please sign up for my news feed to be informed when I post updates.

For the average small to medium sized service based business, the majority of the business they receive comes from referrals, the yellow pages and more recently localized search.  While referrals and phone books can be great leads, the Internet has provided these service based business a phenomenal opportunity to get more business through the power of Google.

While keywords like, photographer or plumber are extremely competitive, as soon as you localize them with the city in which your business resides, the competition becomes less and less apparent.

For example, if you check to see the competition on the keywords “Photographer” you will see that there is somewhere around six million people competing to rank for this keyword.

If we add the word Vancouver to Photographer and Google “Vancouver Photographer” using the allintitle command, you will see roughly 14,000 web sites competing.

If we further break this down and choose Burnaby, a smaller city in the greater Vancouver area, ,and wrap the keywords in quotes you will see there is only 10 web sites actually competing.

Myself, I would probably try and nail Vancouver photographer just because of the larger potential, but for somebody just starting out, why not go after the really easy search terms first and expand once you’ve conquered the easier terms.

The Meat and Potatoes

Alright, now that you understand how little competition there may actually be in your market, now it is time to learn how to absolutely dominate your local niche by combining Social Media Marketing with SEO.

The three main components to this tutorial will be the following:

• Publishing a free Press Release
• Creating 3-5 Social Profiles on Web 2.0 sites
• Publishing 5 pieces of content on each of the social profiles.

Press Releases

While there are many paid press release services out there, in this example I am going to give you a couple free places you can publish your press release to gain some exposure and back links.

The first step is going to be to create a news worthy press release.  If you can’t come up with any ideas, try to think of something new or innovative your company is doing.  If you are really stuck, just announce that your company will now be offering a new service that you already provide.

When writing the press release, make sure you have the keywords you want to rank for in the release at least a couple of times.  You will want to link to your home page using this set of keywords somewhere in your press release.

Once done, have your press release published on a handful of free PR sites (don’t forget to link to your site using your chosen keywords).
I recommend
PRlog.org
prbuzzer.com
articleshub.org

Social Profiles

The next step in the process is going to involve leveraging existing web communities where user generated content is accepted.  Now, before you even begin to sign up for these sites, I want to reiterate that you will NOT be spamming these sites with promotional garbage.  If you are using social media to build your brand or presence you need to understand that you can only accomplish this if you are proving value to the end user.  Most sites will allow you a resource box where you can provide a little information about yourself or your company. Provide your information with your link back to your site (using your desired keywords) in these resource boxes and leave the promotional garbage to the spammers.

Depending on how much competition you have will depend on how many different social profiles you will need to setup. Here is a list of a few to get you started.

Squidoo.com
InfoBarrel.com
Goarticles.com
Ezinearticles.com
Write4.net

Publishing Content

This is really the key to making all of this work.  In order for Google to find your links in your resource boxes on these sites you are going to want to create compelling content that provides value to the end user and helps them answer their questions.  The reason you will want to create five unique articles per site is so that you increase the chances of Google picking up your content and crediting you with your back links from the resource boxes.

When creating content, as natural as it may seem to make the content promote your business, I want you to steer clear of this and 100% concentrate on helping the user solve a problem.  By creating value for the user, you are building trust in your brand.  If they like what you’ve said, they will very likely read your resource box and follow through to your web site.  Even if they don’t follow through to your website, you are still getting a very valuable back link from your resource box that should help boost your rankings for your web site.

Tip: Most sites have no problem if you interlink your articles on their site.  If you write five articles on InfoBarrel for example, link them all together somewhere in your article to ensure that the search engines find all your content.

That is it in a nutshell.  Depending on how difficult your keyword is, you may need to setup profiles on additional sites and repeat the process, but for the most part, this should probably get you on the first page of results for your local business.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial!

Don’t feel like doing this yourself? I am always available for hire, send me a message through my contact form and I will be in touch.

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last little bit everybody. I have been extremely busy with a number of things. Months end deadlines roll around faster and faster every month as more and more consulting work slaps on to our plate.

So what have I been up to lately?

BNI Prestige

First of all, a few weeks ago a good friend of my Sean Kravetsy from Expert4Everyone.com (site coming soon) invited me to drop by his networking group called BNI Prestige.  It was my first time ever popping by a networking group so I was a little nervous but it actually was a really great experience.  Basically how these network events work, is there is a number of members.  There is only aloud to be one member from each service/industry.  Each week, everyone meets up and some people bring guests.  At the meetings, there is one 10 minute presentation from a member as well as a one minute elevator pitch from everybody else.

If you are a member, the other members of the group keep their ears to the ground for potential leads. The end result is a massive network or sales people doing referral marketing for you.  In exchange, you agree to help everybody generate leads.

Since attending my first meeting 5 weeks ago, I have since become a member and have already been thrown a few opportunities for leads.

InfoBarrel

If you’ve stumbled your way to this site, chances are you are aware that I am one of the founders of InfoBarrel.  The site has been growing at an unbelievably pace, with published articles growing by close to thirty percent in July alone!  We have been gradually climbing the Alexa ranks as our popularity climbs.  This Monday was a pretty big milestone for a number of reasons.

First of all, our overall Alexa rank finally cracked the 8000 mark.  What does that mean?  This means that according to Alexa Infobarrel is officially one of the top 8000 web sites in the entire world.  My personal goal is to be in the top 5000 before Halloween.

In order to handle this growth we took on a new administrator to handle managing some of the article approvals.  Tyler Chomos has been helping us out for nearly a month and has been a great addition to the InfoBarrel team.

We’ve also started a YouTube channel (about time right) which we plan on dramatically expanding to give lots of tips and tricks for InfoBarrel users.

Finally, we are hard at work at InfoBarrel v2.0 which will be chalk full of amazing new features and will take InfoBarrel from being just a revenue share article site to something much more exciting.

Consulting

I have been getting more and more consulting requests as each day passes.  The way we blend social media with SEO has received nothing but awesome responses and our clients keep coming back for more work month after month.  As a result we have been seeing tons of new referrals coming in which in turn eats up more of my time, preventing me from blogging as much as I’d like.  Either way, you can never complain about being busy (especially in this economy), so this is a welcomed issue.

If you are interested in using our consulting services, either send me an email via our contact form or take a look at our link building services over at LinkBuildr.

That is it for today folks!  I will do my best to post a few posts in the coming weeks with some helpful information!

I don’t think many people will debate the potential Twitter has for helping promote your product, brand or website. There are two major pitfalls that people run into with Twitter. First of all they only ever post updates that are very commercial in nature and secondly they don’t set aside time daily to interact and connect with like minded people.

Now don’t get my wrong, I’m as guilty as the next guy when it comes to neglecting my own personal Twitter account, but for some reason I have no problem staying on top of my clients accounts. No matter what your excuse, neglecting Twitter is like losing out on an entire potential stream of very targeted clients.

No matter how long you’ve been neglecting your account, it is never too late to turn it around and start building a solid following.

Set Aside 20 Minutes
The first step to building up a Twitter following is to start spending some time tweeting. If you are like me, you come into the office every day, sip on a coffee and check emails for the first ten to fifteen minutes. Tack another twenty minutes onto your morning routine and lets start interacting on Twitter.

Start and Join Conversations
Now, this is going to be difficult, but I want you to avoid commercial conversations unless you are specifically asked. Keep your website on your profile and if you’ve skinned your Twitter with your brand (or website), that should be enough to spark interest if you are doing your job right.

Join Conversations Related to Your Business
Alright, so the next tough step is going to be looking for conversations related to what you do, and participating on a friendly non commercial level. If people are requesting advice, connect with the individual and try to give them a helpful non self serving way to resolve their problem. Chances are they will respond by following you. You are going to build your following twenty minutes a day and one person at a time.

Commercial Posting
Once you’ve built up your Twitter following, don’t become the social media spammer. Your followers are mostly following you because you are either interesting or helpful; if you are posting something commercial it better be something worthwhile. If you own an e-commerce store and want to post something commercial perhaps consider posting a special offer that is only available to your followers. An example would be randomly posting a Twitter deal of the week where your Twitter followers are offered a coupon code providing them with discounts only available to those who follow you on Twitter. The bottom line with commercial Tweets is that you can’t overdo it; if you do, people will stop following you and if they don’t they will probably start ignoring your Tweets.

The Bottom Line
Social Media is about sharing interesting information, being helpful and trying to become influential over a large group of people. Without putting in the time, you will never become influential; likewise, if you are constantly driving commercial drivel down your follower’s throats, you can’t expect them to care what you have to say. So what does this all mean? Take a small chunk of time every day and just try to get involved in conversations…. If you play your cards right, over time you will build a strong following which will result in being able to influence people on a large scale.