New Xomba Writing Blog

Digital Nomads, Travel Logs, & a New Writing Blog

This will be a short post giving some shout outs and back link love to a few blogs I've just recently discovered, or else some good resources just getting going. I'm all about the traveling off the beaten path, about looking for the unexpected, or finding something new and interesting. So for a few side thoughts:

If you want to read a really interesting personal blog that brought the term "Digital Nomad" to my attention, then take a look at Justin's blog, "The Life of Justin: The Blog of a Digital Nomad." This is a fantastic blog. Justin has a great writing style, sharp sense of humor, and is living what, in my opinion, really is "The Dream."

The idea of "Digital Nomad" isn't new to me by any stretch, but I prefer that term to many of the others that I've heard. Check it out for some quality reading.

If you're looking for some good travel writing, check out this Squidoo lens on the Top 10 Travel Narratives. I absolutely love travel writing, and in fact I'm already reading "The Best Travel Writing of 2008" to get back in the mood.

Otherwise, there's a new blog that just got started with a very interesting twist, at least in my opinion. A writer is going to talk about Xomba.com, and going to talk about the benefits of the site, the negatives, and keep up over the course of a year as he continues to write and improve, and even share earnings observations.

So if that sounds interesting, check out Xomba Freelance Writing Adventures.

Hope ya'll find something of interest there. Until next time, cheers!

Reflections on Xomba

Xomba Musings

Xomba is an open site for writers who can make money through their AdSense account, as well as through relevant affiliate links. Xomba is like an article directory, but you can put your AdSense code and any time one of the ads gets clicked, you split the profit from that click 50/50 with Xomba. This gives writers an interesting chance to get some serious passive income streams going, and the inherent linking from Xomba gives it a boost, like Hubpages and Squidoo, and allows for those types of articles to rank higher in the search engine rankings than a normal blog post (at least for beginners to the whole SEO/Adsense thing).

The one major difference about Xomba compared to other places like Associated Content, or Constant Content, is that you need to gear Xomba articles towards topics that have AdSense advertisers. If you don't, it's the kiss of death to your Google earnings, and aside from not earning anything, you'll also get smart priced.

This week was the first one where one of my articles was among the ten highest ranked. It was my article about passive income for freelance writers, and how that is the key to the lifestyle that most envision when they try a writing career.

While the AdSense topics somewhat limit article topics, this still leaves a wide open field. An example of five very different article topics I've used for Xomba articles include:

1. Iowa Wine
2. 5 Best Coen Brothers Movies
3. Making Homemade Root Beer
4. Styrofoam Adhesive
5. The Pineapple Diet

This barely scratches the surface, and a little bit of key word research reveals much better paying keywords that you might be able to jump on to really jump start the earnings. And if it is constantly passive, all the better.

In addition, sometimes it's just nice to be able to write about different topics than you usually get to cover for paid assignments, and maybe somewhere along the way you'll find a gold mine. If not, at least it's more than you had before.

Anyway, that's some of my musings on Xomba, which is a much different type of site for writers, but I like it as one of many different freelance writing channels. There will be more to come, and on some more odd topics (I know I've been getting off topic recently with a lot of writing posts, I'll diversify again soon), including some of the long awaited random thoughts that have been bugging me for a while now.