Sorry I’m answering so late, I had some problems with the site and couldn’t answer any messages, amongst others.
I did visit your site, I like what you’re building up there, and I love the Richard Feynman quote, I must have read his book “surely you’re joking” about 10 times.
I don’t think you have a way for people subscribing to it by email? At least I couldn’t find any, which is a pity because I would have followed you. Anyway good luck with your science career (it does work out for some people)!

Of course I suspect that part of it is that she outsources most of the writing, I think somewhere on her blog she mentions that she’s spent thousands of dollars on freelancers. This allows her to focus on keyword research and to publish 30-50 articles every month. Having to do the writing really slows me down. Theoretically I could write a lot more than I do, but I procrastinate, get tired, lose my focus etc.

I’ve actually been thinking of biting the bullet and trying some outsourcing soon, even if what the freelance writers produce is not perfect, I’ve always found it a lot easier to correct/improve others’ work rather than write from scratch. I keep thinking that I need to improve my keyword searching strategies before I actually spend money on lenses. It would really hurt to buy articles that couldn’t rank because of bad keywords. But I think Skeffling gives the impression that she jumped into the outsourcing before she was really ready, but it worked out really well for her in the end.

I agree with your analysis of what is needed for success. I think number 2, choosing good keywords is probably the most important.

I suspect the reason most people don’t succeed is because it is so slow and discouraging at the beginning, but you need to keep publishing to learn to do better. As with most things in life, it is not difficult to get the theoretical knowledge, find out what keyword scrapers to use etc, but theoretical knowledge isn’t really all that useful, as you keep producing more stuff, some of it will succeed and some will not, and you end up getting a “feel” for what works, a lot of that is probably not even stuff you articulate to yourself, which is why it is so hard to teach anybody. That kind of intuitive knowledge is far more useful, but it takes a lot of trial and error to get it, people get discouraged and then keep looking for “tricks” to rank well and get side tracked.

What I am having a lot of trouble with is finding unsaturated good topics. I keep having ideas about what to write about, but then I find somebody else is already used them. Having said that, there are several ultrabook lenses on Squidoo, but mine is doing pretty well there, so perhaps I shouldn’t worry so much about this.

Since I can’t be bothered to get off my arse and look for a job, and the redundancy money and savings won’t last for ever, I will have to do much better than this eventually. There is still time, but it is rather scary. Today a friend forwarded a job in a health Quango, and one of the “contact if you’re interested” was a guy who used to work in the same Institute as me as a postdoc many years ago, but managed to escape a few years back. Superficially we got along well, but I always thought he was very arrogant, and it would be mortifying if he was going to be my superior. Still I did wonder whether I should apply for it, but then just couldn’t face it. So this has to work!

I will have a look at your blogs. How is your HubPages subdomain doing? I am going to start the apprenticeship program tomorrow so we will see whether Simone can improve my success there. I haven’t written hubs for a while, but I suspect I can write better ones now applying my Squidoo experience, and getting proper feedback should be useful.

I also suspect that the reason that only few people are really successful is that many people tick-off 2 or 3 of these factors but very few tick-off all four. Is that how you see it.

The thing that I found off-putting about WebAnswers is that you have to keep writing there on an almost daily basis to keep earning, so it is not really passive income. The most I earned from there was about £25 a month, and that was from answering about 5 questions a day, and I spent longer finding good questions, than I did answering them. I’m sure that if I kept at it, and accumulated several thousand answers, my earnings would have grown, but because of their quality score system, I don’t think it is really scaleable. Now that I’ve stopped using it, I think I made about £2 from it this month.

So WebAnswes is not a truly passive income system, which makes it hard to scale up. I also had a very weird earning curve there, I think I made just under £20 in the first month, and then it didn’t go up very much. I suspect this is because I answered a lot of questions at first, the first day I did almost 50 questions, so my quality score was very high, but then I reached a plateau. It was frustrating to be earning about as much after 3-4 months of adding content as in the first month.

My best earning site right now is Squidoo, I have about 50 lenses there now. It is possible to increase that to 500 with time, and increase my earnings tenfold. Then if I stop writing there, my earnings will not stop. Squidoo lenses also require some maintenance, I don’t think there is a truly passive income site anymore, but maintaining and updating takes a lot less time than writing them from scratch. So in the end I decided my time was better spent writing on Squidoo and possibly HubPages than WebAnswers.

I think it’s fairly easy to find freelance sites that pay 4-5$ per short article. If I wasn’t looking at passive income, I would rather write a couple of short freelance pieces a day, and would probably make the same money as I would if I worked really hard at WebAnswers, without the uncertainty of earning through Adsense. Also I am worried about whether the site will survive longterm, I think there is a far better chance of Squidoo or HubPages being around in 5 years’ time, and even if they disappeared, I could take my content and publish it elsewhere.