One of the toughest aspects of making money with AdSense is bringing in traffic to your content. If your ads are never seen, you'll never make a penny. Because bringing in traffic is easier said than done, AdSense revenue sharing sites have an undeniable appeal. What these sites let you do is piggyback on their success and have your AdSense ads displayed on their turf. These sites come in all sorts of forms: there are AdSense revenue sharing forums, blog hosts, social bookmarking sites, etc. WebAnswers is an example of a AdSense revenue sharing answers site -- think of it as a Yahoo Answers type site where you can actually get paid for your work!
In practice, WebAnswers does not quite live up to its promise. It is certainly easy to get started with it: you just need to answer ten questions and link your AdSense account up with WA. In no time at all, you should be getting impressions and clicks. The question of just how many impressions you'll be getting is a troubling one, however. WebAnswers uses a cryptic system of ranking users that it calls a "quality score" -- the higher your quality score, the more AdSense impressions you'll receive throughout the site. In addition, you get the lion's share of the impressions on answers for which your response is awarded the best answer. Having a good quality score is rather critical to earn from the site as many question askers end up never awarding any answer. The problem is you cannot check your quality score...indeed, you have no idea what it is except indirectly by watching how many AdSense impressions you receive from WebAnswers. Supposedly writing high quality answers is the key to increasing your quality score, but I'm very skeptical of that. Keep in mind that quality scores are calculated automatically; since computers aren't well known for recognizing good writing, let alone good grammar, I suspect there is much more to quality scores than WebAnswers chooses to reveal.
Ultimately, if my earnings are going to be determined by algorithm, I think I trust Google's algorithms a lot more than I trust WebAnswers'. The problem with AdSense revenue sharing sites in general is that you're settling for lesser earnings for the sake of easier traffic, probably because your content is not highly ranked in Google. However, those who get really into AdSense revenue sharing sites often start promoting those sites in order to increase their earnings. Suddenly, that traffic you're getting isn't so easy any longer; you should ask yourself if you're really better off promoting a site like WebAnswers or a site of your own. If you promote a site of your own, you'll get 100% of all AdSense impressions and earnings. If you promote WebAnswers, you'll get a slice of the AdSense pie...which WA itself will cut for you according to their own secretive methodology.
I won't say that WebAnswers isn't good for anyone. It does provide a way for people to earn by answering questions so if that's your thing it could be a great fit. I myself made a few bucks in about a week there; that compares favorably well with many other methods of making money online and, since you continue to get impressions on past answers, it would be theoretically possible to build a nice passive income from WA. Personally, though, I prefer to use sites that aren't so secretive and don't make me feel like I'm being cheated.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I tried WebAnswers out. Put a couple days into it. Got $1, than $2, than $3+ the next day. Since than I've earned some money every day. I do not recommend quiting your day job for the money but it works better than a lot of things people do to earn online. I also get traffic from a few links I posted there that appropriately answered questions. When I feel like answering questions I go there rather than Yahoo Answers and always earn a few extra cents for the fun.
ReplyDeleteYes the exact formula is secret, but you earn 100% on your awarded answers, split revenue on questions you answer where there is no awarded answer and get something for answering questions. You also earn on random site ads when you are active.
Here is my review: http://www.innovativepassiveincome.com/webanswers-com-an-adsense-sharing-opportunity/
Great post!
ReplyDeleteI was told by some people there to make money from webanswers you need to answer lots of questions and not to focus on a terrific answer get awarded for that 60%.
You are absolutely right with what would make a good answer - grammar has nothing to do with it. I know for a fact because my grammar sucks. More over, there is a lot of questions and answers with stupidly misspelled words and no punctuation. So I wonder if what they would consider a good answer in their 'quality score' would be the length of the answer along with the words that are in the question.
I wonder if I was to answer a question like 'what colour is grass' with: aale reni oru grass is green
atajef jal;r tjeljfid ena ekru aenf af nioe dkajn f aroean f aorjler fafnuerh afo aerjhe nfnej rha enf anvje gn aj green is grass aser kja erj hvjjenf
euieda vn eanfi hedahf hd hf edhf ada hdh fas jeh fejh a fdasf dfasdf dsafsdfas green is grass gtnan dkahf.
Feel me? Think it may be possible to get more money? Or am I just being a bit silly? Hard to tell if I am if you take a look at a lot of their questions and answers there lol. I know that I would not get the awarded answer - but no matter how good of answer I put in, most of the time it goes unrewarded anyways as you said.
Great New Blog BTW! You have some ways to make money online that would never dawn on me. Literally I went - geez I am silly! Why didnt I ever think of that! (the stock post especially) :)
Thanks!
Corrie
Thanks for the kind thoughts Corrie! I think you may very well be right about WebAnswers basically being a numbers game -- the key to success there may just be posting answers frequently and abundantly. Posting a bunch of random words might well get past the WA algorithm, but your answer might still get flagged by other users which could be a problem. I noticed there were a couple of question askers that were copying and pasting horribly written questions and sentence fragments into WA taken from all over the Web at a torrid pace for a while. Eventually a user revolt of sorts erupted...people started to refuse to answer their "questions" and began posting lots of complaints in the support section. That seemed to scare off the copiers, but they might well have been raking it in up to that point!
ReplyDelete