As many of you may (or may not) know, Lockergnome allows you to get paid for writing quality content. Of course, the payment comes in the form of a 50/50 AdSense impressions split. Some people – like myself – have found decent success with Lockergnome, while others struggle to break the $100 mark. In an effort to help all of my fellow Gnomies, I’ve compiled this list of things you should (or should not) do in order to see a return on investment.

  • Make sure your content has a market. For the longest time I treated Lockergnome like any other blog: a place to dump my feelings, ideas, and general comments. The truth is that Lockergnome isn’t a blogging platform so much as it’s a content network. the distinction here is that unlike a blog, you’re more successful on Lockergnome when you post quality content related to the real world – not your world. Talking about cats is fine, but don’t talk about your snookums – talk about the brand of cat food you feed snookums (or any other myriad of other cat-related subjects).
  • Write early, write often. After seeing my AdSense clicks drop significantly over the past month, I’ve come to the sad realization that the AdSense game isn’t some kind of magic ticket: you need to write early and write often. (Anyone recognize where i got this from?) It’s a simple fact of the Internet: if you’re going to be successful, you need to write new content all the time.
  • Queue up content. Right now the auto-posting feature on Lockergnome isn’t working very well (I’m working on it, I swear), so the best advice I can give to you is to queue up content on your local machine and post daily. I’ve been trying to write two to five articles in a given day (given enough time) and post them over a period of a week. Ideally, I’d like to post at least one article per day (or more had I the time). Life is much easier when you queue up articles.
  • Write original content. Writing original content can be difficult, especially when you’re a computer programmer by trade like me; however, never post articles you find on sites like EZineArticles, or articles sold as “Private Label Rights” (PLR). Lockergnome gets almost all of its incoming traffic from Google, so what Google wants Google gets: fresh, original content that it has not seen before. Plus you avoid any nasty legal entanglements.
  • KISS, Keep it Simple, Stupid. OK, so this article isn’t a prime example of KISS, but your articles, in general, should be simple and to the point. I’ve found that 400 words is my sweet spot, with many line breaks, bold and italics text, and links to other pages. Readers tend to see longer articles as a “wall o’ text” and pass it up.
  • Ping it. for the love of (deity) use PingOMatic.
  • Use Lockergnome’s Google Love. Google loves Lockergnome, so why not use that to your advantage? Don’t spam your Web site (that’ll get your account deleted), but do some research on Google and see how you can optimize your article for the search engine.

Well, that’s pretty much it. This is, at its core, a game of educated trial-and-error. There’s a lot of information out there on writing articles that you can use to your advantage. In the end, it boils down to:

  1. Doing research
  2. Executing a plan based on the research
  3. Learning from the results
  4. Adjusting your plan accordingly.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

[tags]google adsense, lockergnome[/tags]