For those of you who are new to Xomba or even new to search engine optimization, it may seem far-fetched that an article you write today can still be found by the search engines a year or more later. I've been here on Xomba about 18 months now, so I'm not new by any means, but I've just seen confirmation that an article I wrote last year is still "alive and kicking".

There are two types of articles you can write in general. The first is an event-specific article, such as a holiday recipe or the link to a website that carries election coverage. The other is what is know as "evergreen", which is just another way of saying that the information is something pertinent the whole year through, such as a link to a job search site or a sports team.

The article I wrote that I was pleasantly surprised to see was for Black Friday 2007, entitled Top 10 Keys to Surviving Black Friday Doorbuster Sales. According to the Google AdSense URL channel report for November 1-25, which I had set up early in 2008, my article has received 121 reads and 10 clicks for 84 cents. If you double that because we split 50/50 with Xomba, that's 242 reads and 20 clicks for $1.68 for one ad in one month. (I'm not sure how accurate the "reads" counter is since we only had it available for part of 2008, but the article shows just over 1000 reads. That means that 25% of the event-specific article's reads occurred a year after I wrote the article.)

If you were to take these numbers times a few hundred articles written over the year, optimized for the search engines with content that people will need throughout the year, you can see that you can make your $100 minimum for an AdSense payout at least a few times during the year.

The key is consistency. You can't write one or two articles and expect to make lots of money. But, if you write one or two articles EVERY DAY of the year, optimized for the search engines, you've got a good shot at making a decent side income. There are some who really write a lot (I'm getting there myself) of articles throughout the year and make more money over time. Just set your goal and go for it.

Now that you have proof that articles that you submit can make money a year or more later, shouldn't you be writing something right now?