In between client work I’ve been getting more and more involved in various “make money online” ventures to help supplement my income.

Unfortunately, most of these projects require lots of unique and well-written content. I don’t have the time or motivation to sit down and write all of this content on my own so I’ve been going with third-party service providers to lend me a hand. I think I’ve finally found a service I can rely on for all of my writing and content needs called Textbroker.

At Textbroker, you create an account and then build orders for pieces of content you’d like written. Your orders contain the individual topics you want written about, the expected word count and the quality of the writing you’re looking for. The pricing is based on price per word so higher quality content will be more expensive but have better style and grammar.

When you’re done entering in your specifics, the order is then submitted to the site moderators to be verified and added to the system. Once verified, your order is presented to all of the site’s registered writers who can then pick and choose what pieces of content they would like to write. When a writer is finished with one of your articles, Textbroker’s system emails you and then asks you to login to either approve the content or ask for revisions. It’s that simple.

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s a site I recently had built using content from Textbroker’s members: Vegas Casinos Direct

I recently launched two new mashup sites. I was meaning to post about these earlier but work and the holiday got in the way. Anyway, the two new sites are the Manchester United Report and the Real Madrid Report. Soccer is something I’ve wanted to expand my growing sports network into for the last six months or so but I never got around to actually putting sites together.

Luckily, I found a guy in the UK who was wiling to write the player biographies for each of the clubs for a more than reasonable price. It was simply a matter of copying and pasting his content into my mashup CMS and the sites were live.

I normally don’t talk dollar amounts on this blog but a lot of people are curious what various projects cost so this time I’ll reveal that information. The biographies cost $30 per team. Add another $10 per team for the domains and the cost of each site was $40. I spent about an hour or two adding all of the content into my content management system to get the sites up and running.

So for $80 and a small amount of my own time, I expanded my sports network by two sites and also added an entire new sport to the coverage. I’d say that was an incredibly good deal.

The idea of a mashup, or a site built with pieces of content from other sites, is definitely not an unfamiliar idea to me or most people. I have a large network of such sites based around sports and I’m starting to branch out into other topics lately as well. My latest is a site about my favorite record label called Sub Pop Bands.

I’m a big fan of the mashup idea for two reasons: speed and simplicity.

Mashups Are Quick

I have a custom built content management system for my mashup sites but even if you don’t have that kind of programming knowledge making your own mashup site is relatively simple. There are so many widgets and free scripts to let you bring in fresh content that putting together your own mashup site should take no time at all.

Aside from the content from outside sources, my mashup sites also contain hand-written content that I have made unique for that site. Whether you write this content yourself or hire someone to write it for you is your decision to make. When I have the content in hand I simply copy and paste it into my CMS and the site is updated.

Mashups Are Simple

A mashup site isn’t a complicated e-commerce store, a frequently maintained blog or any other type of time consuming website. it’s really a simple content site that is augmented with automatically updating features to keep the site fresh with new content. How can it get much simpler than that?

It is that simplicity that makes it possible to produce, quite literally, dozens of these sites with little to no effort. For under $50 I can have all of the necessary content written for me and away I go. No fuss or hassle after I load up the site using the content management system.

The End Goal

The whole point of the mashup site, as with most things online these days, is to make some money. You can use something like phpBay Pro to add eBay listings to your sites like I do. I also include AdSense and sell private advertising on the sites when the time for that is right. It takes a bit of time but not a lot of effort to turn these sites into profit machines.

Since the recent switch from Commission Junction to an in-house affiliate program my stats on my eBay auction sites have gone in the tank. I’ll be the first to admit that my eBay sites don’t see a lot of traffic but before the switch I was seeing regular levels of clicks and sales.

Since the switch my stats are all over the place. One day I’ll have no clicks at all and then the next I’ll have 70+ on one site seemingly at random. The next day we’re back to no clicks.

I’ve read in a lot of other places that people are not happy with the numbers they’re seeing as well. They’ve reported this to eBay and have basically been told they’re wrong and that everything is going just fine. One of the big points of argument with affiliates seems to be the number of new signups they’re seeing. It just so happens new signups are one of the biggest money makers for affiliates but I’m sure this sudden drop is just a coincidence…

My eBay revenue was so small to begin with that I’m probably in no position to really argue but some of the bigger players in this field feel something is amiss. When enough people start to see smoke there probably is a fire.

I mentioned in my last post about eBay that I had a framework in place for quickly launching these types of affiliate sites. Today I’ve launched another one: Discount Sports Items

This site is actually built as a companion piece to all of the sports news sites that make up the Jack’s Sports Report network. Each one of the sports reports has team-based pages that previously contained a few links to related eBay auctions. Now with the Discount Sports Items I can cross-link the sites and offer visitors a wider variety of auctions to choose from almost seamlessly.

There wasn’t much effort involved in this new site since it runs on the same set of code that made Golfing Galaxy so quick and simple to setup. One of my big ideals whenever I do something is to build it in a manner that makes it easy to roll out similar sites quickly and efficiently if the idea behind the site proves to be successful. I’d already had a few conversions on the golf site and eBay listings on the sports report sites is proven to work so I’m optimistic for Discount Sports Items.