How Does Xomba Work?

Users post either short, 150 word articles called Xombytes or, even shorter, 50-word Xomblurbs promoting a link or website.

Each post is monetized with Google Adsense advertisements. Half of the advertisements on the posts belong to the user, the other half belong to Xomba. In short, if someone clicks on your ad, you get paid to your Adsense account.

Xomba also offers a referral program that pays the referrer 10 percent of the earnings raised from posts added to the site by new users. These earnings come from Xomba’s cut.

The Downside with Xomba – The Pay

I’ve only been posting on Xomba for a little more than a week now. At this point, I have 15 Xomblurbs (the super-short social bookmarks) and 4 Xombytes (the longer posts). Additionally, I have had several posts listed on the front page of Xomba’s Writing Tips and Tricks page. And, how much have I earned? Nada. Nothing, Zilch. Zero.

While I’m sure that the site admin would tell me that I need to give Xomba more time and effort to yield results, I don’t agree. When it comes to residual pay sites, in gauging a new opportunity, I find that the following simple approach very insightful: Add 3 or 4 posts and wait a week. Once I see how the site performs in terms of traffic and revenue, I compare it to past experiences.

I am reasonable, and I do acknowledge that it does take time to build residual earnings with any website, but in my first week, with that much exposure and that much content, I would expect to see something that makes sense to the traffic.

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Technical Difficulties A-Plenty

Since signing on with the site, I’ve noticed quite a number of mistakes and run-time errors that leave me a bit concerned. For example the number of “reads” that my articles generate never matches up between what Xomba says and what my AdSense account details.

Additionally, there have been times when I’ve visited the site’s main page and was unable to navigate past it.

A Bright Spot

Despite the lack of pay, I do have to say that Xomba has been an effective promotion tool. Xomba has referred several visitors to both The Freelance Experience and several of my articles on Suite101.

In terms of a place to house backlinks, I feel that Xomba has been a good investment. As new as The Freelance Experience is, I’ve only been able to develop backlinks on 3 sites, Xomba, myLot and BlogEngage, and in the first 5 days that this blog was live, I found it showing up in the first 5 Google search results consistently with short-tailed search terms.

My Plans for Xomba

In the short-term, I’m going to give Xomba a month before I make a real judgment on its pay potential. On the other hand, it’s pushing a decent amount of content to my pieces, both on The Freelance Experience and on other websites.

Over the next month, I’ll continue to index each of my blog posts and articles with Xomba and track each one with Google AdSense channels, link by link. Next month I’ll publish my results on the blog and reevaluate steps forward.

What’s your 2 cents on Xomba? If you have any experiences with Xomba, we’d love to hear them by way of the comment box!

Photo courtesy of Image*After

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