Guide to making money with Newsvine

You sign up for free, and then start posting links to anything you've read on the web that you think deserves a wider audience. If other readers find your link or article interesting, they will vote it up (unlike Digg and Reddit, Newsvine does not have a down-button, so members are less vulnerable to malicious cliques trying to "bury" content).

When you first join Newsvine, you are placed in the "Greenhouse", which means your articles appear in a holding area for newbies. They do this to discourage spam. You get out of the greenhouse once your articles have been voted on or commented on sufficiently - the best way to to this is to participate in the site and to make friends, join groups and leave comments on other people's articles.

Once you are out of the greenhouse, your links and articles are published to the main areas of the site depending on category, and the most popular items appear on the front page.

Newsvine encourage people to write original articles as well - and you can literally write about anything, and using HTML, add pictures and embed links in your article too.

All you have to do is what you would do if you were a member of Digg or Reddit - post links to articles that are interesting that you think a wider audience would enjoy. Plus comment on articles and if you like writing, write some articles yourself. If you are writing articles, pay attention to your title and to keywords so that the search engines pick it up.

Newsvine shares revenue with their members, and the revenue depends roughly on what advertising they have at a given time and the number of pageviews you get. December is the peak time for advertising, so that is usually when earnings jump up, provided you have produced sufficient activity that month.

Therefore the more pageviews your articles and column gets, the more you earn.

Note that the readers of your original articles or links can come from anywhere - not just other members of the site or the public browsing Newsvine, but from hits from Google or links from other sites.

Newsvine allows you to track the visitors to your "column" using Google Analytics. To set up the tracking, open an account with Google Analytics if you haven't got one already. Then log into Newsvine, click on "Account" in the toolbar across the top of the screen, then click on the tab marked "tracking" and paste the Analytics code in. Google Analytics will then track the data, and you can find out who has been reading your column and where they've come from by logging into Analytics and viewing the reports.

Payment is made two months in arrears - i.e. September's earnings are paid in November, usually in the second week. Once you have $25 you can cash out using Paypal. The amount people earn varies depending on how much effort they put in. Some people make few cents, some make several hundred dollars a month.

Here's a link to my column. As you can see, it's the typical mix of press articles I've linked to (in the Newsvine jargon "seeded") and articles I've written.

Do promote your column by putting your Newsvine column URL in your signature in forums, Twittering and doing the usual things to promote your material. Google seems to pick up stuff from Newsvine automaticlly.

If you want to join Newsvine, click here. (They do not have a referral program).

If you enjoy reading the news, sharing items you've seen, debating and leaving comments about politics and a whole variety of stuff, Newsvine is the place for you.

You should be able to tell from your Google Analytics stats how many pageviews you have got in a given month. As mentioned before, the earnings fluctuate, depending on how many ads they have. Here is what earnings have been in previous months. All figures are earnings per 1000 pageviews in the calender month (eCPM):

June 2008: $6.80 eCPM
July 2008: $2.70 eCPM
August 2008: $8.00 eCPM
September 2008: $3.00 eCPM
October: 2008: $2.90 eCPM
November 2008: $1.15 eCPM
December 2008: $3.92 eCPM
January 2009: $2.03 eCPM
February 2009: $1.71 eCPM
March 2009: $0.68 eCPM
April 2009: $2.68 eCPM
May 2009: $1.32 eCPM
June 2009: $1.064 eCPM
July 2009 $1.038 eCPM
August 2009 $0.95 eCPM
September 2009 $1.415 eCPM
October 2009 $1.064 eCPM

The amount per 1000 pageviews fluctuates like mad and is out of our control. But members can aim to get as many pageviews as possible. If you get about 20,000 pageviews in a given month, your earnings would fluctuate between $23 (Nov 2008) and $160 (August 2008), depending on how expensive the ads being displayed in a given month are.