Is Xomba a Scam? Nah! A Xomba Review

Hi! There are a million articles on the get paid to write site Xomba. As of the date of this article, I've hit my third month on Xomba and thought I'd try a review of my own. I'll be objective here. I'm not going to overwhelm you with phrases telling you how wealthy Xomba made me and all those other things people generally say in order in order for you to click a referral link. Such statements would be lies. I will shamelessly offer a sign-up link at the end of this article but that part is really up to you.

The Xomba community writes 200 word minimum articles and 100 word social bookmarks on virtually anything.

Anyone can post on Xomba and you can write about just about anything you want within the Google Adsense guidelines. There is no editorial review so publishing is fast and very easy though Xomba is tightening the reigns on poor content and is moderating more often lately due to some policy changes.  Xomba has moderators to check for articles that violate their guidelines and policy.

You monetize your articles and social bookmarks on Xomba by signing up for Google Adsense and entering your adsense code on Xomba. Xomba takes 40% of any adsense earnings and you get to keep the other 60%

I'd dare to say that Xomba has a fairly childlish look to its website. It almost reminds me of the décor in a child's room. There is a lot of purple and green coloring. Each page has at least one comic strip-esque purple faced cartoon character.

This type of look is not a necessarily a bad thing. At the risk of appearing a bit amateurish, Xomba takes a chance with what resources it has to provide a very light-hearted, welcoming appearance that helps set it apart from the other more polished looking sites.

Using Xomba is pretty simple. All you need to do is put down 200 words for an article or a 100 word introduction for a unique social bookmark. In some ways, the site is too simple though Xomba is making some upgrades. For example, their new rich text editor was upgraded to show you your word count. Not exactly revolutionary, but a big help to Xomba writers trying to make the minimum word count requirements.

You can add photos to Xomba and many writers do it but the process is not very user friendly at all, especially for a newbie. I typically add photos via URL code but I admit websites like Hubpages make it much, much easier.

Eghad! The only part I seriously turn my nose up to on Xomba is some of their somewhat shady looking ads and pop ups that appear on their site. Now, in fairness to Xomba, I have never found any malicious spyware or anything of the sort planted on my computer after using Xomba. That said, I do get one of those annoying, large, blinking pop-ups every time I log onto Xomba.

Xomba also posts those cheesy, obvious, suspicious looking ads that say something like, "Congratulations! Your IP address is the winner."  etc etc.

If I had one wish for Xomba, it would be my hopes that they class-up this already great site by getting rid of that junk.

Like any site, certain functions on Xomba occasionally breakdown but this isn't often enough for me to complain. I've been on other sites where I was afraid to write an article for fear that it would disappear into oblivion the moment I hit the 'publish' button.  This is not the case on Xomba. While Xomba does experience glitches from time to time, their mechanics usually take care of it in a timely manner.

Xomba has some of the best staff and support that I've experienced yet on the internet. If you have a suggestion to improve the site or just about any question you could ask, they personally respond to it. Response is fast too. Pretty impressive considering the array of sites that are totally unresponsive.

After 3 first months of being on Xomba, I focused on backlinking / bookmarking all of my eHow articles and then I began writing some articles and bookmarking other sites. At the time I had 363 bookmarks and 29 articles on Xomba. I know the basics, but I am not an SEO genius so I'm not drawing tons of loot. My first month I was pretty happy to have earned $8.63 on Google Adsense via Xomba. I figured it would snowball from there. The 2nd month really dropped off save at $1.31. The 3rd month it came back at bit around $9.12.

I was surprised that the drop off in the 2nd month. Admittedly though, I didn't put much work into it the second month. Maybe the lack of activity meant less exposure and caused the drop off?

That said, interestingly, my articles on eHow seemed to have jumped up in earnings since I've backlinked them on Xomba. Maybe the eHow articles just "matured" but for the past 3 months, since backlinking on Xomba I've went from almost $1 per day in residual eHow earnings to just above $2 per day. I haven't written for eHow in months either since eHow went to their new format. Maybe just a coincidence though. Xomba is a No-Follow site so page rankings won't improve.

BIG NOTE HERE.... UPDATE AS OF FEB 2011 ..... Xomba has recently forbid members from posting back links to their own blogs or websites. If you were thinking of posting articles here on HubPages, then bookmark/backlink it on Xomba be careful. You could very well be violating their policy and get banned.

Update: After 6 months on Xomba my eHow articles are up from $2 to making about $2.50 per day. I've been bookmarking just very recently on Snipsly but otherwise I haven't done anything else on eHow except let the Xomba bookmarks help. Again, could just be coincidence, but it is good to see the extra income.

Recent Update: After about 6 months on Xomba ... and adsense my adsense revenue through Xomba alone is at $60. Not big bucks, but the bulk of my Xomba posts are simply bookmarks to my other sites and sites of interest. You only need to write 50 words so this does not take a lot of time.

Referrals, Xomba had a referral program where they rewarded users for bringing on referrals. Xomba has since stopped sharing additional adsense revenue with users who bring on new referrals. They said that Google no longer permits revenue sharing for referrals on their site. Xomba does add though that they still welcome referrals (they just can't reward you for it yet) and hope to come up with a different reward plan that fits the Google guidelines.

Even if they won't compensate me for signing you up, I'lI still shamelessly offer a subscription link if you'd like to sign up, though you certainly don't have to use it :-)

No way! Xomba is not a scam. Xomba as far as I can tell is completely honest and provides a good, basic platform for budding writers to get their articles on the web. You won't get rich but you can make money on Xomba. The staff is responsive and really seem to care. I have not experienced any suspicious activity on Xomba.

UPDATE 12/27/12 I admit, I've been hearing more and more backlash over Xomba shutting down authors but still using the author's post for adsense income. If this is the case, the folks at Xomba are really killing themselves. I doubt that are a lot of their contributors are making a full time living on the site but the site itself does depend on the crowd sourcing (ie they need a lot of folks like us to write for Adsense share or even free) to create lots of content to maintaing good Google ranking.

I'm not sure where the long term benefit would be unless they are looking to dump the website. If you read the comments below you'll see they get progresively more critical.

Personally, I'd been dumped by Xomba years ago. I'm quite sure of the reason but as of late I've been receiving Adsense money from articles posted on Xomba so it isn't as if they are burning me for free.... that said.... I don't think the survey can like. Check out the comments below and you'll see there is obviously a huge disconnect between Xomba and their community.