So, I am embarking on three challenges this coming month. I’m going to add another 100 hubs, 100 Squidoo lenses, and 100 infobarrels to my online portfolio. Yes a folk, that’s 300 mini websites in a single month. But, I KNOW I can do it. It’s going to be crazy though and a big bit for even me, crazy person that I am, to achieve. But, I’ve said you should tackle a challenge head on, and I’m going to meet this one swinging.
For the next two weeks, starting from today, I’m going to be doing 100 Squidoo lenses and 100 infobarrels. The last 2 weeks will be dedicated to 100 more hubs.
100 Infobarrels in 14 Days
I’ve been looking into Info Barrel, and it seems like a good alternative to Hubpages. I’ve heard Google loves it and there almost instant indexing. The question is, will Google love infobarrel as much as they do Hubpages?
Well, I’m going to find out. The thing that stands out about infobarrel is that they offer you 70% of the Adsense earnings, as opposed to 60% that Hubpages does. For me, that equates to about another 3-5 bucks a day – a big deal.
I believe I can apply the same strategy that I’ve used with Hubpages to infobarrel pages and find some success here.
Now, I was going to start with 100 Squidoo lenses for the next two weeks, but I noticed that infobarrel is offering some challenges for this month, and I want to take advantage of these. Infobarrel has the following challenges running for this month:
Member with the most points - $50 Amazon.com gift card
Achieve more than 30 points - 90% Adsense Revenue Share
Achieve more than 20 points - 85% Adsense Revenue Share
Achieve more than 15 points - 80% Adsense Revenue Share
Guys, something tells me that that $50 dollar gift card is mine! 
You get 1 point for a 400 word article and 2 points for a 800 word article. I can get at least 100 points in 2 weeks, or if I really bust my ass off, 200 points. Even better, if you get 30 points, you get 90% of the Adsense earnings for the month of July. So, I’m going to start on this project right away. I’ll occasionally be adding Squidoo lenses, but the builk of the work won’t start for another two weeks. Since infobarrel is a lot like Hubpages, I predict I can make some money with them. How much is to be determined. Again, there is no fail here. Worst case scenario, I end up with a strong 100 site farm that can be leveraged to make other sites money.
The ground rules will be the same as I outlined for the Hubpages challenge.
-400-800 word articles
-Articles that target Adsense
Looking forward to see what I can do!
100 Squidoo Lenses in 14 Days
I’ve been doing some research and I think most of my lenses will be geared towards affiliate sales. I will be creating 20-30 lenses to support some of my hubs, but I don’t like the payout structure for Adsense earnings that Squidoo has. Adsense payout seems to depend a lot on Payrank – and from what I’ve seen, Payrank depends a lot on bullshitting your way around the Squidoo community. I want do make money, not friends, so I’m not going to invest any time joining the community.
This means I’m going to have to go the affiliate route to actually make some money. I think I’ll mix it up between eBay and Amazon for my affiliate vendors. Now, apparently, if you use your own affiliate links, you get 100% of the commission – so I’ll be trying out click bank products as well.
Now, my gut feeling is that I won’t make as much money as I am with Hubpages. I had my first $30 day yesterday with hubs (ok, $29.49, so sue me if I “bumped” it up a bit) – I doubt I can top that with two weeks of Squidoo hubs.
I don’t know “how” well you can do in 2 weeks with Squidoo. I suspect you will need a month or two just to let your lenses mature. I’ve also heard Squidoo don’t have the instant Google love that Hubpages has – this means much less traffic, initially. And since I will be focusing on affiliate sales, I NEED traffic to make money here. I’m open to trying to get some Adsense earnings, which is why I’ll be creating 30 lenses targeting Adsense – using my same Hubpage techniques. Maybe they’ll do well and surprise all of us. To help my lenses along, I’m going to try and back them up with Ezine articles – if I have time.
So some general rules for the Squidoo hub challenge:
-Each lens will be 400-800 words
-6 ~ 7 lenses a day for 14 days. I may have to creep a bit into the 15th day to finish of the lenses. This is because one of my readers pointed out that Squidoo will suspend your account for review if you post more than 6 a day. Now, I don’t want to create multiple accounts because I want to maximize my account’s Payrank – I suspect it will be easier to do with an account that has 100 lenses rather than two accounts with 50.
-30 lenses will target Adsense.
-70 lenses will target affiliate sales. I’m going to look at Amazon top products and write reviews and recommendations for some of these. For others, I’ll write an article about solving some problem then start to recommend goods. Affiliate programs with be clickbank, eBay, and Amazon. Ideally, I want to try to keep 100% of the commission for myself.
-Back each lens up with an Ezine article (if I have time. I am still behind on my writing enough ezines for my hubs)
-Send AMA, UAW, BS, and other links to each hub. Again, this might have to wait till the third week, since
So, we’ll see how this one goes. As I said, in MMO, there is no failure. I can definitely use 100 strong Squidoo lenses to prop up current and future niches.
(another) 100 Hubs in 30 Days
Yep, I have over 250 hubs, but I’m making good money now, so I am not about to stop. I’m going to throw up another 100 hubs to my portfolio. I won’t be detailing this too much, since I already have posted 5 pages on this. But I’ll include the results in my next Hubpage update in a month.
So, there you have it. My projects for this month. For now, I’m starting the infobarrel challenge and in two weeks, the Squidoo challenge. Time to work my ass off!
If anyone wants to participate in the challenge, feel free to! It will only help your own MMO efforts. I do know that many of you are still working on the Hubchallenge, so it may not be feasible. But the offer is open for anyone who wants to tag along. You know what they say: misery loves company!
Ben Out
27 Comments
Uh Oh!
Looks like I have a shit load of work to do! I have had a breezy last few days taking a much needed break. (looks like you have been too… haven’t seen you on when I have been.)
Time to gear up!
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Get ready to work your ass of Joshua! I’d added a few things to our work load!
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Hey Ben,
This is Ryan from Infobarrel (one of the admins).
I came across your blog today through Google alerts and I have to admit, you have one hell of an impressive work ethic!
I’m looking forward to seeing you hammer out this challenge.
Good luck on your 100 articles and we appreciate your awesome efforts!
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HI Ryan. Thank you and I look forward to adding those 100 articles. I have a good feeling about infobarrel and I look forward to becoming a part of the community. Hopefully, my efforts will inspire more people to join!
Ben
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Thanks for the praise buddy
If you ever need anything feel free to email me at the email address attached to this comment.
Cheers
Ryan
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Pretty cool of you to stop by, Ryan. Hope to have $100 dollar days with you soon. :o)
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Made it sound like this was my blog - Not my intentions Ben. lol
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Ben,
Try knol to. I guess you could make good money from it to
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Impressive! I have no doubt that you’ll do this!
What process do you use for your writing? I came across your profiles (I won’t tell!) and there is actually some valid information in them. I’ve been meaning to start writing myself (I’m a huge outsourcer) but can’t get around research.
Just take ezines and re-write them, or what?
Thanks,
Dave
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Hi Dave.
Yes, I do try and put decent infomation into my posts. If it’s a niche where you can start suggesting people look onine for other resources or the niche that really leads into people looking at other websites or services for a solution, then you can give valid information — at the end of the day, the person is still going to have to seek out on online service. This idea also applies to review type affiliate writing. You write something good about a product and then people will want to click on this.
It comes down to the niche though. If you are talking about how to lose weight, you don’t want to actually really tell people how to lose weight (must people are too lazy anyways, so I don’t think it would matter) if you want to get some ad clicks.
rewriting ezines is the way to go, initially. One you write like 3 -4 articles, you can just start spitting the stuff out.
Yea, I believe in outsourcing too, but after getting ripped of for 500 bucks, I’m leery. Outsourcing really comes down to what you want to pay. You can get 2-3 buck articles, but the quality is usually pretty variable, and you end up spending a lot of time tinkering. For decent stuff, you have to pay 5-7 bucks an article, really, which means you need to pump 1000-2000 bucks into just content if you are trying to do.
Unless you have 5-10k you can invest in like 1000-2000 articles, you are going to have to write it all yourself. What I’m trying to do is have a good 3k or so articles in a year to use for my niches and affiliate marketing. I don’t want to pay out 15k to get that writing done — at least not yet.
Basically, I’ve found there is no real substiute for good hard writing work. WHen you write, you can really control what you want to say, stuff in keywords, etc.
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There is a RSS feed code somewhere in the shed that will let you import a ebay feed for products that I have found really helpful in squidoo. It looks really nice and has done fairly well for me. Have a look and if you can’t find it email me and I’ll dig it up.
–DeMerchant
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What’s your ID on HubPages?
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sorry nicomp, i like to keep my niches out of sight for the most part. There are a lot of people out there who will report sites of out spit and basically dick around with stuff.
ben
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Hi there, thanks for all the information you provided so far. I have a question. One of my hubpages was on page 1 for a certain keyword. Today i found out it was deindexed, but i have no idea why.
So i would like to know what could lead to such thing.
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How long was the hubpage up for? Goodle occationally does it’s usual dance and deindexes and reindexes sites. I’ve had the same experience with some sites — I woudn’t sweat about it. In a few days, you hub will probably be back.
Also, when you create a new website, there is fresh content bonus google gives that can really boost your SERP position, for a short period of time (a few days to a week is usually about average in my experience, depending). Usually, you can send a few good quality backlinks to restore the position
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seriously Ben, I WANT your keyword list
My experience with indexing and google and affiliate offers for what its worth - it can be tough to get your lens indexed if there are already a lot for a particular product, like say “the magic of making up” just to take a popular squidoo - clickbank item. Unique is key.
I only have one lens in the top 1,000 and it pulls about 100 pageviews a month, and is very unique to squidoo - I think there are maybe 3 other related lenses but nothing targeting what I have - I don’t really have friends on squidoo or play in the community so my guess is the ranking is just from traffic. Still I wish I had known more about hubs at the time as at least I would be making adsense (I get good clickthrough but apparently the product sucks at conversions).
Meh, my 2cents. Good luck man, you are a machine still!
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For those who are doing the Squidoo experiment, I recommend reading a blog by a chap called “Captain Squid” - see the following URL:
http://www.captainsquid.com/
He makes most of his money through affiliate sales via Squidoo. I recommend going through his blog archives - plenty of videos/vlogs regarding using Commission Junction and other affiliate programs. He pretty much knows everything there is to know about Squidoo, and his top payday was making $500 in a single day with Squidoo.
Hope people find his site useful, I know I’ve learnt from it.
Also, regarding “targetting Adsense” on Squidoo - you can’t really do this as the lenses don’t allow you to paste Javascript. You can only use the lenses with HTML affiliate links.
Squidoo operate differently to Hubpages. With Hubpages, you put in your Adsense ID and it is shown 60% of the time. Squidoo has a central pool where they use their own Adsense and pay-per-impression ads (Glam ads), and then distribute this. The distribution is done by lensrank. The top 2000 lenses get the bulk of the payout and the rest up to 100k get a pittance (I think it was circa $10.5 for Tier 1 lenses, $1.51 for Tier 2 lenses (lensrank 2000-10000) and $0.07 for lensrank 10,000-100,000. Lensrank seems to be based on all sorts of things - how many people click out of your lens, how many people rate it, how many people give it 5 stars, how much traffic you get, how frequently you update it.
I hesitate to give a guru like you advice BenK, but I wouldn’t bother targetting 30 lenses at “Adsense” because a) you can’t paste your adsense Id anywhere on Squidoo and they don’t accept javascript and b) it’s too hard to get 30 lenses into the top 2000 with all the criteria and weights given to “community interaction” so you won’t make much from the distribution fund.
Instead Captain Squid and co seem to make all their money by going after traffic to earn affiliate sales and the distribution fund is an afterthought.
P.S. regarding Amazon versus Ebay - Amazon have a 24 hour cookie and Ebay (and most other affiliate cos) a 30 day cookie. Easier to make money on a 30 day cookie as most people don’t buy straight away, they browse, compare prices and come back later. But I guess you can incorporate this in your experiment to prove this one way or another.
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If I was a guru, I’d be making 40k a month, lol. Still a bit a ways, but working my way there!
Thanks for the advice. I’ll take what people can tell me about squidoo. I know it’s different payout than adsense. I don’t like that whole pool payout thing — I think I’ll have to go 100% for affiliate sales.
Thanks Silver; I’ll be sure to check out captinsquid to pick up some techniques. I am not a master at squidoo by any means, so I’ll will be interesting to see what I can do.
Ben
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I can say that I have been inspired with your work ethic and hard working and also the “INFECTIOUS ENTHUSIASM”. I in turn have inspired my two other friends to write on hubpages
All thanks to you.
We are all togther targeting 300 hubpages in a month. Will report back with how it progresses.
Keyword selection is proving to be the most challenging task. Any special tips !
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admin Reply:
June 17th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Glad to see you going forth with the project. If you are willing to really put in a full day’s work of writing (this could mean getting up 2-3 hours earlier and spending 4-5 hours after work just writing and not surfing), you can get it done. I’m actually doing 250-300 hubs + 100 info barrels + 100 squidoo’s this month, heh so it can be done!
for keyword searches, you can look at Court’s Keyword Academy (if you are not part of it). There is a whole keyword program course. Now, personally, with this many hubs, I just look for searchs that I have an inkling will get clicks. After 300 or so hubs, i have a pretty good idea. But if you are first starting off, just look for very long tails that solve a problem.
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Thanks for the answer. I know about the fresh content bonus, but of all my hubpages i have it was the only one that got deindexed, so i guess there is no problem.
Looking forward for your ebook
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Regarding making Amazon sales on Squidoo - I have been told that as the quantity of amazon products sold overall on Squidoo is so high, that getting 50% using the Squidoo modules for amazon is just as good as getting 100% on your own links if you are just getting the basic. Plus because any sales you make through the Amazon modules on Squidoo are paid to you by Squidoo you don’t have to wait to reach minimum payout.
Hope this makes sense.
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Another question for you
Do you use social bookmarking services to link to your hubs? i’ve seen people recommending http://www.socialmarker.com/, but…am i wrong or, could this be considered google bombing if you’re not careful?
Thanks in advance
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you need to hit your hubs with everything at your disposal — these means other hubs links, link exchanes, ezines, go articles, blogger links etc. As i’ve stated, treat each hub like a blog post you want to rank for a term.
The best social bookmarking program is Bookmarking Demon — it’s about 140 bucks though. If you make sure to changes anchor text tags you won’t have a problem. With bookmarketing, they key is moderation. You don’t want 1000 links coming a to a hub/blog/site a day. If you have 100k links, well a 1000 won’t matter. But if you go from 0 to 1000, well that’s a problem.
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can’t figure out how to get in contact with ebay partner network.
would anyone happen to have an email address for them. Seems like a great way to make money if one can get accepted. They make it difficult by not giving you a way to find out why you have not been accepted and to try and make a case for yourself.
Thanks in advance
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I guess it wont be a problem then. I only bookmark my hubs on 10 sites at the beginning, and change the anchor text.
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@tiptop Go to Help in ebay network and then I think you’ll have an option to submit a form on any given question there. May be it’s the FAQ.
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If you’re after ranking with Squidoo, it’s fairly easy to get into the top tiers. You basically need this:
- A bunch of traffic (any term will do)
- Users to click on something that isn’t a squidoo url
There’s some guy on there who has around 800-1,000 lens on the top tiers between his pile of accounts. Take a look at this here for an example:
http://www.squidoo.com/god-of-war-2-walkthrough
I’m starting the hub challenge a month late - best of luck with your latest! Your wall of texts were very helpful
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