Make Money Online With Hubpages: 200 Hubs in 30 Days Update IV

June 6, 2009 By admin 45 Comments

The hubpage game has changed. Before you read this post then pepper me with questions about hubpages, please read my recent September 2010 Making Money with Hubpages. All the information given in these hubpages posts are still relevant, but stuff has changed in terms of trying to make money with hubpages.

It’s been a great week for my hubpages. I’m not going to retire on my hub earning any time soon, but I’ve seen consistent earnings, day in and day out since my last update. If you don’t have an account, you need to get on over and sign up for a hubpage account and start making money!

Summary of Stats
Note: brackets are last week’s stats. If two brackets, the second bracket is week before last:

-First Hubs published 25 days ago
-180 Hubs (116) (61)
-Word Count between 400-1000 words. The average would be about 650
-Hubpage views 4635 (1900)
- 2,774 total/ 2,086 unique (834/618)
-1,627 Google visits (509)
-583 Yahoo visits (185)
-28 AOL visits (12)
-87 Ezine Articles (0)
-82 clicks total (31) (7)
-$73 ($26) ($2.44)
-Adsense amount of time of writing: 13 bucks – June 5, 11:30 pm

I also made 60 bucks yesterday from my ebay affiliate links. I am not sure if it was from the ebay links in some of my hubs or from a couple other ebay niche sites I have.

Result Discussion
Ok let’s discuss the results. As you can see from last week, there has been a BIG increase in both the traffic and the click rate and money earned. Now, we can explain some of the changes due to the number of hubs that I pushed out. But, you may notice that the figures keep on getting higher and higher. For example, last week’s update I had 509 visitors. 7 days later, I now have over 3 times that amount. Same with clicks, I’ve had almost 3 times the number of clicks. I’ve only added about 60 more hubs in that time.

What accounts for this? Aging. You are seeing the effects aging on the hubs. The older the hubs are, the higher up in the rankings they are moving, and subsequently, the more traffic I’m getting. I hope this gives some of you who just start a couple hubs and despair when you only see 1 or 2 people a day. The longer your hubs age, the more traffic they should pull in. This is also one reason why I am confident I’ll be making more money next month than I did this month. I don’t know if my earning will be more next week (Court’s earnings dipped quite a bit this current update), but I suspect in a months’ time, I should be making more.

Now, let’s talk about the money. I went through my reporting for the last update and found I was off by like 5 bucks (I counted an extra day). I changed the tally and put them in brackets next to my stats so you can compare.

But as you can see, in 7 days (counting today), I’ve made almost 73 dollars (rounded up). That’s a mite over 10 dollars average a day. My top day was about 14 or 15 bucks and my lowest day was 3 bucks (Sunday). As you can see, in 7 days I have tripled my earnings from last week. Last week, I had about 26 bucks, which was about 9 times the amount I had the week before (3 bucks). As you see, it’s only getting MUCH better. Now, I don’t suspect I’ll get double the earnings next week (final week). But, I believe I’ll get more, maybe around the 100 or so range, but we’ll see. I’ll have another 40-50 hubs out there and all my hubs will be even older.

Now, an interesting note. Near the beginning of the experiment, I singled out 5 niches and I spammed them with links from Article Marketing Automation and Unique Article Wizard. I think I must have sent out like 10 AMA articles for each hub and a couple UAW articles. I also added a few links in Connect Content. Now, I didn’t see an improvement in the traffic I was getting right away. But after about a week I noticed the sites were getting the most traffic out of all my hubs. Now, they are blowing my other hubs away in terms of traffic. The top one is getting about 50 uniques a day from google and the other 4 are pretty close. In comparison, I have a lot of other hubs that only get 10 or even 2 people a day.

What does that mean? You can really lever backlink services to give your hubs an boost in traffic. It may take a few weeks for you to notice, but it’s well worth doing. Now, as an experiment, I really spammed the links to those 5 hubs. I wouldn’t normally do this for a niche site, but my theory was that hubpages has a lot of domain authority and links to the parent domain, so I figured you could get away with sending as many links as you want. So far, it seems to have worked.

The past week, I have been backing my hubs up with links from article directories. So far, I think about 50 of the 180 hubs have article directory links to them. After I finish my hubs, I’m going to spend a solid 4 days backing every single hub up with directory links and a run of UAW, BS, AMA, and Book Marking Demon, as well as a few other “tools” I have in my linking arsenal. We’ll see how that pans out for my revenue later.

How to Make Money With Hubpages

Ok, since I’ve been giving out advice about how to make money with hubs my last 3 updates, I’ll continue the trend, sharing what I’ve learned. I’m giving out new information here that I didn’t talk about in the other updates.

Backup all hub pages with backlinks
Treat each home like a niche blog/website post that you want to rank for a term. This means sending backlinks to each hub. As I previously stated, I sent a lot of backlinks from Article Marketing Automation to several of my hubs; they are now my most visited hubs. This means using your hub for link exchanges, sending article directory links to it, using backlink networks to send links, etc. The more links, the higher your hubs will rank. Now, I do suggest that you don’t overdo it. Google may penalize you. As always, you should try to vary your anchor text in each link.

Choose the Right Niches
Now there are a million niches out there and this is the hardest part. My advice is to stick with long tails. “cancer cures” may be a great niche, but you can bet a few other million internet marketers feel the same thing. It’s must better to go for something like “Cure cancer with natural remedies” or something like this. The longer the tail, the less traffic and also the more targeted traffic. The more targeted the traffic, the higher your CTR will be (ad click rate).

And folks, don’t pick the same generic long tails EVERY other marketer things of. This means don’t bother with “how to cure cancer” or “cystic acne treatments” or “how to lose weight.”

Pick a niche that has some potential, pull out some paper, and write down phrases you might type to find some sort of solution or answer to a problem in that niche. You can come up with some phrases that are off the beaten track. These phrases, lo and behold, may have a good CPC and a decent amount of traffic. These are what I call good “low competition” niches.

I’ve been finding that creating hubs about specific products often leads to clicks. For example, creating a hub about “Pond’s Moisturizing Face Cream for Women” may more often than not lead to a click than “face cream for women.” This is especially if the ads are targeted. Mind you, the product you target should solve some sort of problem.

Create Lots of Hubs
Guys, if you are participating in the 30 hubs in 30 days challenge, pack up and go home. You are not going to see any income with that. Yes, yes, there are a couple people here that were making good money with 40 or so hubs. Court for one and Joshua (see comments on my other updates). But both of them have a good deal of experience and the majority of you don’t. I say plan on creating at least 100 hubs if you want to see some fast income. I’m not saying you can’t make good money with 30 hubs IF YOU SEND BACKLINKS, but I don’t think you’ll be pulling in 5 bucks a day with that. But, I’d love to be proven wrong here, so feel free to tell me I’m wrong – if you are.

A final tip here, don’t fucking make 30 or so hubs in the exact same niche unless you are making money in it. I’ve seen a couple people who created 30 or so hubs about a single topic and they weren’t getting a single click. I suggest throwing as many hubs in different niches as possible. You have a much better chance of not screwing yourself over by creating 100 hubs in a dead end niche. But, a few hubs in a niche are good.

Create Multiple Hubs in the Same Niche
I suggest when creating hubs, you throw out 3-5 hubs per each niche. For example, “cure cancer with aspirin”, “how to cure cancer with maple syrup”, and “best way to cure cancer fast”, “treat cancer with Advil”, “Cheap cancer scans.” Since they are all related, you can use them to send good, relevant backlinks to each other. You also have a higher chance of “testing’ out a niche to see if there is potential. Four of the hubs may be losers, but one might start scoring clicks.

Optimize Keywords for Adsense
I’ve found sometimes the ads present in a hub don’t actually match the content. You may have to go back and tinker with your text a bit. I’ve found changing the keywords in the title or in the paragraph next to the ads may help trigger ads relating to your site. I suggest before you actually create a hub about a niche, you type the keyword phrase into Google to see what ads pop up on the right hand side. If there are no ads, you won’t be getting much in the way of targeted ads. For example, if you niche is about “How to Cure Cancer With Antibiotics”, you will score the most clicks from ads contain something close to your keyword phrase. If you’ve done everything right, someone found your site by typing in a long tail related to your keyword. If the ads also contain that keyword or something close, it’s laser targeted and this will be more likely to click.

Now, if the ads start to show “cancer treatments” and “cancer advice” and “cancer peer group,” the person who found your site by typing “how to cure cancer with antibiotics” probably won’t be as inclined to click the ads.

Now, I know you can’t exactly control what ads are displayed and the best you can do is to have keywords that the ads can pick out and use, but at the very least, think twice about making a niche hub that doesn’t have very many relevant ads.

Write for Adsense
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: don’t answer the fucking question when you write your hubs. A few people have been sending me hubs to look at, and let me say folks, you are spending way too much time. ALL you need to do is write content that will pass a visual from a Google engineer. That means making sure the text actually is relevant to the webpage and is readable by a human. This month, I think I’ll devote a post giving writing instructions about how to write poorly so you make money with Adsense 

This is my personal way of doing it with hubs:

INTRO <–bland but gets the point across. I always have the keyword phrase I am targeting in here, either t op line or end of intro paragraph.
BODY1 <–talk about WHY the reader should look online to find a product, or encourage reader to look online
for the best deal, etc. This ENCOURAGES reader to look for a solution in the ads. Hopefully, they
just see how shitty and uniformative your post is and beat it the hell out of your site, through one of
the ads you have subliminally encouraged them to click.
BODY2 <–more blather, somewhat informative. use keyword once.
PICTURE
CONCLUSION <-might actually say something useful here. Use keyword and related longtails
EBAY/AMAZON (if relevant to niche)
NEWSFEED (can give related longtails)
LINKS (add a couple to wikipedia. Looks more legit)
COMMENTS

Now you might note that I try to “help” people click on the ad write away. Folks this doesn’t mean you tell them to click on the ad. You will get your ass banned right out of adsense for good. I mean, if you niche is about treating cancer with wool sock home remedies, explain to them why they should look online for more information or to find the best deal on the product etc. I have noticed a higher CTR by doing this, but you’ll just have to see if it works for you. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

As for placing the actual adsense ads, I’ve talked about this before. But I suggest you take a look at Lissie’s Adsense Placement hub for an informative look on how to position adsense for best results.

Now, I believe content does not matter at all for ranking. I know Grizzly hammers this across a lot and from what I see, it’s true. Good content is always better than poor content, but good content also take a hell of a lot of time to write. In the time that it takes to write a well crafted article that’s actually worth reading, I can blast off 5 shitty articles that will draw in more clicks than the good article ever will. If you are trying to make money with Adsense, you don’t want good writing folks. If you are trying to score affiliate sales or get people to join your member’s club or something, or get props from other bloggers about how “intelligent” you are, then write good content. If you are trying to create a strong flagship blog, write good content. If you are trying to make money online with niche marketing sites, write shitty, terrible, horrible content that is just good enough not to be tossed out as spam.

This blog is actually my one attempt to provide somewhat decent, if badly spelled, content to attracted natural links. I’m not putting any work into SEO for this site, because, well, I’m not trying to make any money with it. I like doing it Grizzly style – free information! But I’m keen to see if by providing good, compelling and useful content, I can attract a fair amount of natural links.

Make Money with Hubpages without Ranking for the Main Keyword
So I’ve decided to tell you a dirty little secret about make money with hubpages. I suppose I could keep this to myself, but, I’m in the giving mood tonight. Or maybe it’s that I’ve written almost 20 hubs and 5 ezines today and I’m too fucking tired to be greedy. Either way, your benefit.

I’ve discovered that you don’t really need to rank at all for you keyword phrase to make money with hubpages. You see, hubpages gives your hub enough authority to quickly rank for long tails. I don’t mean long tails that you target in your titles and posts, but natural longtails that just occur when you write. You can rank very high for these long tails because of hubpages’ domain authority. Now, I suspect that if you were to create 100, 1 article blogger blogs, you wouldn’t get nearly the same traffic as you would putting those same 100 articles up as 100 different hubs. This is why you can make money with hubpages without really doing any serious backlink work. I’ve making over 10 bucks a day like this.

Now there are a few stipulations here.

1. You need a hell of a lot of hubs to get enough money (I’d say 75-125 hubs. The more the more $ you
make)
2. You need to pick the right niches that actually will click on ads

Now, folks, I’m getting clicks by making hubs in niches I have no hope in hell of ranking for. For example, If I make a site about “how to cure cancer”, I would rightly expect not to be ranked very high (or at all) for that term, and not without months of backlinks work. I am certainly not going to put months of work into trying to get a hub niche ranked #1 for something like that; I would want my own self hosted blog up there so I have more control and keep all the money.

BUT, if you stuff your post with enough related longtails, you can attract Google search long tail traffic that is targeted to the same niche — people who will still click on the ads. So, while someone typing in “how to cure cancer” may not (in fact, won’t) find my site, someone typing in “how to cure cancer with vitamins” might. There is a pretty good chance that person will click on an ad — especially if your long ass post (and it should be long if you want to make this strategy effective) mentions somewhere that vitamins can cure cancer. Even if you don’t mention vitamins, you have still got a reader who is looking for how to cure cancer — a topic your post should be about.

If really long tail traffic is finding your site, it’s usually pretty targeted. Note, this long tail strategy only works for some niches. I have some niches with a lot of traffic and few clicks, and other hubs with few traffic and a lot of clicks. You will just have to make a hundred or so hubs to find out which niches work and which don’t.

If you want to make money with long tail traffic, you need to have long posts to maximize the longtail traffic. The more you talk about, the more longtails google can rank you for. Don’t expect to get as many long tails from a 250 word hub as a 1000 word beast. I’d probably aim for about 700-800 words per hub, if you want long tail traffic.

Now, I have to be careful telling you this, as you could end up in trouble. I am not saying create every single hub in a niche you can’t and won’t ever rank for. But I’m saying if you think you have a winning phrase that might pick up some clicks, but there are a bunch of PR 4/5 blogs sitting at the top of the serps, make it anyways. You’ll still get an occational click if you set it up right.

But, if you only have 100 hubs, and you create all 100 hubs in niches you have no chance of dominating, then you will only ever be getting trickle long tail traffic. While this may provide you with a bit of an income if you have a lot of hubs, it’s going to be less effective over the long run because you won’t be dominating the search engines for those phrases. And folks, you want to be in the top 5. Instead of getting a paltry 5 bucks a day from 100 hubs catching long tail traffic, you’ll get 5 bucks a day from 1 hub alone.

I just want you to be aware that you may still make some money with hubs, even if you are not ranking. I’ll go after a long tail phrase that looks good if I think I can score a couple occasional clicks. If spending 20 minutes writing an article can bring in a .50 or a buck every week, the effort was well worth the time. You should try to make most of your hubs in uncompetitive niches so you can dominate them with backlink work and get more money.

And there were some more tips, but fuck it. I’ve spend 2 hours writing this damn post and I’m not getting paid to do it. I’ll post one more update next Wednesday or Thursday, wrapping up the 200 hubs in 30 day challenge/experiment. I’m going to see if I can crank out 250 hubs actually, but I’ll see how it goes. I’ve also been promising a big ass tutorial “How to Make Money Online with Hubpages” that compiles everything I’ve talked about the past 4 posts with some other useful tidbits all packed into a “tutorial” format.

Anyways, I hope you found this post useful. If you found it useful,you can pay me back by sending a backlink from a blog ;)

Again, this has turned into another hulking monster of a post. I’m beginning to despair of ever writing a post here that’s less than 3000 words.

Ben

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Make Money Online with HubPages: 200 Hubs in 30 Days Update III

May 29, 2009 By admin 46 Comments

Ok, a bit behind on my schedule. I’ll cut it all down to a single phrase: Hubpages, do it. You can make money.

This is the third update so far and let’s take a brief look at my stats:

-First Hubs published 18 days ago
-116 Hubs
-Word Count between 400-1000 words. The average would be about 800
-Hubpage views 1900
-834 Unique Visitors/618 absolute unique
-509 Google visits
-185 Yahoo visits
-12 AOL (does this even exist?) visits
-33 clicks total
-Approx revenue made as of writing: 32 dollars. 28 of that made this week.
-Hubpage revenue made while sleeping and this morning (as I write this at 12 noon): 12 bucks.

Summary of Progress

For the first 40 hubs, I made a dollar or two. By hub 70 I had made 3 dollars. But then I finally figured out how to make money with hubs and from hub 70-116, I’ve made about 21 dollars.

Now, there are a few others that are having more success than I. Court for one only had like 70 or so hubs and made roughly 100 bucks last week. Joshua (see comments) is making 7 or so bucks a day. I’ve made 20 bucks in about 5 days. I had a 5 dollar day, a 4 dollar day, a 3 dollar day, a 1 dollar day, a 4 dollar day, a .50 day, and a 7 dollar day.

Yea, I know I’m not going to retire on this, but I’m pretty impressed since I’ve just started to get these earnings as of Sunday. Now that I’ve kind of figured out what to do, I’m getting some consistent earnings. I expect these earning to go up over the next 100 hubs I create, since I’ve know what to look for and have an idea how to make money with hubs now. Keep in mind these earnings will only go up as the domains age and as I begin to send some backlinks. At about 4-5 bucks a day, that’s not a bad PERMENT income for a good solid 2 weeks of full time work. Sure, you might make a couple thousand of dollars spending that time working for someone, but getting 5 bucks a day for the rest of your life more than makes of for that. And of course, you will start to make more as the domains age and SERP’s improve.

Here is what I’ve found in the course of my 2 and a half weeks writing hubs.

How to Make Money with Hubpages

Content=more traffic
However, you can still get clicks with shorter , 300-400 work articles. I think if you want to max your search traffic and start sending backings to hubs, more content is better over the long term. But don’t think you need to write 800-1000 word beasts for each hub. I did a solid 30 or so hubs like this then said screw it and started writing 600 word hubs. Now, I think I’ll just go with 400-500 word shorties. I’d rather churn out 2 different hubs than a long single hub. IF I was trying to dominate a niche, than I would have long posts, but in this case, shorter is ok.

Keep Layout Simple
Videos, links to authority pages, pictures. Don’t need em. Sure, if you want to invest some quality time in a informative hub, ad them. Too much “stuff” can distract the user from doing what you want him to do: clicking on an ad. Layout is important though.

Optimize Hubpage Layout for Adsense
The most effective layout is using the standard hub layout. You don’t want to have a picture at the top of the hub. This means you will have the title, followed by a horizontal square of ads. You always have a large rectangular ad box immediately to your right. This helps to surround the initial paragraph with a “box” of ads. It’s really easy for someone to click an ad here. Since your articles should be highly focused, nice-based articles, you should score occasional converting clicks here. I’ve also found is having the following format:

TEXT
PICTURE
TEXT
EBAY/AMAZON
COMMENTS
LINKS

Now I haven’t scored any affiliate sales from eBay or Amazon yet, so I can’t really state too much about making money with these on Hubpages. However, if I am talking about a specific product, there is no reason why you cant add eBay links to the product. They might buy it. Initially, for my first 40-50 hubs, I had eBay and Amazon products inserted into every text body. I figured having targeted products I am talking about, inserted to the right of the text (hub pages allows you to do this), and would make sales. I was wrong. I haven’t had a single affiliate sale. Now, granted I am not really commanding the traffic to garner sales, but I’ve given up on affiliate sales. Adsense is way easier to make money with on hubs.

Also, you may not that I have a PICTURE inserted between two text boxes. This is because if you don’t’ have that picture, Hubpages puts a horizontal Google ad bar at the bottom of your post. I like to have it right in the center of my article. Easier to get a click I think.

Write for Adsense, Not for Readers
Well, I don’t buy in to the whole “content” is king argument. I think content is crap and backlinks are king. When writing for Adsense clicks, content is important, but not witty content. You are going to get most of your click near the top of the page body. You ideally want people to read your stuff for a few seconds, then click on the ad. The longer they read your article the more LESS likely they will click on the ad. Longer reading means that your article is actually answering the questions they are trying to find. And whey then do they need to click on an ad? Now, I know there are exceptions here. For example, you can write about a product or service telling how important it is to solve a problem but don’t TELL them where to go. If you have your keyword phrases right, you may trigger the ads that show that service. People want to find the service and they see a link, they will click. So yes, content matter for clicks, but not in the traditional blogging way. You don’t want an audience, you want people to read and then click. So don’t entertain anyone with your writing. Hell, I think putting up some of that shitty Indian-written content may get you more clicks then native English well crafted informative article. How can you learn to write like this? Experience. You just have to write a LOT of articles for Adsense. Eventually you get to see what works and then write around that style.

No Competition Niches
Yea, if you want to start making money write away, the key is no competition niches or low comp niches. If you pick competitive niches, you will be frustrated and won’t make money. A lot of you are probably doing this. FORGET about going after those 5k a month search terms. Aim at 200-400 search terms a month. Yea, it won’t be a 100 buck a day Adsense hub, but you might be able to get a click once a while.

There are actually two strategies here: Go after niches with high competition and low CPC. You might be able to find some of these, but the niches won’t be in the usual insurance, skin care, credit cards etc. You will have to look off the beaten track or come up with a unique keyword phrase. If you find a niche with 5-20k people a month and there is low competition, go for it. Each click might only be 20 cents, but if you can get 10-20 of them a day, that’s pretty good. Keep in mind though that if you go after the traffic niches, you WILL need to be ranked high for that keyword term. So only do this if there is little to know competition off the bat.

The other strategy is to go after HIGH paying ad clicks. Now, you can be sure that for the main phrases are all beaten to death by internet marketers. But while all the nice, juicy fruit up top has been picked clean by the birds, there are still pieces of fruit to be hanging low or on the ground. You can get 50 people coming to your hub and maybe 10 people click on an low paying ad, giving you a total of 2 bucks. Or you can have 4 people come to your hub and one might click on your ad, but you get 2 bucks from that click.

Either way is viable.

Link to Your Related Hubs
I suggest when making Hubpages, to go at each different niche in bunches of 5 or 10 related niches. This way, you can back them all up with links for your hubs. Since you are ideally targeting no comp niches, these backlinks for other related hubs will really give your hub the juice to get high on the SERP’s. As your hubs mature in the SERP’s and age and gain PR, so will the link juice passed. I try and give 1 way links. If I make 5 hubs, the first has no backlinks, the second hub links to the first, the 3rd links the first and second, and fourth links to first,second,third, and so on.

Get Backlinks
Treat your hubs like an niche blogs and build backlinks. You will make a LOT more money, but it will take effort and time. I do suggest if one hub is doing spectacular, you just go out and buy a domain and toss up a workpress blog on it. Then you laser target that niche blog to that exact keyword and use the hub to send it’s authority to the new blog. Then build backlinks to it and get to #1. Slap on Adsense and you won’t be sharing money with Hubpages. As was pointed out by a reader, hubpages steals part of your clicks, so you get less money. This is why you ultimately want your own site to get 100% of the revenue.


My New Strategy for the Next 100 Hubs

For the next 100 or so hubs, I am eager to see how much more money I can make. Keep in mind that the older my hubs are, the more traffic I should get and the more I should make. If everything works out, my hubs should be getting more traffic and money as time progresses.

Court is making about 12 bucks a day with 70 hubs, but then again, he’s one of the best in the world. But now that I am finding some success here and I know what niches seem to work and what ones don’t, I think I can fine tune my next 100 hubs so that each of them perform. Currently, I have like 30-40 hubs generating me revenue while a good 60 or so are dead weights. If I can make the next 100 or so hubs actually perform, I’ll make a lot more money.

-Laser Target Niches. I have an idea what works. It took me 70 hubs to figure it out. Going to replicate this now and fine hone my niches.

-Cut back to 400-500 word hubs (not convinced the 800 biggies are doing any better than small ones)

-Create 100 Ezine articles and send two backlinks to two hubs. Yea, this is going to be a lot of work. I’m already working on a god damn 200 hubs in a month. I don’t’ think anyone else has done that before. Adding an additional 100 Ezine articles to the plate is going to be tough. Why am I doing this. Because I’m god damn crazy, so deal with it! ;)

Meanwhile for any of you people who are following my little old make money online blog, get your asses into gear and make 30 HUBS. If I can creat 30 hubs in 4 days while working a 10 hours a day full time job, you can surely do that by my next update (7 days)? No excuses, just DO IT.

Meanwhile, I’m going to do another make money online experiment next month. I’m thinking 100 phBay self-hosted ebay niche sites, 200 ezine articles, 100 blogger blog niches, or 1 self hosted blog in a niche with 200 niche based articles, or 3000 backlinks in one month. We’ll see if we can make some money with one of those! Help me choose or toss me some ideas. You can watch me slave away for a month to see if it’s possible to make money!

Ok, enough talk. Back to writing. I’ll post next week when I have 170 hubs and 50 Ezine articles. Geez, even my short updates are turning into Grizzly-style put-em-to-sleep posts. When this experiemnt is finished in 2 weeks, I am going to make a massive, informative hub about exactly how to make money with hub pages using adsense. It’s going to be so long that even Grizzly will weep with envy.

Ben K

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Make Money Online with HubPages: 200 Hubs in 30 Days Update II

May 21, 2009 By admin 18 Comments

So, it’s been 11 days since I started this challenge.

My current stats for 11 days:

*61 hubs so far (70 hubs by end of today).
*Writing between 6-8 hubs a day.
*Posts all 500-800 words, with most being 500, and a few being 880-1000
*6 clicks total
*3 dollars made

The first week, I made about 2 dollars – most of it was in the tale end of the week. I went 3 days without a click (I has about 40-55 hubs at that point). Today I just scored two more clicks, giving me $1.

I have a total of 534 page impressions according to Hubpages, 222 visitors according to Google Analytics, and 96 visitors finding my hubs through long tail keywords.

My first 40 hubs were all long tail keywords (or short tails) in fairly competitive, high paying niches. Unfortunately, the niches are proving to be too competitive to rank high in the SERP’s for just with hubpages’ domain authority. I was getting some trickle traffic from Google, but not enough for clicks.

I thought about it and decided I should go after lower hanging fruit. The next 20 hubs were in niches will much less competition. Mostly 2-3 PR websites for the top 5 search results. These niches all had about 1-5k exact searches a month. Unfortunately, a couple days of no clicks has convinced me the niches are still too competitive to get traffic without backlinks.

So now, I’m shifting directions again. I am now not going after low hanging fruit, I’m going after the fruit that’s on the ground and rotten. I was restricting myself to niches that would bring in, based off the standard calculation for minimum expected Adsense revenue [Searches * CPC * .40 *.05], about 50 bucks at least. For the first 40, I was targeting niches in the $300-1k range. For the next 20, I was targeting niches in the $80-$300 range with much less searches and much less competition. But that’s apparently not working. So I’m now going to target niches in the $25-$50 range, and just throw a lot of them out there. I mean like hundreds. If I can get 300 hubs in a month, super ( I doubt I can).

If I can find some super keywords good traffic and good CPC and NO competition, I’ll jump on those opportunities. Now, most of these niches will have between 300-700 exact searches a month. I’m going to let the CPC guide my niches selection now, instead of search numbers here. This is because with those small searches, I can only expect a few clicks a month. I want those clicks to count.

So, we’ll see how it goes. I’m hearing that some people are making 5 bucks or so a day – including Court. I guess my initial strategy was flawed in that I was treating these hubs like the way I would treat a niche blog. But creating hubs for money and creating blog niches/websites is NOT the exact same process. Mainly because with blogs, I fully intend to start sending backlinks over the long term, but with hubs, I’m trying to make money right away, so they don’t get much in the way of backlinks, at least not initially.

I’ve also started to send backlinks to my older hubs, so let’s see if I start to get more traffic. I’ll post an update when I get to the 100 or so hub range. With 50 or so hubs based around no competition keywords, I may actually be able to make a couple bucks a day.

So let’s summarize my new strategy:

My New Strategy for the next 60 Hubs

1. Hubs will be going after NO competition niches (top sites will be PR 0-1 in the searches, search traffic about 300-1k a month, CPC will be 2+ dollars a click)

2. Content of Hubs will Change (much crappier)

The last 20 hubs I made were very high quality. I’ve added informative content, pictures, videos, and basically tried to craft high quality hubs. No more. I think people going to those hubs will find their answers and will have no need to click on an ad. I’ve also been throwing up a lot of eBay and Amazon listings in the body of the posts, probably distracting the users. I’m going to simplify the layout. I only want the user to see the content and the ads.

I’m going to go for the Adsense now and just forget about eBay and Amazon sales for now. This means that I am no longer going to write informative posts that try and answer the question. I’m going to write long, 800 or so word posts with no videos, no pictures, and no ebay/amazon products listed in the body (i’ll have ebay products listed at the end). The point is to try and get the user to click on an ad, not to find an answer to their problem. I’ll create about 50 or so hubs, basically making my posts as ugly, long, and as unhelpful as possible. Combined with the fact that these will be in no competition niches, I may start to see an improvement in clicks here.

3. Posts will all be 700-1000 words
About 50 posts are all 500 words. I’m going to increase the length to 800 or more to drive more longtail traffic. More long tails for Google to rank and send traffic with. I will stuff them (without keyword stuffing) with related long tail keywords.

4. Will Send Backlinks to older posts

Going to see if I can eke out some revenue from the older hubs in higher comp niches. I think I’ll hold off on sending backlinks to these next 60 hubs, at least for another week. I want to see If I can make money without resorting to backlinks here. I should need them if I go after no comp niches, since I can rank high right away, I hope.

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Make Money Online with Hub Pages: 200 Hubs in 30 Days Update I

May 17, 2009 By admin 11 Comments

So, I’ve been spending insane amounts of time writing hubs lately, trying to keep on track with my crazy 200 Hubs in 30 Day challenge. As of right now, I have 32 hubs. It’s been a week so far and I need to have about 6-7 hubs written a day to keep up with the 200 in 30 days. Technically, I should have about 42 hubs by now, but I initially started out with 100 Hubs in 30 Days, then switched over to the 200 Hubs after 4 days — meaning I had to play catch up. I’m almost caught up, if I can pump out another 10 hubs today, I’ll be where I should be.

Now, the question everyone is wondering: Am I making money with hubpages?

The answer is no. I’ve had 3 clicks so far and made a total of about a 1 buck. The 3 clicks came within the past 2 days…when I had about 20 or so hubs.

Court said he had several 0 click days followed by a day where he made 8 bucks. My theory for why he got an 8 bucks in adsense clicks is that people know Court’s hubpage username (apparently). Since his name has been plastered all over hubpages’ official challenge newsletter/post, he’s been getting a lot of traffic to his hub profile. More traffic = more chance of clicks. Or he could just have some sweet keyword niches with no SERP competition.

Why I’m I not getting clicks? I’m convinced it has to to with the fact that I’m not getting any traffic (duh). Since putting up my first hub on Monday (May 11), I’ve had a grand total of 107 visitors according to Google Analytics. Not bad considering it’s only been less than a week. Hubpages are easy to start getting search engine traffic right away, since Google doesn’t seem to do the whole “punish the new site” thing to hub pages.

Now 31 of those visitors came from Google. A look through the keywords used to reach my hubpages show some long tail traffic.

So with 107 visitors, I’ve gotten 3 clicks. That’s around 3% click rate — not really good but not terrible. Most people say about 5% of the people will click on a google ad. Some people can get 10%+ if they style their layout a certain way and craft the writing so as to encourage ad clicks.

So, I can think of several reasons why I’ve made peanuts so far:

1. Niches Are Too Competitive — hubs stuck in the SERP nowhereland
2. No Backlinks to keywords
3. Niches Don’t Have Enough Traffic
4. Content of Hubs

Now, I think I may have been choosing niches and keywords that are too competitive. All of the niches are long tails in competitive niches. But, I am beginning to think that even with the long tails, there is too much competition to really rank high in SERP’s for without backlinks.

My hope was that with long tail keyword targeted hubs, the trust and domain authority of hubpages.com would enable my hubs to rank fairly high for these long tails. But from the traffic I’m getting and Google Analytics, it appears that this is not the case. I basically have two choices here: start sending lots of keyword anchored backlinks to each hub, or start creating niches in uncompetitive hubs.

If I create a lot of niches for keywords that don’t have any real competition, it’s possible to get the hub ranked out high without backlinks and capture that traffic. Now, I suppose this is a viable strategy, but I am trying to create some hubs that can tie into my other blog niches to use them as backlink fodder. I think what I might do is create 15 or so hubs in niches with NO competition and track the results to see if I get traffic and maybe clicks.

Now the other choice is to start to sent out backlinks to my existing hubs. I’ve actually been too buys writing my 7 or so hubs a day to sent any backlinks to them. I think I’ll start doing this.

Now that I have about 32 highly focused niche hubs, I am beginning to see that hubs are just like any other blog. You can’t really expect to make any money with hubs unless they rank in the SERP’s and start to get search engine traffic. Now, I don’t really get much in the way of other “social” hub traffic, but that’s fine by me. I doubt other hubbers would want to click on my ads or buy my ebay products. I suppose I could spend a lot of time trying to get other hubbers to join my fan club and visit my sites — but I hold to my original assertion that to make money online, you need targeted search engine traffic, regardless of whether you have a hub, blog, or website.

My Impressions
It may be too early to call this — I would want around 100 or so hubs before I feel I can state anything with some accuracy — but based on my current performance, I don’t see myself making any real viable money, even if I pump out 200 hubs, if things keep on going the way they are.

As it is, if I only got a couple clicks with 20 or so hubs in a week, I may get more clicks by having 10 times the amount of hubs, just because of the sheer volume, but we will still be talking about pennies and dollars here. Let’s say that in a week my 20 hubs gave me 1 buck. Now I know that for like half the week, I only had 10 hubs, but we’ll ignore that fact now. So 20 hubs gives 1 buck a week. That means I may get 20 bucks a week from 200 hubs. For the sheer effort it is taking to write 200 hubs (we are talking like 5-6 hours of work here a day for a month straight), it’s not really worth it from the monetary sense. However, it’s a great link farm to use to support money sites or support sites, so there is still some good value to the effort.

As stated, I either need to mass target niches with no competition so I can bring in more targeted traffic, or I need to get backlinks to bump up hubs in the SERP’s to increase targeted traffic to those niches. Right now, there is not enough traffic to command any clicks.

What’s clear to me is that some new hubber can’t just go on a hub blitz and expect to make a real income through hubs. First, they will probably not create niche hubs — and these are the type of hubs you will need to make money, provided you get traffic. Second, they won’t get any backlinks to the hubs. Now, I know some people are making a few bucks here and there — probably due to social traffic accidentally clicking on links or an occasional affiliate sale.

What I’m still trying to determine is if an internet marketer can make money. I’m 100 percent sure this is the case, if a concerted attempt is made to get the hubs ranking high.

I’ll keep you guys updated. It’s too early to call anything either way. By the end of nextweek, I hope to have about 100 hubs, so I can give you guys a more accurate assessment of where things lay.

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200 Hubs in 30 Days

May 15, 2009 By admin 2 Comments

An update on the 100 Hubs in 30 Days. I’ve decided to one up the challenge and take it to a new level. I’m going to do 200 Hubs in 30 days.

I just decided this yesterday. A 100 is great, sure, but 200 will yield even better results. It’s 3 days so far and I have 17 hubs (16 part of the challenge) and have made 0 on my adsense. I haven’t added any backlinks yet, which I need to. This of course should help. Feel free to join up as well.

Time to get cracking again. 6 a day is a serious commitment!

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