From now on, I’m going to post one of my pictures with each post to put some color into this site. I love photography and it’s my dream only to travel around the world with a camera on my back, and capture exotic landscapes and sunsets.
These pictures are a personal motivation for me to continue what I’m doing, so I can do what I really want to do.
You know why I want to make money online? Not to drive around fancy cars or have a private stash of LV wallets or DuPont Lighters — no, it’s so I can travel to the exotic locations of the world and capture the perfect landscape shot. This is what I live for – to stand on top of a mountain far from civilization, and watch the fiery sunset wan. That is true living folks. I don’t want to be writing articles all day. I want to be capturing with my camera the beauty that is this world. But, to get where you want to go, you have first do the traveling.
Anyways…
People have been asking me for an update, so I’ve here it is. Be careful what you ask for. This one’s a beast in length. I cover everything from hairy midget thongs to the meaning of life. Great, now Google’s going to start ranking me for pr0n.
Back to business. It’s been a very good week for me. AdSense earnings have doubled across the board, my sites are starting to rake in money from different sources, and I’m nearing $100 AdSense days, in addition to my other sites. Keep in mind that I was making 1 buck a day (well, a good day brought in 2 bucks) with AdSense 2 months ago. I’ve been at this “game” for about a year — studying SEO, testing small niches, and generally experimenting with IM, MMO, and SEO. I decided a few months ago to put 200% of my effort into actually doing the work to make the money. You can have all the head knowledge in the world folks, but without hands on practical experience, you’ll flounder around.
It’s possible to make money online. But you have to work folks, oh do you have to work. Don’t think I gotten these results by sitting back and talking about making money. I’ve been making money by doing work, lot’s and lots and lots’ of fucking work.
So let’s get this show on the road. Grab a coffee, and maybe some popcorn too.
Make Money with Info Barrel Result
Now, let’s take a look here at Info Barrel. So it’s been a a month now (well a few days over, but let’s say a month, since I made nothing the first week). With around 100 info barrels, I’ve pulled in $141. This is very near my original $5 a day goal, which is a success. However, two weeks ago, I took in about $66 bucks for the week, and this week, I’ve taken in about $60 bucks. That’s about an average of about 9 bucks or so a day. So all though my total is close to $150 bucks a month, based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m on track for around $300 for the next month. And as I found out with the hubs, the month after that will be higher. There is a real possibility that these 100 infobarrels could generate $400-$600 a month, just on domain aging.
I’m going to call them at $300 bucks a month for now. I do notice that I am seeing 13+ days, so I feel confident in saying that the earning are going up.
My future goal: 500 info barrels, all backed with backlinks. It’s reasonable to expect that if I create another 400 infobarrels, I should be able to get 300*5 = 1500 a month out of them. Now there are no guarantees, but seeing 1500-3000k a month with around 500 is doable, especially if they get ezine links and maybe even some hubs links (a reverse, lol). That’s my goal next couple of months.
Conclusion, Infobarrels fucking rock for both money and backlinks. Given the choice between EzineArticles and Info Barrel, I’d go Info Barrel any day. If I put up these 100 articles on EzineArticles, I would have had link juice, but I’d be short $300 a month at least. So go sign up for an info barrel account to make money and get very good link juice. If you want coin though, you are going to need 100+ info barrels though. Apply the same hub strategy to them and you’ll stand a good chance at pulling in 5-15 bucks a day.
Now on a side note, don’t fucking abuse info barrel. I know we internet marketers love to milk something for all it’s worth, but please submit GOOD content to them. Some of the admins have been complaining to me about the shitty content you guys are putting up there. If you want to write shit, use ezines. I know I’ve said write shitty to make money, and yes that can work. But there are ways of writing shitty (i.e. don’ t give the answers to the main question, or at least don’t give them until you are at the bottom of the article) without actually writing like shit? Get me? Also, don’t write 200 word info barrels and expect to make any significant money.
Again, if you want to abuse a platform, beat on ezine — you can write shitty 250 word articles all you want there. If you want to make money, write 450+ word articles on Info barrel. I say it’s better to spend an extra 10-15 minutes to make sure the article is LONG and decently written.
I’m not just talking out of my ass here. Writing a decent quality Info Barrel that’s at least 450 words will directly make you more money. You will rank from more terms because a 450 word article will have more longtails to rank for, AND if the article is well presented (you don’t have to give out answers in the article, but just make sure it reads well), people will be inclined, if they don’t click one of those ads, to click on a link to one of your hubpages and perhaps click on an ad there! In a single month, I’ve made over $41 dollars from people coming from infobarrel to hubpages then clicking on an ad there. But if your article is complete crap, you will likely lose this “extra” opportunity to make money off that person.
Ok, done. I’ll post what’s happening in 2-4 weeks with info barrel.
Hubpage Update
Hubs. Ah, hubs, my friend and my enemy. I love the money, but I’m fearing the whallop Google’s going to be giving them. Again, there is a lot of craze going on about hubs — probably in small way because of me (”pat’s himself on the back”). But the problem with this is that it takes the emphasis off of your own properties and on to one platform. The key here is to diversify. Every 10 hubs you make, create a self hosted blog, or a niche blogger blog, or 5 info barrels, or 5 squidoo lenses, or a donkey — I don’t care. The bottom line is that you dont’ want to have ALL your assets invested into one platform, especially one as unstable as hubpages (yes, it’s not stable folks). Why do you think I’m spending a god damn 10 hours a day working on click bank sniper sites? Because I want to ensure I get a stable income apart from adsense and hubpages — on sites that I OWN. Your going to see me put a lot of emphasis on my own properties the next few months to diversify.
Now, I really shouldn’t be posting this since it’s like holding a red flag to a raging bull, but here we go…
Oh geeze, I can see the frothing already. Completely ignored the part where I told you that all goes to 0 when google slaps hubpages or hubpages decides to up there share it keeps of the earnings, or google simply decides to deindex hubs. If you hear anything I’m saying just remember to split your time between hubs and your own websites.
Click Bank Sniper Update
Well, these are fun. I’m getting a lot of practice mastering the art of complete and utter bullshit. Penis enlargements, fake boobs, and harry midget thongs. Does anyone want a harry midget thong? I don’t, but believe me, there are some people out there who actually do.
Clickbank has made me a bad person. A very bad person indeed. My soul feels dirtied somehow. I suppose it the shit stain from that hairy midget thong I’m wearing right now. Opps, that was suppose to be a secret. Don’t tell.
These things take me around 2.5 - 3 hours if I rush to set up and deploy. To promote, another 3 minutes. I’ve been doing them for 10 days so far. Let’s see how I’m doing.
Yikes no sales. No worries, there is a reason, which will be explained way down below.
Now I actually skipped over really going into detail for my reasoning for choosing this model of revenue. Let’s talk a bit about this now. Firstly, I wanted to get familiar with the whole affiliate sale thing — one of the most profitable ways to make money online. If you are limiting yourself to only Adsense, you are shooting yourself in the foot in regards to the money you can make. To ignore affiliate selling online is like a painter deciding not to use the color red. Can it be done? Sure, but why? The second reason is because I know this model can work for me. I’ve already seen exactly how to make it work, at this point, it’s just getting the right niches and pumping out the volume needed to score sales.
Let’s look at the chart above.
I have around 700 hops here (hop = a click on the affiliate link I’m throwing around on my midget thong sites). Now, from what I seen (from friends) number of hop conversions should be roughly 1-5%. Some niches might be 200 hops per sale. I’m banking on about a 1%.
Now the beauty of clickbank is that each sale, you may get between 20 bucks to 75 bucks (or more), since you collect most of the sale. That means you really only need to make a sale a day to see roughly 1k a month. Compare that to Adsense and you need like 30-50 clicks (or more if your CPC is crap) to get that figure.
With 3-4 sales a day, you may see anywhere from 60 bucks to 200 bucks a day, depending on what sells. That means, at say 1% conversions (standard for affiliate sales seems to be between 3-5%, though if your sales pitch is amazing and the product good and the niche perfect, you may get 10-30% conversions. I’m playing it really safe here), you need to get roughly 400 hops to bank on 2-4 sales a day — roughly 2k a month (or more). About 20-30% click on an hop link (this is where your writing is huge). Let’s say 20%. So to get 400 hops of TARGETED traffic a day, I’m going to need roughly 2k people a day. Now, if I had a website that was getting 2k people a day in a niche perfect for clickbank, this would be a great way to maybe earn 2k or so a month. Alas, I don’t, and I don’t want to spend a year or two trying to build one. So, I’m going to do it the quick and hard way. Throw out 100-150 snipers. If each sniper site can bring in 20 people a day of TARGETED search engine traffic, that’s over 2000 visitors a day — enough to eke out those 2-4 sales and make that 2k a month I’m looking for.
Still with me here? Good. Money on the web is all about traffic. More traffic = more money. Remember what I said about the conversion rates. With targeted traffic, you should be seeing between 1-5% CTR. If you get 2k a day, you are going to get anywhere from 2-10 sales, clicks, or whatever. It’s all a numbers game. Now note that I said targeted here. This is very important. If you create a site about fishing lures, but decide to hawk mystery books, you won’t be seeing very many buyers. You won’t be getting 5% CTR, or even 1%CTR. More like .001 CTR. Why? Because you are not addressing the needs of the searcher. Slap on an affiliate pitch about the best fishing lure known to man and your CTR might rise from .001 to 10%! Now keep in mind these are general guidelines. I don’t want you to be taking all this CTR talk as the Gospel or anything. There are factors that change things. For example, I have a romance book site. It sells romance books via Amazon. I get roughly 1k visitors a day. I have Google ads. CPC is about .50 on average. I should be getting therefore, 50 clicks at my 5% CTR rate, right? Wrong, I get more like .05 a percent on a good day. Why, my ads are targeted, are they not? They are, but think about need. Someone goes to a site to find recommendations about romance books (so I have a soft spot for romance, fuck off). Now, do you think they want to click on an ad about Jenna Jackson’s new self published work being promoted via ads? No.
So it’s important to understand a bit about what sort of products tend to come through as ads and exactly what the target audience wants. This is not a good niche for Adsense. But for selling books, it’s not bad. Still, when you hawk books, you always have to worry about those damn free libraries — people are cheap. Affiliate sales always work best when the user has no other choice but to buy that product. You don’t do as well when they can put in a little bit of legwork and get that product for free elsewhere.
Which brings me waaay back the question. Why did I have 700 hops and no sales? Technically, I should be seeing about 7 sales. Well, besides the fact that about 100 or those hops are my own from checking to make sure all the links work, etc, 95% of those hops came from social traffic like digg, stumble upon that i used for some quick backlinks. That type of traffic has a conversion rate so low, it’s buried under the ground. So, digg, reddit, stumble upon are pretty much on par with a 0 CTR, or close to it. Right now, I’m just starting to see Google search traffic. The more click bank snipers sites I build, the more google traffic I’ll start to bring in and the more money I’ll make. Right now, I’m not getting enough traffic. I spend 10 or so of these sites learning the ropes and I didn’t exactly pick the right keywords. The next 100 should be better.
Anyways, I’ve pretty happy where these click bank snipers are going. I find I am able to get my sniper sites ranked onto the front page in competitive niches for long tails. It’s very possible to squeeze out 10-100 people a day from each site. I’m aiming for 20 or so @100 sites will probably give me the revenue I’m looking for. At this point it’s just the work, and folks it’s a LOT of work. Like 10 hours a day. That’s roughly 300 hours in the month to get this done.
However, I’ve said I want to diversify, so I’m doing it. Here is what’s on the plate for the next 6-7 months. Each of these a month, if I can.
*100-150 click bank snipers (I want 2k a month) in 30 days (might go over this a bit)
*100 PHP ebay niche snipers in 30 days
*100 blogger blogs in 30 days
*300-400 article “sniper” Authority website <– this will be interesting. I’m going to enter one of the highest paying niches and one of the most competitive niches and target 300-500 longtails with the same number of articles. Think of it as my own mini version of Hubpages or info barrel).
*100 Self Hosted Adsense Sniper blogs
Making Money Online with Climbing
Yea. That title was for the SERPS. But I want to talk a bit about making money and climbing, sorta.
I have some online friends that are getting disillusioned that they have not been making any money. I’m sure many of you are in the same position. MMO is a Everest and you are squarely on the bottom looking up. Now, that mountain is work. And there are different ways to get to the top of this peak. You have 99% of the people scrambling at the base, but the higher you go, the less people you find.
Near the base of the peak you find those few Grizzly’s, Courts, that are making a pretty penny but aren’t rich. Then you have the guys standing on the tip. Guys like the plenty of fish owner (don’t pretend you don’t know what it is folks, I SAW you on there. Wait, I guess that means I was there to. Ignore that comment) who make 10 million a month affiliate and Adsense revenues.
Now, the goal is to climb high enough the mountain that you are earning some decent coin. There are different paths that lead to the top. You might have a Vic way, you might have Court’s way, you might have Grizzly’s way, I have my own way. This is a slow, but sure way to climb the mountain. It takes time and persistence. There is no instant result, not instant climb. Once person may, by finding a quicker path, scale up higher than the next person. It just happens.
There are also those who opt to fly to the top. Blackhatters. They figure, why bother climbing when you can cheat your way to the top. Do they get near the top? Yea, but they usually fall off.
Then we have all those PPC shills and “gurus.” Those are those guides at the bottom who claim to have climbed the mountain. They offer to “show” those at the bottom a way to scale to the top at record speed. But they only take your money and run.
The only real way to climb that mountain is to put in the effort. Remember that folks. There are shortcuts, but most of them lead to dead ends. Sit down and decide how bad you want to make money. Then consider how much effort you are going to put into it. If you are spending a couple hours a week dabbling in MMO, don’t fucking waste your time. You WON’T make any money. Oh, you may score a few nickles and dimes, but you won’t be seeing the dollars, that’s for sure. Count on spending 3 hours a day at least. And I’m talking about real work. Chatting with your friends and forum posting doesn’t count as work. Work is getting shit done. Oh I “work” two hours a day. You mean you surf the web for an hour and piddle around for another 30 minutes, then write for 30 minutes. Folks, that’s not called work, it’s called dog fucking. You would be amazed at how much you can accomplish by really working and not bullshitting around.
Work, it’s all about work guys.
So if that mountain seems like it’s too high, just remember, it’s one step at a time. It’s high right now, but in a year, in two years, in three years, that one step at a time adds up. Before you know it, you’ll be looking down pretty high.
Which brings me to the question: how to make money? There are two sorts of ways (in my picture). You can create authority sites that have a lot of high quality content and over the course of 1,2,3,4 years, with backlink work, can make you lots of money. You might see between 50 - several hundred bucks a day. The other way is volume, lots and lots and lots of sites.
So here is my Mad Master Scheme to Make 20k a month in a year.
For myself, I’m going route #2. I’m going to work myself into a position where I can start many authority sites, or outright buy them to target short tail keywords. But to do that, I need to have a lot of small sites. Blogger blogs, clickbank sites, Adsense snipers sites, hubs, infobarrels, etc. Now, I’m realizing instead of actually doing backlinks or creating sites, I spend most of my time writing. I’m going to fix that.
All my online earnings will be going into outsourcing articles. This means 3K USD+ a month to be spent on outsourcing articles. Each successive increase in earnings will be going back into buying articles. This should vastly increase my output of small sites.
I’m going to become a zombie that creates sites and gets backlinks. That’s it.
I’m going to pay about 5 bucks for a decent 500 word article. 3k a month is going to get me about 600 (each month). I may have to create 300 or so my self for the first couple months. I want to produce about 1k articles a month for the next 6 months.
Am I crazy? Maybe, but there is method to my madness here. Based off my experience, I’ve see the average article (say Hubpages) gets about 3 people a day of targeted traffic. With 3 people a day, you may get 90 people a month per hub. 90 people a month times 100 = 9k. CTR is 5% and .50 per click sees you at $225 per month for 100 hubs or roughly $7.50 a day — exactly what I’ve stated you should expect before. I’m being conservative with my estimate.
1000 hubs should therefore bring in around $2250 a month (in actuality, it will be more, I’m really low balling it here). 1000 articles will cost roughly 5k – 2 months of earnings. But based off my estimate of earnings, it takes about 2 months of earnings to pay for those 1000 hubs. After two months, it’s profit that can be reinvested.
And you see where this can go. I’m not just talking hubpages – I’m talking blogger blogs with Adsense, info barrels, etc. Guys, it’s just a number game. The more I make, the more I put back into my business and the more profits. Eventually, I’ll be pulling in a good penny. Then I can start to turn my attention to major authority blogs or even afford to buy them.
Is it a risk? Sure. There are a lot things that can go wrong. But, I’m a bit of an expert at mini sites right now and I know I can make a lot of money like this. If you want results in life guys, you are going to have to risk sometimes. I’m risking a lot of cash, but I see rewards here. I can piddle around with small time earnings, or I can aim for the sky. I’d rather aim for the sky.
Anyways,this was a pretty fucking long post and my fingers are tired. Now time to get back to those 15 articles that should have been done while I wrote this.
Ben Out
34 Comments
Hey, enjoying the blog. Maybe I missed it but can you be specific on how you are creating and structuring your clickbank sniper sites?
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Hmmm, I am using the same article outsourcing plus adsense system, I am expecting I’ll get back my investment in a month or two, and what I have found is there are 20% of the articles made 80% money.
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Wow Ben thanks for the inspiring post!
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I’m really enjoying your blog. Some inspiring posts here with some really good information. I haven’t even looked at infobarrel yet but it looks like another good resource.
I don’t have as much time online to do my ‘work’ (around 2-3 hours a day) but I agree, taking one step at a time is the way to go. I’m now making a pretty decent income but it’s taken a lot longer to get here.
Keep bloggin’ because you have just become my new Griz.
Tracey
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admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Hi tracey, you just do what you can. If you have an hour a day, then put that hour a day in. What I mean though is that there are two variables to making money online that are related: work and time. Let’s say MMO = work + time (as in time that passes).
Now, you can do less work but wait more time and get results. An hour a day for 7 days a week is 7 hours a week. This comes out to 365 hours a year towards MMO. Over 4 years, this adds up to 1460 hours of work. That’s a lot of work and if you make habit of putting out 1-2 sites a week (certainly possible), you will make a lot of coin in a few years. Maybe not a year, but you will make money.
Now, think if you spend 2 hours a day. You get the same result in 2 years. Now say you spend 4 hours a day. You get the same result in 1 year. Now say you spend 8 hours a day, you get the same result in 6 months. Do 16 hours a day (like seriously full time) and you get 4 years results in only 3 MONTHS.
Now, it’s not the “same result” persay. You have to take into account aging as a big factor, so in 3 months you will not see that same results. But, think if you get all the websites/work done from 4 years in 3 months and just sit on it. All that 4 years of work will begin to “age” and in 4 years, hell, you’ll be making a lot more because of this than someone who does it gradual.
So that applies to someone who wants to make money online quick — but if you are persistent, yes, you can make a lot of money, even if it’s only a couple hours a day
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Very interesting post there! I just have one or two final questions before I can finally convince my parents to set up Adsense
When you talk about high and low CPC’s - what do you consider them to be?
Where do you brainstorm ideas for keywords - I’ve already been looking around but have really been struggling (may join TKA if that will help the issue)
And side noting for Hubs/Infobarrels, do you try to get them to rank on the first page for that keyword?
I hope you continue doing well, I understand that it’s loads of work, I realistically could rank #1 or 2 in my only website if I COULD be bothered to put in the backlink work.
Keep it up!
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admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 8:03 am
lot CPC, in my opinion, is about less than 1/2 bucks. I generally look for 3-4 bucks CPC as a sweet spot in terms of competition and payout. You tend to get around 20% of your the CPC, so 4 bucks would tend to give you $1 clicks. Now this is not a firm rule. I’ll go after higher if I think I can pull it off, and if a niche has 1 CPC or .80 CPC but a LOT of exact searches (1000/2000+) and LOW LOW competition so you know you can get a lot of traffic, then go for it.
The thing with low CPC niches though — there doesn’t seem to be a lot of “need” for people to click. Those niches don’t tend to cater to desperate people, cause desperate people will click, thus the bidding for ads is much higher, hence higher CPC.
TKA will really help you get do keyword research and some ideas. I suggest joining. I joined to see what was going on a couple months ago, but I’m quitting — not because there is anything wrong with it, but I have my own methods that work for me to make money. BUT, Court provides a lot of valuable advice and videos — perfect for the new person for the first few months or year.
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Ben, you took that picture? It’s gorgeous- where was it taken?
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admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 7:57 am
Hi Carrie. I took that last year on my travels to a remote village in China last year. It was an entire mountain that has been carved into a rice terrace by hand — something that’s taken hundreds, even a thousand years to do.
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Ben,
Great picture, post and update. I totally agree with what I’d want to do with passive income that is residual in future- not the big cars and flat screens but meditation, yoga and inner depth. When you backlink to an infobarrel page (or a hubpage) do you create a different title for that 2nd article focusing on a different (but related) article?
Deb
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Ben you are a machine indeed. No doubt you’ll make you $20k/mth in no time. I’m loving your methods as I think they really encourage a GREAT learning process especially for a beginner SEO.
I’ve been outsourcing for a long time now and it has helped. You can do a lot more when you don’t spend your time writing, but I would suggest you find a writer (or a few writers) you can be their sole client for (and with your volume that should be possible) so that you can tailor their writing style, and teach them to put in some longtails. I know I always end up having to go back and put in another few hundred words just to get in some longtails.
Anyway I’m still plugging away at HubPages and hoping that this next batch will be the ones I crack into success. I’ve been a little frustrated with them as I’m not having nearly as good results, but I think that’s my fault for not going low enough for competition.
Anyway keep up the good work and much success.
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admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 7:47 am
@DeMerchant
Yea, I’m looking around…I looked at textlink brokers and I feel iffy about them. I won’t go with cyberhub, that’s for sure. I actually have to say I’m reversing my opinion a bit about crap content and am leaning more on Court’s side with this. The reason? Most of their content is pretty crappy (I hear). With potentially thousands of web properties out there, I am feel I’m going to get a visual from google. The last thing I want to happen is to find all my articles have been deindexed for some stupid reason. So, I’ll pay more. Any tips for finding a few writers? I’ve heard elance tossed around. However, their rates seem kind of high. Any ballpark figure on what I can expect to pay?
It’s all about finding those winning niches. For example, I have 400 hubs from different niches that may only pull in 40-50 bucks. But then I have a few hubs from one niches that might pull in 30 bucks just by themselves. The only way to find this is to experiment. It helps going after low competition as well, since you rank high and get more volume this way.
I’m make a post about out experiment next week! I’m keen to see what will happen!
Yea, hubs are tricky. That’s why I tell people it’s all about volume. Grizz’s methods of longtail stuffing works pretty well.
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BenK, i really take my hat to you, you’re an example to everyone. However, i’ve some doubts that i’ll ask you:
1) you’ve 200+ hubs, and you’re getting money because they rank for the keyword. However, how you’ll avoid that the hubs lose rankings? You can send more links, sure, but the more hubs you’ve, the more tasks of creating links you need. Also, you can rank for low competition keywords with a couple of links, but what about competition, others can also target the same keyword and have more links or have ways of getting more links.
I know you should have to think about this and have a plan, if you can give your opinion and insights, that would be much appreciated.
2) How do you write articles about long tail keywords on niches that you know nothing about?
Sorry for these questions, but i really would like to understand a little better certain part of this game that escape me, day after day.
[Reply]
admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 8:27 am
Dinheiro, the VAST VAST majority of my hubs rank are almost nowhere to be found for their main keyword. There is often too much competition. A good rule of thumb for hubs is that if you spot an yahoo answers or ezine article property on the front page, you can get there with your hubs — in time. Unless there is no competition, you won’t rank top 5. A hub will (in my experience) never beat an aged ezine article — at last not yet. But it stands a chance of getting up in a similar position, especially if you send a handfull of backlinks to it. Almost every single one of my hubs is backed by interlinking between hubs (often 5 or so), links 1-2 ezines, 1-2 infobarrels. The next phase over next month is going to be to take a look at hubs that have gotten clicks (and most have, at least once that past 2 months), and add a goarticle a squidoo, and maybe one of these other article directories people are talking about.
The only time it makes a difference when other people target the keyword, is if there is actually a chance you are going to rank high for that keyword. Then it comes done to doing links. Most people who create a hub won’t bother to send any backlinks to it. By even throwing up an ezine and infobarrel link, you are way a head of most hubbers. Now you could have a few of Court’s students trying to use their hubs like a niche blog and actually rank them #1 for their spot — in this case, you are going to have to fight — but to be honest, most people are too lazy to do this. But most cases, you won’t be really ranking for a term, so all your traffic will be longtail traffic — which tends to be unique.
If you pick a niche with fairly low competition (PR 2’s, maybe 3 with no direct keyword in title), a hub that has a link from squidoo, infobarrel, ezine, goarticles, and other hubpages will be pretty high in the SERPs
I’m also working with DeMerchant over from http://www.webseo.org, with an experiment to use his services (submits to 3 of the best paid backlink networks) on 45 of my hubs and we are going to track the increase in traffic over 3 months or so.
If you don’t know about something, you can look it up on ezine articles or go articles and rewrite.
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DigitalPoint is where I would look. You really shouldn’t be paying more than 1 cent per word. Like I say I would look for someone who can do the volume you want and will be able to work for just you. That way even if they aren’t the greatest writers you can coach them a little. Maybe find 5 people who meet this criteria and then “audition” them all by paying them for 10 articles and see who you like best in terms of quality and turnaround.
[Reply]
admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Yea, i’m still smarting over the $500 USD I paid to one Indian writer who took my money and ran. My fault for being an idiot and paying the full amount up front. I’ll try that out. My budget is between 4-5 bucks for a 400 word article.
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Ben,
Thanks for another inspiring, in your face post about your trials and tribulations! And I have to admit you actually got me to google “hairy midget thong” to see if you had a site ranking #1 lol
About the length of your ezines and infobarrels, how many words do you make these? My school of thought was to make hubpages the most length (600-800), infobarrels the next most (400+) and ezines at around 300 or so words? Your thoughts on this and if it matters?
Also, would you recommend social bookmarking just the ezine article, or all 3 items (ezine + hub + infobarrel)…Thanks!
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admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Haha, yea, but hair midget thongs are about equal to what most clickbank products are, lol.
Ezines, I’ll do at about 250-300. Infobarrels about 450-550. Hubpages, I have a range of 1000 word beasts, quite a few 800 works, lots of 600’s and 400’s. I’m making money with 400 word hubs. These days, I find myself sitting at about 400-500 words per hub. However, I tell people to bite the bullet and create 600-800 word hubs because you have more longtails to rank for and thus more traffic. Can you be lazy and get away with 400’s? Sure, but you need to make sure you put a lot of longtails in them.
You should social bookmark all three — even ezine. The reason is that if you strengthen your ezine, you will be giving it more link juice to pass to your other sites, thus you befit.
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Hey Ben, i thought your picture was taken in the Philippines (where i am from), because there is also a similar location here! Anyway, I really found this post inspiring because we actually have the same reasons for making money online. Ever since I first read the book “Around The World In 80 Days” when I was still a child, traveling around the world instantly became my first priority in life. Back then, I had no idea on how I’d get enough money to do so; but that was until I got the chance to learn this art of MMO.
Just to share, I’m already on my 8th day of the 200 hub challenge, and have made around $11 so far. I have 50 hubs so far, but all those $11 only came from 4 hubs which are of the same niche. haha, which brings me to my question about how you choose your keywords. When you say low competition niches, how low is it? I’m using Google’s Adwords external tool, and under the “Exact” settings, how many searches for month should I look for, if my hubs will only be supported minimally in terms of backlinks?
Thank you very much, and good luck! Looking forward to your next posts!
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Thank you for your answers BenK. I’m really doing something wrong, and i don’t know what. If i write articles about long tail keywords (4-5 words keywords), i can rank high, but the traffic and earnings are not what i expect. If i write for more broad keywords (2-3 words keywords) and mix some long tail keywords, i don’t rank for the keyword (of course) and the traffic resulting from the long tail mixed keywords are low. I do what everyone does, i send backlinks from the places we all know, and from other places that i mix.
The conclusion i get, is that i’ve very few web properties (200+ squidoos, 70+ hubs, 10+ hosted sites), and i’m targeting the very wrong niches. If i think better, if the niches are less competitive, that means others have checked and dropped the niche because of no sucess.
My problem is low quantity and wrong keywords, it must be. What’s your opinion?
Again, sorry for boring you with these questions, thank you for everything benk.
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admin Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 9:37 am
@Dinherio
I can’t comment about squidoo, because I haven’t tried to make any money with them. From what I hear, they are a dying horse — which is why I canceled my experiment with them. I think the problem is your quantity here. 70 hubs is not enough to make money, not by far. I was barely making anything with just 50. I only started to so 7-12 dollar ways with 140 hubs in my pocket.
I now have almost 500 hubs. I’ve working very hard to bring this up to 1k in 2 months. I’ve had 2 months to test out which niches are winners and which niches seem to be losers. My strategy is simply trial and error, I create 10 or so hubs in a promising niche, and If I start to see a few results, I put more hubs up. If with 70 hubs and two months you are not seeing results, then it’s because you don’t have the volume, and you haven’t stumbled on good niches.
Don’t bank on making money with 70. I’d aim for 150 or so, then see where things stand. Some niches won’t pay anything at all (I’ve found this out the hard way), while others pay big time. The key is to find this and there is no other way but sitting down and grinding out a few hundred hubs in different niches. Once you see some success in one niche, you can hone in.
If you do keyword research, write decent length hubs, and put in longtails, and send a few backlinks that’s all there is to it the rest of it is just picking good niches. And you know how you do that? By writing so many hubs in so many niches that you know what to look for. It’s as simple as that.
Buddy, and I say this with the uttermost respect, stop over analyzing and start working. If you approach hubs with the mentality of “if I don’t make money with the first 100, i’ll make 200. If 200 doesn’t work, i’ll make 400.” You are going to make money — a lot of money. As you surmised, it’s a volume problem — you can’t tell anything with 60 hubs, not unless you got lucky and found winning hub right off the bat.
@Everyone
People want a “trick” or an “easy solution” here with questions, I notice. They want me to tell them the magical formula that will make easy money with hubs.
Guys (to everyone here), I’m sorry, there is no magic formula. There are things you can do, like SEO, backlinks, lontails, laying out your hubs, etc, BUT it really comes down to the niches. And you just need to have a lot of experience with what seems to work and what does not work. How can you get that experience? By writing lots of hubs.
The “magic formula” I’ve been following is to spent 6-8 hours a day writing hubs 7 days a week for 2 months. just pure work. Some people will get lucky with their niches and can get a lot of revenue right off the bat.
I think part of the problem here people are having here is with the the whole 100 hub concept. People want to create 100 hubs an bank on the fact of getting 20-30 bucks a day, just like Court did with his 100 hubs.
You may be wondering why Court went into the challenge and made the money he did with such a few amount of hubs. I’ll tell you why right now. It’s because he created niches based on the same topics as some of his money sites — he knew the long tails he was targeted would pay off because he’s already made a lot of money with those in a niche. As he himself states in his postings on his free blog, he noticed he was making money with some of his hubs before deciding to throw a contest. You can bet he threw up a lot of hubs in that same niche.
So he started off in the right niche and was able to score quick cash. Most of you guys don’t have the luxury or the years of experience of knowing what niches work. That’s why you need hundreds of hubs as feelers to find niches that have potential, then you expand into that niche big time.
But the point here is that you need volume to get there. Hundreds of hubs. I haven’t had anyone tell me they are not making money when they have 300 hubs here. It’s always “I have 50 hubs or 60 hubs and i’m not making money.”
So, please, NO MORE questions about how to make money with hubs until you have at least 150 hubs. With 150-200 hubs, you start to get a good idea about niches. Frankly, if anyone of you guys makes 200 hubs, you won’t need my help anymore, you will be well on the way to your own path!
Ben
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Thanks for another very informative post Ban,
Every time I read you I get more and more ideas then it’s off to the keyboard to implement them.
I have one question on your clickbank snipers. Are you self hosting all these sites or do you use any sevices like blogger? I don’t mind self hosting because then you own the site but I was wondering if free blogs would be a good way to find out what seems to be working.
Thank you for all the help you have provided me. I took your advice about the Hubs and made $12 yesterday. Sweeeeeet.
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
@agrande
Hey, great new man. Good to see you starting to pull it in! You’ve certainly been working at it for the past 2 months! Really glad for you!
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Amazing post.
I’ve had your feed in my must-read category in Google Reader for a while now, but I wanted to stop by to say thanks too. You have very simular reasons for wanting to make money online as me!
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You’re a beastly human Ben! I have about 140 Hubs done now and have been pulling in over $10 dollars per day the past week. It took about 3 weeks for them to get up to $10 dollars though, the first few weeks they were making only about $3 bucks per day…
The total amount of $ that I’m pulling in is about $15 per day from Hubs + my sites, even though I had a $26 dollar day last week. This really kept me amp’d because I started out the summer with just 2 sites that were making about $2 bucks per day…
I am now cranking out about 3 Hubs per day and 3 Infobarrels per day to promote each website that I set up… I have about 22 Infobarrels done at the moment, and should have well over 100 a month from now. I have only made $1 total from my IB’s, but I honestly see them ranking just as good (if not better and quicker than) my Hubs.
Right now I’m busy setting up 100 niche sites… I decided to target the KW’s that my hubs were successful with. Each of the sites has 5 x 500+ word articles and each article has 1 Ezine / 1 IB and 1 Hub link. Plus the homepage has 5 Hub links / 5 IB links and 5 Ez links… Unsurprisingly, within the FIRST WEEK of 2 niche sites, I was making over $1 per day… This really impressed me. I’m writing about 20 articles per day and finishing 1 niche site per day.
I was motivated from the start, but reading your content and results really fires me up even more… BTW, I loved your mountain analogy!
Keep up the great work Ben, I already know that you will be traveling the world and snappin PICS before most people finish their first 100 Hubs!
I don’t currently own UAW or AMA, but am going to get one… so I wanted to ask you - which would you recommend? And do you use them for your Hubs and IB’s?
Your advice has BEN great man - I’d honestly consider paying for a membership to this site. MAJOR PROPS!
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
@drew — glad to see it’s working for you! yea. You are doing EXACTLY the right thing — building up your own property along with your hubs, while using your hubs to help find those niches! I’m thinking after I finish these snipers, I may be doing 100 self hosted blogs in a month — I like the idea of getting the clicks on my own sites soon. This whole ebay thing is a perfect example of what I’ve been saying. Keep doing what you are doing mate and you’ll be rolling in dough in 6 months or so!
Thanks for the kind words
Ben
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BenK, thanks for all your answers and adives. I think i finally fully understand what my problems are, and i identified three. Beginning today, i’ll correct the 3 problems, and i’ll give you news when i hit success.
By the way, you should try squidoo, specially if you are ebay affiliate. Squidoo it’s the majority part of my income, which is $450 month. Squidoo only needs the same strategy of backlinks that you talked for hubpages, etc.. I’ve many squidoo lenses that have better rankings than hubpages (in the same niche). The only difference is backlinking. Believe me, squidoo is not dying, but like hubpages, infobarrel and the other, it needs quantity, you need at least 100-200 for making good money.
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
@Dinherio
Here is my reason for dropping squidoo.
1. No instant ranking perks. It’s evern HARDER to get a squidoo lense indexed than your own blog. Why put the effort in to rank a squidoo when you can do the same for your own and keep 100%?
2. Adsense sharing is sketchy and crap. If you drive traffic to your lenses, you aren’t getting your fair shair of the money. It’s divided out into a communal pot. No thanks. if I do the work to get the clicks, I want to get it — not create a welfare system for people who don’t do sh*t.
3. No more ebay — this is a big one. Since ebay is dropping squidoo, blogger, hubpages, etc your own choice is to do a double redirect from squidoo. This is pretty big for me — it’s 10x easier to make money with ebay than amazon.
I may revisit squidoo in a few months time and work on doing amazon review lenses and see how that goes. for now, it’s more productive to work on others stuff.
Cheers
Ben
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I have added adsense to my blog for the past six months and my account balance is at about $10, is this normal or what ?
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
@edos
Yep. That sounds at about right. You can’t just ad adsense to any blog and expect to make money. that’s the big fallacy with adsense — most bloggers feel if t hey slap on adsense, they can sit back an retire if they have a readership. Nope. You need targetted search engine traffic in niches that pay well. Read my very first post — I talk about how to go about this. If you want to make money, you are going to have to change your strategy and think like a marketer and not a blogger — this means targeting niches that pay well and writing for adsense
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Hi Ben
Are you using any ebay modules on your hubs? No doubt you’ve heard that eBay just banned them. http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/17585 (and on Blooger, Squidoo etc too)
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
@janet
glad to see your doing so well with your own self hosted blogs and adsense! Next month, I’m going to push out 100 -150 self hosted adsense niche blogs — I want to start pushing my own properties. This whole ebay thing just confirms what I said about diversifying and making sure the bulk of your income comes from your own sites.
Yea, i had ebay on probably 15% of my hubs (50 or so). It’s a royal pain to change it over now. Costing me some money too — I made about 170 bucks last month with ebay on those hubs, and this month I’m at 50 bucks so far. Not a killer but it’s costing some money. for others though, this is huge — people are going to take a HUGE hit or even lose their shirts. I hope it’s a wake up call for people reading this blog to start working like crazy on your own SELF HOSTED blogs rather than hubpages or any other domain where you are not in control.
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I think that Google has already noticed that people are trying to make money with hubpages and is doing something about it. It is taking much longer to get your hubs indexed… A few weeks ago they would show up in google the following day, now it takes me about four days for them to start showing.
btw. You are ranking #1 for some huge money making long tails with this blog:
“make money online with seo wearing thongs”
“make money online climbing with midgets” <- whoa double indexing!!
Seriously, I know you are not doing SEO for this blog but I bet you are getting a lot of weird longtail traffic. The same goes with hubpages and I think that it is the biggest problem I have. I am not a native english speaker so it is hard to come up with longtails. I am learning though and I think that when I get my most recent hubs indexed, I am looking at some steady traffic and hopefully a decent amount of clicks. Currently sitting at 120 hubs total and many of them have 1-2 barrels pointing at them and 1-2 ezines. Not all though, and my plan is to write 15 more hubs and start with doing the same keywords on infobarrel. My highest hubpage day still is only $3,5 and I am getting those zero days a bit too much. Averaging a stupid dollar a day is not a good compensation for the work I am putting in this, but shit happens. Also creating niche blogs at the same time, and without that I would probably be looking at 200 hubs at the moment…
I am sharing your goals with internet marketing since my ultimate plan is to get passive or low maintenance income online, and start travelling the south-east parts of Asia. It is nice to see that people are not doing this to get rich, but just to live without the hassle of working every day
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btw. that indexing isn’t happening with all the hubs so I think I just hit a nerve with some of my keywords. So no problems yet, keep on hubbing!
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
@Phillip
Yea, no slap yet. But START PREPARING NOW for the slap. If it doesn’t come, your laughing and making money from different sources. If it does come and you don’t have your own properties, your screwed.
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Hey Ben, I thought maybe it was China. You have a good eye, it’s a great picture.
If you are looking for writers you may want to try the “warrior for hire” section on WF. I think the quality is better there than DP. I used GetAFreelancer with some success, but anytime you look for writers it is hit or miss.
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
@Carrie
Yea, it’s a stunning place in china. Most people thing of China with the polluted cities, but that’s far from what it’s like in the remote parts (china is massive in size). Some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world can be found in parts of china, especially the more remote areas.
Yea, I’m starting to shop around. I may look at WF and interview writers. If Im going to be putting 2k-3k+ month into outsourcing, I want a good deal and I want quality. The difference between 1 buck can mean the difference of hundreds of articles as well. Ideally, I’d like say 4 bucks for 400 words of good content, but I’ll have to see. I think 2-3k should be enough to get a private writer for that price maybe.
Ben
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Alok Reply:
July 28th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
@Ben,
I have been thinking of putting a team of content writers so that I can also provide Content Writing Services apart from Website related services. Let me know if you would be interested for a dedicated team. I can hire people with Good Written English for around $200-$500 pm range though we need to train them for writing articles as per your needs.
Regards,
Alok.
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Hey Ben,
I’ve been building my self hosted sites and am up to about 25. I’d like to keep my domain costs down with private registration. Where are you going to buy your domain names?
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Michael: go to http://www.netfirms.com. Cheapest .com/.org/.net registration on the net. 6.99 USD with FREE privacy enabled on all .com’s and .net’s you buy there.
Ben
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love your blog - very helpful
Can you 1)talk a little about “the slap” you see coming on hubpages? I just started there and would like some more info
2) there seems to be some confusion on the ebay/squidoo situation. since it technically is squidoo’s EPN number and not everyone’s individual number, there seems to be a loophole. Squidoo has nothing about it on their site from admin. I would imagine ebay wants them “banned” but the new policy gives them an opt-out
thanks
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admin Reply:
July 20th, 2009 at 9:34 am
@3bagsfull
Google is all about improving the index. The last thing google wants is spammy, rewritten articles clouding up the searches. The problem is the 99% of IM’ers don’t bother do write anything origional. It’s simply a rewrite of ezine articles, go articles, etc. Even more, the information is often much less helpful than say an about.com or wikipedia article about that topic. In smaller quanities, this is fine — it’s part of the game. But think what happens when millions of people start to make crappy hubs to chash in on coin? It starts to make a difference to Google’s index. The problem is not regular hubbers who often write great, informative, and useful hubs. The problem is with “deettr324d” from india (or america or wherever) posting barely legibal crap that’s simply rewritten a thin copy of an ezine article. Google wants to make money — sure. But their main business is making sure when someone types something, they get EXACTLY what they are looking for with the fewest amount of clicks. That’s Google’s main business. If their searching capabilities suffer, people will turn to yahoo, Bing or some other service and they lose market share.
Well see how it pans out with squidoo. But I hope that everyone who reads this can see the writing on the wall. When you rely on 3rd party sites like squidoo, hubpages, etc to make your money, you put yourself in a vulnerable position. Hubpage and squidoo income should be the Icing on your cake, not the cake itself. Get what I’m saying. I’d rather have 100 self hosted niche blogs that produce 100 bucks a day with 6 months of work, than 400 hubpages that produce 100 bucks a day within 2 months. If you are in the position where you are gettin a significant portion of your income for your own site, sure, put some effort into hubpages. But if you don’t, be very scared because you are vulnerable.
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Grace Reply:
August 20th, 2009 at 9:00 am
This is the official stuff from Squidoo about the ebay changes
http://blogs.squidoo.com/squidblog/2009/08/03/ebaychanges/
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oh yeah
can you talk about the cost you carry for having to maintain 100’s of individual sites. Is there a way you are limiting the cost? I am assuming a cost to buy the domain and then a monthly host for hosting. perhaps you are going about it a different way — thanks
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3bagsfull- I’ve seen conflicting answers about the whole EPN issue with Squidoo and Hubpages. Also, it hasn’t been made too clear by EPN staff, but it seems right now that the issue lies with putting your own EPN links on Squidoo or Hubs, rather than just using the eBay modules they allow. The eBay modules are revenue sharing for us and Squidoo/Hubs, while putting our own EPN links means we get 100% of the commission. So EPN seems to want us to only use our own links on web properties we own (self hosted blogs or sites).
So right now I’m just working to remove all links I placed on my own on Squidoo, Blogger or hubs…The Hubpages staff also has mentioned they may provide a new tool built-in so people can easily remove eBay modules from hubs if they need to..
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hey Ben, thanks again for the blog. I just hit ~150 hubs and $7 yesterday with your tips.
A question: I’ve almost mastered the <5-min 251 word EzineArticles masterpiece. Do you recommend including your main keyword in the EZA title so that it competes with your hub or niche site, or title the EzineArticle something more generic and only use your keyword in the resource box’s anchored link so that it doesn’t compete for low-competition terms? Thanks!!
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admin Reply:
July 20th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Great. Glad to see some people starting to have some sucess! Yea, I can burn those ezines out too. Takes me longer to upload one then write it!
I usually will go with the same keyword. Search Engines often use the titles to rank the keywords. So if your ezine has the keyword only as the title, it often get’s ranked higher for that keyword than if you lower the denisity by including other words…My reasoning is that you can pass more of that authoirty on for that keyword to your hub.
Your hub should beat that ezine, especially if they are both new and you have an ezine + infobarrel + related hubs linking to your hub. If not, it’s not the end of the world. A significant portion (20-30%) of the people will click on your URL link at the bottom of Ezine and go to your hub anyways. I think I’ve made over 100 bucks alone just this month from people clicking in on my ezines to go to my hub then clicking on an ad.
Which also brings me to tangent — the more infobarrels and ezines you have about your same topic, the more money you will make because of the referal-clicks. For example, this month I’ve done 100 bucks from people coming to ezines, then going to a hub and clicking.
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Ben - What’s your CTR on Hubpages.com? I’m only getting 3.5% for page impressions.
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Hey Alex,
I think if you go back and read through Ben’s posts and comments you’ll see that this question has been answered many times over.
–D
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Pretty inspiring stuff! I actually spent a few months writing articles for eHow to fund the purchase of new domain names (for Sniper sites).
Now I am thinking that I will work 3 days a week on my own sites and 3 days a week putting up quality hubs (I have only published 1 so far) and infobarrels (that site rocks). Like you, I should then be able to reinvest that seed money into bigger and better things (all owned by me of course).
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Ben,
I completely agree with your philosophy with click bank.
When I first started with IM, I fell into a niche that I was making 4-5 K from a month.
The niche died, but I saw the kinds of stats you are projecting.
I could make 3-4 hundred buck a day but on 5-6 thousands impressions.
the other thing that seems to be successful with clickbank is being really convincing with your “review” and offering bonuses for buying through your link.
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admin Reply:
July 23rd, 2009 at 1:10 pm
@Poiboy, thanks mate. You can make a killing with clickbank for sure, but you do have really come of as genuine in your bullshit sales pitch. I’m working on the bonuses thing. My first 10 niches were probably not very good — I chalk it up to learning. My last 10 have some potential. Going to plant the next 80 in different niches.
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Dude thanks from some where from hub pages i came to your blog. i completely forgot about adsense revenue sharing sites. now back again. Now, i add more content. and see after one month, how much my adsense revenue rise.
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Thanks a lot for the netfirms link. I had been wasting my money on GoDaddy thanks to TKA. Paying $10 for a domain, and paying $7 for a domain is a big difference for me and for plenty others I think. Before you start to make decent coin online, it is necessary to keep the costs down.
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admin Reply:
July 26th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
@phillip
People like to recommend godaddy because of the affiliate system not because its the best deal. I’ve been using it for a while. It’s hands down better than godaddy.
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Phillip Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Besides just being cheaper, the domain manager kicks G-daddy’s ass. Thanks again.
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http://www.makemoneyonlinewithseo.com to GoogleReader!
AlexAxe
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