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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8 Comments
Hi How do you find out how many clicks you’ve had? I can’t see it on Hubpages and, as you can’t use channels (at least I don’t see how) I can’t see how you can find out. I have had 3800 visitors so far and $0 from adsense. I don’t really make the hubs for making money but for good backlinks/
One thing I was surprised about was how easy it is to get your hubscore high enough for the links to become dofollow. 4 hubs did it for me.
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Hey. I’m impressed if you’ve had 3800 visitors. I have about 40 hubs and I’ve still had less that 200 visitors!
To track adsense clicks, you need to go to the Manage Channel Section of Adsense. You need to add a URL channel (using the address of your hubpage). If you add a Custom channel, it won’t work apparently.
Yea, it’s easy to get a do follow. I’m having fun with my hubs and I can use them for a farm for sure. But, I am a bit disappointing I am not making any money with them. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to start sending backlinks, but it look like it’s going to be the case.
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3800 visits is over many months and a lot of those are for hubs about themes and stuff about BANS not for any sites likely to make any money. I forgot about using URL channels as I’ve never used them before. Thanks for the tip.
I think you really have to send backlinks to Hubpages to get very far, which is a pain as I have enough sites to work on backlinks for already. Although I haven’t formally joined the challenge it has spurred me on to make a few more hubs.
The niches you are targeting are very similar (and in some cases the same - with different keywords though!) to the ones I made Blogger blogs for. Although I did all the usual keyword research they are not performing very well at all. One or two are starting to get some long tail traffic after a couple of months, but for self hosted domains I usually get that kind of traffic much earlier. Often a good boost initially, then a slump, followed by a slow creep back. I’m not seeing any of that pattern with the Blogger blogs. I’m not really sure if it’s the niches (they tend to be on health related subjects) or because they are Blogger blogs.
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admin Reply:
May 18th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Yea, my skin care sites are all doing so so. Only trickle traffic. One of the self hosted sites is started to get some traffic though (50 people a day). I am going to try and find some obscure niches with no competition — many I can get some ad clicks right away from the hubs.
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Hi,
A noob question here. I created 2 hubs yesterday. How to add my adsense ID?
I clicked the link about adsense, they asked my email or phone number (4 last digits if I’m not wrong).
Did you provide that information to hubpage?
Thanks
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yea, you have to give them the last 4 digits of the phone number you have registered on your adsense account.
Once you do that, it hooks your hubs to your adsense account ( you have to verify it first — google sends you an email with a link to click).
Also, you need to make sure you ADD URL CHANNELS using the address of that hubpage you want added — otherwise, adsense won’t register your clicks.
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You need to target a non-competitive keyword.
I started the hub challenge on the same day, but fell behind for 3 days. I finally caught up today and made 3 extra… So I am currently 3 ahead.
You mentioned how you basically have no traffic, I have just over 2000 views as of today, and today I have made about $5 bucks. Keep at it, and remember to use these as backlinks as well. (I have enough content already written in my niche, sitting on my computer to bust out 300 or so hubs, just don’t know if I want to use it all.)
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Thanks for the comment Joshua. Yes, I’m beginning to think that my keywords are too competitive. As of now, I have 60 hubs and still sitting at no clicks for the past 2 days. My first 40 or so hubs were in competitive niches. I decided to change track and picked ups in low competition niches (say 2-5k exact searches a month, with PR3 range for the top 5 websites).
The last 20 hubs have been in lower comp niches (1k-2k exact searches, PR 2-3 for top 5 websites). However, I still haven’t seen any clicks the past 2 days from these.
In total, I’ve got 518 page views in 10 days.
What level of competition do your keywords have? Are we talking like 300-700 exact searches a month, with like PR 0-1 websites for the top 5?
I’ve started to send backlinks to some of the first hubs now, so I’m keep to see what’s going to happen. I think comp might be too high too see any immediate effect.
I think I’m going to have to go after even lower hanging fruit now — keyword searches that bring in the 200-300 a month with NO competition. It’s not working going after high, medium or even low-mid comp long tails…at least not without backlink work.
We’ll see. I’m determined to at least make 5 bucks a day here!
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I am talking about Niches with 20,000 + searches a month, BUT have little competition but very low CPC. (I make about 10 cents a click)
I have sites based on the same niches and fetch over 1500 clicks a day.
You don’t ALWAYS have to find niches with $4 CPC and that stuff Court preaches… there are MANY niches like I search… and profit wildly on.
I have averaged about $6/day for the past week.
And I am putting backlinks almost instantly to them. and I have something like 4,000 page impressions at Hubpages so far.
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