Ok guys, finished the 200 Hubs in 20 Days Experiment yesterday.
The hub challenge experiment:
Make Money Online With Hubpages: 200 Hubages in 30 Days 1
Make Money Online With Hubpages: 200 Hubages in 30 Days 2
Make Money Online With Hubpages: 200 Hubages in 30 Days 3
Make Money Online With Hubpages: 200 Hubages in 30 Days 4
So far, the hubpages experiment has been a great success. I’m still not making the adsense earnings Court has been posting, but mine have improved. And there was a big bonus as well. Let’s take a look:
Hub challenge Stats and Earnings
U1: First Update Post
U2: Second Update Post
U3: Third Update Post
U4: Fourth Update Post
-First Hubs published 31 days ago (May 11th)
- 240+ Hubs (U4: 180) (U3116) (U2:61) (U1:31)
-Word Count between 400-1000 words. The average would be about 600 to 650
- Total Hubpage views: 9,607 (U4: 5,829) (U3: 2484) (U2: 831) (U1:418)
- Total Visitors: 5,531 (U4: 3,071) (U3: 1100) (U2: 272) (U1:117)
- Total Unique Visitors: 4,327 (U4: 2,086) (U3: 736) (U2:119)(U1:15)
- Google Search Traffic: (U4: 3,017) (U3: 635) (U2: 119) (U1: 35)
- Yahoo Search Traffic: 1,346 (U4: 647) (583) (185) (U3: 227) (U2: 33)(U1: 7)
- 64 (28) AOL visits 65 (U4: 37 )(U3:16)
- Ezine Article Visitors: 280 (U4: 96)
-Clicks per update: 135 (82) (31) (7)
- Adsense Earnings between each update period: $114.82 (U3 to U4:$73) (U2 to U3: $26) (U1 to U2: $2.44)
Average per click: $.82
Average daily earnings: $7.22
Total Clicks: 271
Total Adsense Earnings: $224
Total EBay Affiliate Sales: $134
Total Earnings $224 Adsense + 134 EBay Affiliate sales = $354
Hubpages Challenge Results Discussion
So, let’s talk money. As you see, I’ve managed to score some ebay affiliate sales. The past week, I’ve generated 134 bucks from ebay. Very cool. I did slap on EBay links on 50% of my hubs, so it may be that even if they didn’t make any Adsense clicks, they still generated affiliate sales. I didn’t really focus on affiliate sales, but I see there is some serious potential here. With all the long tail targeted traffic, it’s worth it throw in some ebay links. What I’m not sure of is whether I should dedicate a hub only to affiliate sales or slap on the adsense too. If you want to make a hub geared toward affiliate sales, it changes the whole adsense strategy — I’m thinking CRT would go way down.
This is interesting because it shows that you can make decent money without Adsense. The thing is, you need a lot of impressions for affiliate sales. The more hubs you have in targeted niches, the more you can score it with affiliate sales. Now, we have to see what happens this next month to see if these are a regular occurrence. But for now, I wanted to let you all know that you can get some money from ebay on your Hubpages. It’s nice to see several of those “no performer” hubs did indeed bring in some bacon to the tune of $134. Not bad!
As you see, I’ve earned a total of $224 in 31 days in Adsense revenue from Hubpages. Now, I know I’m not going to quit my job with this, but there is a lot of potential here. If you track my earnings over each update, you’ll see a progression. My first 30 hubs gave me a grand total of about $1 for about 6 days. My second update showed me at 61 hubs with $2.44 after a good 11 days. Now this was disheartening to say. But things start to get interesting around the third update. At about 116 or so hubs I made about $28 dollars after 19 days. By the 4th update, I had made over 100 bucks. By the end of the challenge a week later, I made about $225.
You will notice the trend upward? Each week has brought more money. In fact, if you look at the figures, you will see that there were big increases each week in earnings.
Now, there are a few things to consider. I have been continually adding more and more hubs, the hubs have been aging, and the past 4 days I’ve been adding external backlinks to 50% of my hubs. I want to have ever hub backed by with backlinks by the end of the week.
My average has been about $7 a day, but you have to take into account that for the first 2 weeks, I made only a couple dollars. It was really the last 2 weeks that saw about 95% of my earnings.
These days, I have been averaging about 15 or so dollars a day. It’s been getting higher. Update 4 was giving me a solid 10 bucks a day in Hubpage earnings, and a few 12-14 dollar days. I’ve now been seeing 13-17 dollar days on average. My hub earnings the past week have not really dipped down below 11 dollars a day. My best day was 3 days ago, which gave me a very cool $27 from hubs. This was followed by a 13 dollar day, which was then followed by a $17 dollar day. Today (4pm my time), I’m sitting at about $14 in Hubpages. There is a pretty good chance this will hit 16-20 dollars by the end of today.
These challenge has been such a sucess that I will continue to add hubs. My goal from now is to add 50 new hubs a month, maybe more. I would like to have about 500-1000 hubs. I expect I will earn quite a bit from those — maybe enough for a full time income (3-5k a month). My immediete goal is to make 50 bucks a day. I am near the $20 mark right now (even had close to $30 one day), so I am excited to so how the hubs to this next month once aging and my backlink work begins to set in. Continually adding more hubs will only increase the revenue. Hubs are also create as a “niche” spy. You create some hubs (10-20) in a niche, send a couple backlinks and test to see if you start to get clicks. If you make money, there is a big chance you can make a hell of a lot more money if you open your own self hosted niche site and get it near the top of the SERP’s. This save a lot of wasted time, since the domain authority of hubpages let’s you fast track to see if niches have potential. Now, you can never be sure how you’ll do unless you are on the front page of google for a term, but hubs do give you a pretty good idea if a niche has some value.
Trends
-Hubs may (or may not) have an initial burst of traffic the first few days then the traffic decreases. Traffic begins to pick up again 2 weeks later. The initial burst can be explained by Google fresh content bonus and other hubbers coming to check out your hubs.
-Hubs don’t generally start to generate clicks (at least for me) until a week or more. I am having hubs get clicks now that never had clicks the past 3 weeks. I assume because there are starting to rise or stabilize in the SERP’s. Keep in mind it’s too early still. We need a couple months for things to settle down. This is why I fully expect my average income, even if I don’t build backlinks or add new hubs, to rise. This phenomena is just part of Google’s algorithm. The older the website is, the higher it naturally seems to rank in the SERP’s.
-Sunday has usually been pretty bad performer, though there has been one exception for me
-Most of my clicks seem to come between 9 – 3 and decrease. It’s not uncommon for me to get 12-15 bucks between 9-3, and then only see a dollar or two more by the end of the day. Nights are a crapshoot. I’ve had a couple days where I’ve made 7 bucks between 12 am – 8 am. Now, I’d say I average 2-3 bucks while sleeping. I expect this to go up this next month though.
Now, you will notice, if you followed Court’s update, that he’s been hitting in the 20’s for the past two updates. I’ve had one very nice 20 dollar day, but that’s been it. I know of one other person who is regularly cracking the 20’s. You will note that I have almost 250 hubs out there and I am not regularly cracking the 20’s yet. I am expecting to reach the 20’s regularly this next month. It’s my aim to get into the 50’s within a couple months.
This comes down to niche selection. This is my experience, 90% of the hubs you find won’t make you anything. Out of my nearly 250 hubs, I think only about 30% of them actually have gotten a click, and of those only a fraction get regular clicks. I’d say about 75% of my total earnings come from a handful of hubs.
Which is why you need to have a lot of hubs if you want to make 10+ bucks a day. I’d say you need roughly about 100 or so hubs before you stumble across some niches that do well. With 100 hubs, you should be getting at least 3 bucks a day just from random clicks. If you have the right niches, right off the bat, well, you could have 30 hubs giving you 20 bucks a day.
So far, I’m happy with my $324 bucks this month from hubpages. Although it’s a month, It’s more like I made $320 bucks the last TWO WEEKS, since I didn’t score any affiliate sales or much Adsense clicks the first two weeks.
I will post another update in 1 month tracking my Hubpage Adsense earnings and affiliate sales. I’m predicting it should be MUCH better this next month.
Tips for How to Make Money with Hubs Using Adsense
I’ve spent hours giving advice about how to make money with hubs, so I’m not going to give anything new here. In the past 5 updates, I’ve spent 10k words telling showing you how I made money on Hubpages. Folks, there is NO other how to make money with Hubpage tutorial as detailed on the web. I won’t bother going over it again in detail. But I’ll summarize some of the main things you need to do to make money with hubs in 5 steps.
Create a lot of hubs (at least 75)
If you’ve read what I talk about above, most hubs you make won’t earn anything. Oh, given enough time they’ll get a click here or there, but they won’t consistently get clicks. I have hubs that get 70 people a day and only get 2 clicks for 5 cents and I have other hubs that get 2 people a day and 1 click that’s worth a dollar or more.
If you have a bunch of hubs that don’t bring in any consistent earnings, they still have value. You can use them as a link farm and they will bring in a little money. Sure, if a hub brings in .50 cents a week, that’s not a lot, but when you have 300 hubs, each bringing in .25 cents a week, that’s $75 bucks a week, or $300 a month. These little, occasional clicks do count for something when you get a lots of them. This means a lot of hubs.
Write about specific niche topics
It’s my experience that the more specific the topic, the higher the chance of getting a click. This means writing about “hand cream for dry skin” will likely do better than “hand cream” and “Pond’s hand cream for dry skin” will do even better than “hand cream for dry skin.” Now, this can vary from niche to niche. But in some niches, getting very specific – even putting the specific brand name into keyword phrase, can increase your CTR. I believe this is because people find your site when looking for a specific product and if you write something good about the product, they may click on an ad.
IF you write about a specific topic, you WILL get some clicks. But folks, please fucking pick a topic that there is some reason to click on an ad. Grandma’s Peach Cobbler Recipe Guide WON’T generate clicks. “Best Skin Care Treatments for Acne” WILL.
This is key for both getting Adsense clicks or affiliate sales – you need to be very specific. The more specific, the less traffic you get, but the higher the CTR. It’s also a hell of a lot easier to rank for a long tail then it is for a shorter tail.
Write the Right (Bad) Way
I’ve found that how you write can make a big difference. Now I’ve been posting how to write for Adsense the past few updates. I’ve told you shouldn’t answer the damn question. But, this doesn’t give you license to write like shit. Your sentences should be coherent and well formed and things should make sense. The trick is to write good in a way that is bad. Beat around the bush, brush around the answer, giving hints but not actually answering. Give suggestions about finding the product online or going to websites about the product/service etc. The point is that you want to plant suggestions that the user should fucking click on that relevant ad a few inches away from the sentence talking about it.
Send Backlinks to Your Hubs
Interlink each hubs, use go articles, Ezine articles, infobarrel, squidoo lenses, go articles, whatever. The point is that you want to give your hubs as much of a boost in the SERP’s as possible. You can do this by sending links. I’ll talk more about this in my How to Make Money Online eBook I promised I’d make.
There are two ways you can increase your earnings with your hubs: make more of them or start getting each of them ranked up high with backlinks. It’s more efficient to get them ranked high with backlinks than it is to create a lot more hubs. Ideally though, you want to do both.
My advice is to imagine that each hubs are a blog post/webpage on your own domain. What do you do if you want that post or article to rank high? Send backlinks to it. Same deal. I’ve shown you by working my ass off for the past month that you can generate between 10-20 bucks a day without much in the way of external backlink work. But ultimately, if you want to really make more money with hubs, you need to work the backlinks just like you would for a niche site.
Be Patient
It takes some time to make money with hubs. Yes, you can make money pretty much right away, but finding the right niches and getting enough hubs to do so will take a lot of work.
Why am I not making money with Hubpages?
If you have 50 or more hubs and are not making money, one or more of these is probably the problem:
1. You are not writing about specific topics.
2. Your niches’ CPC is crap. Look for CPC over 2 bucks (you get 20% of CPC)
3. You don’t have enough hubs
4. You are not interlinking your hubs
How to Increase Hubpage Adsense Revenue
Ah, I am going to be spending the next month or two experimenting with this. I’ll toss a couple strategies out there for you to increase your existing Hubpage revenue if you have any.
Boost the Money Long Tails to Your Best Hubs
For some hubs, you will notice you get consistent clicks each day or couple days. If you notice a trend, open up analytics and look at what ENTERANCE keywords that hub is getting. I don’t have my analytics with Adsense linked (I do, but it’s not working). I try to identify what the money long tails are and send backlinks to them. If Hub A get’s 5 clicks, I want to find out what long tail is brining them to that hubs. I open analytics and look at the entrance keywords used to find that hub the same day of those 5 clicks. I generally take a look at all the longtails used to find the hub then if one stand out as a longtail that would bring in someone who would click, I send backlinks to that hub with that long tail in the anchor text. If I notice a hub has say 20 people, and one or two keywords that are not the main keyword are brining in traffic, I send backlinks from other hubs and external sites to that hub using that backlink.
What will this do? This will help you bring in more targeted traffic to your money hubs and help (hopefully) boost your daily revenues. I’ve been doing these to my hubpages.
Optimize Hubs by Adding More Longtails
If you have hub generating money, you should try to optimize it by a) keyword stuffing and b) increase the size of your content. This means looking for some related terms in the niche and editing your post to include this new long tails. If you post is 500 words and generating you 3 bucks a day, add another 1000 words to it – you will be giving more longtails for Google to rank.
Optimize Hubs for Targeted Ads
I find that sometimes a hub does NOT show relevant ads. If this is the case, you should go through it and put money making keyword close to the ads to try to “encourage” the ads to show relevant ads. If you have a niche that should be getting good paying clicks but getting .05-.20 cents instead, it’s probably because the ads are not relevant to the content and keywords.
How to Make Money with Hubpages mini Ebook
I’m also going to start working on my mini ebook (10k or so words) tutorial next week. I’ve been talking about a tutorial post the past few posts, but I think an ebook format would be perfectly suited for this tutorial. What is it exactly? It’s going to be a comprehensive tutorial about how to start from scratch with hubpages and make money in a month’s time.
You can get most of the information from the 5 hubpage challenge posts, but if you are looking for a much easier to read, tutorial format, the ebook will be better. Now I can’t say you will make 20 bucks a day (I’m not even making that consistently yet — but I will), but you will make something and with enough work, you will be able to make great money with hubpages.
I’ll add some new information in it and throw in stuff I learn over the next month from improving my hubpages. We could called it Make Money Online with Hubpages. Should be a great place for people new to hubpages to start. I’m probably going to just give it away for free, though I am thinking about charging a nominal fee like $1, considering it will take like a week of writing to create, not to mention 400+ hours of actually working on hubs trying to learn this stuff. People in the MMO world don’t appreciate free for some reason. But, we’ll see.
Why People Will Never Make Money Online
I’ve been reading the hubpage forums and other MMO foums and following people’s performance. Thousand of people entered this Hub Challenge. Court started it but the people at Hubpages started promoting the challenge as well. You know how many people actually completed the 100 hubs? I count 4 people. That’s it. These four people were out of the hundreds of people who follow the whole Make Money Online scheme. I can’t say how many “hubbers” on Hubpages finished it, but I can bet you 100 bucks that almost none of them did. I looked through the forums checking, and I didn’t see anyone posting that they have. Oh, people did finish the 30 in 30 days, but I’ve yet to see anyone with a 100 in 30 days. And you know what? The Hubpage forums are full of hubbers wanting to make money but concluding that it’s impossible or will take years. Bullshit.
Most hubbers don’t know how to make money because they don’t know jack about niche marketing as taught by Court and Grizzly. They also don’t want to work hard.
Work is what separates those who will make money online and those who will dream about making money online. I’m going to make money online. I’m going to make a hell of a fucking lot of money online. Why? Because I am not afraid to work, I’m not afraid of spending every spare minute writing god damn boring articles, or spending days trying to get backlinks.
THIS is how you make money on the internet folks. It’s by knowing a method of making money online that actually works and by fucking working like a dog.
A lot of people are afraid to actually make websites or hubs because “what if I don’t make any money after I put that work in.” Then go work at fucking McDonalds and get the fuck off my blog.
What’s really disturbing is that thousands of people around the world watched as Court posted his earnings proving that you can make some great money on hubpages. However, I am absolutley bowled over that this didn’t encourage people to jump on the hubpage challenge like Cops would grab a bucketfull of free donuts.
Would you sell your life for a month to make a guarenteed 1000 bucks a month (at least) for the rest of your life? Apparently, the answer is no for most people. I’m not saying you would make 100 bucks a month, but the point is, you have a very big chance to actually start making some permenent online income.
I see a lot of people claiming that they don’t want to make 100 hubs because something may happen to the Hubpage scheme in the future etc. Folks, this is why there are people sitting at home, watching TV and eating cheetos, lying to themselves that they are going to become millionaires in a couple years. Then there is the person who is actually fucking mortgaging his house and working 18 hours a day to realize a dream. Who do you thing is more likely to make it?
Guys, I’m not trying to bash you if you didn’t finish the 100 hubs in 30 days. Shit crops up in life, the kids need to be tucked in, and the dog needs to be walked. I get that. But it really shows me something about MMO. 95% of the people who talk the talk don’t walk the walk. It’s easy about talking about how to make money, its different story actually doing the work to make the money. The point is, you have to move past all this shit if you want to make money. Sure, you can always do 100 hubs in 3 months rather than a month.
But that’s not the point. Many of you told yourself you were going to do 100 in 30 days or maybe even publically posted it. But you didn’t do it! Folks, if you set yourself a challenge you need to fucking meet it head on. The people who created 100 in 30 days are far more likely to make that 20k a year doing MMO rather than drop out disillusioned after 6 months of not making money. Why? Because they are willing to push through crap, work, and other problems to make it happen.
I spend 12 hours a day at work. I spend my entire Saturdays at a school studying another language. A good portion of my Sunday is booked up doing physical labor. But in 31 days I’ve written over 240 hubs, 60 Ezine articles, and 5 fucking massive posts on my blog about how to make money online with Hubpages. So when I hear excuses like ‘I didn’t have enough time, or I was too busy”, I don’t fucking believe it.
So there we go, rant over. If you didn’t complete the challenge fair enough — I’m not judging you. I admit it’s hard as hell to write 100+ articles you don’t care about. There’s always next time for a challenge. But at the very least, I hope my efforts motivate you to work harder. The entire point of this blog is to show you, through my own elbow grease, that if you work your ass off, work harder than 99% of the other people, you can make money online.
Ben’s 100 Squidoo Lenses in 14 days Challenge
Hot on the heels of this Hubpages challenge, I have a “mini challenge.” I’ve made money with Hubpages in a month. Can I also make money with Squidoo? I’m going to find out this question myself.
Now, the whole theory behind Hubpages and Squidoo is quite different, as is the revenue sharing. Hubpages tries to keep everything internal. They dont want you linking out and they won’t let you put any affiliate links into your hubs. Squidoo actually encouages linking out, believing that the squidoo lens should be a gateway to your websites.
The revenue sharing is different as well. Hubpages gives you 60% of the impressions with your Adsense ID. Squidoo doesn’t give you your Adsense earnings, instead putting it into a public pot and shares with all Squidoo users depending on Payrank and your traffic.
This tells me that I don’t think generating Adsense revenue will be as viable on Squidoo pages as they are on Hubpages. I’m not sure if I can get my Payrank up to the point where I get reasonable Adsense earnings. Squidoo does, however, let you keep 100% affiliate commission. I don’t believe Squidoo has the “instant” ranking and indexing advantages that Hubpages does.
As such, I’m going to focus more on affiliate sales and articles geared around selling things then getting Adsense clicks. This is going to be radically different and I’m not sure how well it will turn out. I think I’ll make 50 lenses geared towards Adsense and 50 for affiliate sales.
I don’t think I will be making as much money with Squidoo as with Hubpages, but I want to find out what’s possible. I might even try to make money with info barrel as well.
I’m stoked about this idea. I’ve proven I can make money with Hubpages and now it’s time to try and cut my teeth with Squidoo. The worst case scenario is that I won’t make any money (unlikely, I should make something with 100 lenses). But even a loss is a win because I’ll have 100 strong Squidoo lenses I can use to support other niches sites and my Hubpage hubs. So, no loss.
Sigh, another grizzly-length post. Damn it. Next post will be 250 words, I swear it!
Ben Out
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43 Comments
Ben, this is the best post I think I have ever read anywhere — and I can’t even read the whole thing right now. You use the F word better than anyone else on the Net.
“Then go work at f*ing McDonalds and get the f*** off my blog.”
I would write it out but I don’t want to deal with some spam filter catching me or something.
I’m sure you posted it somewhere, but I haven’t seen it: have you been working a day job over the past month?
And you haven’t used Amazon huh? I’m Adsense banned and eBay didn’t accept me when I did exactly what Hubpages says to do to get signed up with them. Kontera sucks. I’m watching everyone and thinking if I can make money merely honing in on Amazon affiliate sales on Hubs. Maybe I could become the Ben Kong of Amazon on Hubs…
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admin Reply:
June 12th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Hi Nate. Yea, I do like the F bomb, heh. I confess I was a little upset that not as many people jumped on this challenge and put their heart and soul into it — especially since it’s an easy way to make a bit of coin online without having to go through the whole backlink grind that scares most people away. It comes down to just doing enough work.
Yes, I do work a day job. But I’m hoping to quite in a few months time. So far I seem to be well on my way.
If you are banned from adsense, you should create company (LLC) and apply again. Regarding ebay partner networks, keep up submitting your application until you get accepted. I was rejected 3/4 times. I spent two weeks spamming them with reasons why I was a good candidate. They key is to tell them you won’t do any shady crap and to send them some sites that look like legit flagship blogs (you can probably send them a link to someone else’s blog).
Amazon is good for some niches. I have a flagship that sells amazon books. I think I made about 10-12 bucks a day with it. For some products, Amazon can be good. For most niches, ebay is better though — you get commission for a month after they click on your affiliate link if they pay something. Amazon’s is 24 hours.
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Hi Ben - just be a bit careful with Squidoo as if you make any more than about 6 lenses in a day on one account they will block your whole account for review. This is a recent thing as you used to be able to make as many as you wanted in a day.
Fantastic post btw and congrats on making over 100 (over 200!) hubs.
[Reply]
admin Reply:
June 13th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Thanks for info grace. Looks like I’ll have to make 2 accounts then, with 5 or so lenses a day added to them.
Squidoo is very different than hubpages. I noticed from TKA that you made good money on it and I took a look at your squidoo page about it. Any more quick advice before I start monday? It’s a new format for me, so I’m going to have to change the hubpage strategy.
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Hahaha - good one Ben!
Your 240 puts my 100 to shame! lol. I was going to put up a post on TKA more or less along the same line of thought - about the philosophy of change. I decided not to though because so many people there are not willing to work hard. (Actually, I think they believe that they are working hard, but are not really.) It would just become something else to debate instead of actually doing the MMO formula set out by M&C.
Briefly, I believe that the “do a little everyday and you will get there” approach is a sham. It gives people a reason to not do crap … or to do very little crap for a couple of days until the next project comes along - at which point the original commitment is dropped. I am a firm believer in “massive change” or to put it another way “massive action.” Change is not the accumulation of little habits - change is big - massive life altering movement. If you are not willing to do it - don’t fool yourself into believing that if you do just a little bit everyday, eventually you will get there. It’s a lie - you won’t. I compare this to losing weight - millions of people are under the impression that if they change just a change one little thing (say eating a proper breakfast) that they will lose weight. They are told this by the guru’s who think that they are helping people by making the change easier. Nope - doesn’t work - you won’t keep it up because it is not real change. It is not something that you can put a solid grip on and commit to. If you want to change your life - then change it big. Don’t tweak here and there and think that is going to do it - it won’t. Massive change is the key. Ben, you did way more than me - you committed to double the challenge, and I really admire your drive to challenge yourself twice as much as what you had to. The 100 in 30 days was hard, but if I had committed myself to even greater (more massive) change, I probably could have done it. Kind of wish I had now…. lol.
Way to go - you are my hero!
[Reply]
admin Reply:
June 13th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Haha, well it was good and I’m now not afraid to site there and write all day if I have to. Before, I used to dread writing ezine articles and pumping out content for my blogs, but now, not any more.
You did good with that challenge, Strathy. I only know 1 other guy who finished the 100-30 days challenge, and he’s getting a regular 20+ a day. You are right, *most* people, even people who join a club to make money online or post on MMO forums really don’t have the drive needed.
I’m not saying that if someone only spends 3 hours a day every day they won’t make money online — no, people can and do. But I’ve seen this pattern: someone finds a blog about making money online, get’s all pumped up, creates a few sites, doesn’t make any immediate money, quits, goes to taco bell. Well, I made the taco bell part up, but you get the point.
For me, I *thought* the 100 in 30 days was a crazy big challenge, but more than making a bit of an income from the hubs I’ve created, I’ve learned just how much work you can accomplish if you are really willing to work. And I firmly believe this is the passion you need to have if you want to make it big MMO. So from a personal development standpoint, this challenge has really taught me a lot.
I also like the challenge format, so most of my new MMO projects will be challenges. Like the 100 Squidoo lenses in 14 days, mys 250 article niche blog in 30 days, and a 100 ebay niches sites in 30 day challenge etc.
Keep it up and thanks for the kind words!
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Great post Ben
Well done for creating 200 hubpages. I must admit I seriously doubted you would do it at the beginning. That’s a hell of a lot of work!
I didn’t take part as I knew I wouldn’t do 100 hubs. I spend most of my time on my niche sites but I did make over 30, mostly because I was inspired by your success.
I agree that most people don’t want to put in the work necessary to MMOL. Friends have been laughing at me for months saying I’m addicted to the computer etc. They’re not laughing now. I made $1200 in April and $1500 in May and I fully expect that to increase this month. In fact I’ve had my best day ever for adsense with a $63 day a few days ago. While it’s not in Griz’s league I am very pleased with it and I know that if I continue to work at it I can increase it every month.
Keep up the great posts and I look forward to reading about your next challenge. No doubts now that you will it!
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If you are into Challenges - maybe you could do 100 on InfoBarrel to see how they are compared to Hubs for getting traffic. They share 70% I think so if they have the same clout with Google, the income might be even better there.
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hmm. We’ll maybe I should try 100 squidoo lenses is 2 weeks, and 100 infobarrel hubs in 2 weeks. That should give me a good idea. Infobarrel seems similar to hubpages.
However, my only problem with infobarrel is that they only have a PR 4 domain. PR is not everything, but I don’t think infobarrel has the same level of trust as does hubpages. This means I don’t think you will see the sort of traffic that you get with hubbpages.
Squidoo has been around but took a big hit a while ago. I’m not sure where they stand in google’s eyes right now. I know you don’t rank as high or as fast as with hubpages though.
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Ben,
I’m one of the people from that 90% who fail. I started a blog (3 years ago), I wanted to make money from it -> 0$.
Then I get on and did some sites -> almost 100$ in one year.
I diden’t give up, I come to grizzly and tka sites. I started a couple of blogs, nothing worked.
I started another site, managed to get 2$ per day :))
Then I saw this challenge and I’ve realized that if someone (like you) can do 20$ per day from zero, I could do that to, even more. So I started and I’ve realized that if you don’t give up you can do a lot of money on the internet, with a lot of work.
I plan a big hit for this summer and the rest of the time. I plan to 20/24 [ hours a day ], 7/7 on 7, for 3 months to see how much I can do per day at the end. I saw at you that if you work a lot (if you would not have a job you would be making probably more than 100$ or 200$ per day), so it’s possible.
You’re my hero!
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Jother, fantastic. That’s exactly how you make money online. I don’t claim to be Grizzly or Court, but I will be in 1-2 years
The point is that you can make money online if you put in the work. Guys like Grizzly have really opened the doors for how to make fantastic money online, but it takes work to get there. It takes sacrificing TV, surfing the web, and your spare time to get there. But you know what, once you get there, you can take it EASY. Do all the work now, live free later.
Ben
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Awesome, inspiring post Ben. You are absolutely right, most people don’t want to put int he work required to actually make money online.
I came late to the challenge but am plugging away. I can’t see how you managed to complete 200 in 30 days, your freaking superhuman!
Back to the boring writing, keep up the good work!
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Maybe in the future, people like us (or whetever gets into this challenge of doing fantastic money online and wins - lots of works, dedication, learning) could create more learning academedies, for free, to teach people how they could change their life making money online. Dreams
I guess everyone could make money online if they really want to, they could make everything. Most of the people in my country do not pass the 1000$ per month limit with a regular job and they are passing over their 30’s, 40’s and so on. Basicaly the internet is a new way, a new job that can give you ten times the money you could do with a regular job, if you really want to put your time and dedication to do it, and that’s fantastic.
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Great post as always. I didn’t complete the challenge - I’m ashamed to admit how few hubs I made. My problem is that I had a real hard time thinking up ideas for hubs.
Regarding Squidoo - it’s good for affiliate marketing. But be warned that it’s hard to get lenses indexed. In my experience if you don’t have a lensrank of less than 100k, you don’t get indexed. Also - I had a Squidoo lens that did really well in terms of traffic and affiliate sales - and then suddenly one day Google decided it didn’t like me and dropped it. Have no idea why. One plus though - the Squidoo forum (called Squidu) allows you to put backlinks in your signature (and they can be for your blog or other sites as well as lenses). A good way of building a few backlinks.
My conclusion is that it’s easier to make money from Hubpages than Squidoo.
P.S. have put a link to your blog in the hubpages forum - hopefully the moderators will leave it up as everyone will gain benefit from reading your post.
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Oh my god - it has taken me ages to read this post. I started this morning while I was at work but kept getting interrupted by the bloody phone ringing (boring work stuff) then our internet system crashed so I had to wait til I got home to carry on reading.
As you have inspired me to write more, I have started writing articles on my way to and from work (I have a 50min round trip train journey) instead of reading a book. I am able to scribble at least 2 or 3 articles. If I can, I try to type them up while at work or wait til i get home. Tonight I had to wait til I got home. As soon as I had eaten, i fired up the computer, typed up my articles, published a hub and finally allowed myself to finish reading your post. phew.
I may not be one of those who can set such a hard challenge for myself like 100 hubs in 30 days (fear of failure anyone??) but you have given me the impetus to just write more and to write about stuff that bores the tits off me. Before I was content to have 5 to 10 hubs which I was just going to write whenever I felt like it. Now I will get strive to get to 100 hubs in a much shorter space of time.
Many thanks and i look forward to reading and learning more about each and every new challenge you attempt.
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admin Reply:
June 14th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Glad you find the post inspiring Tiptopcat. If it has caused to do a bit more than you normally would have, then I consider the post a success. And yes, you CAN set a hard challenge for yourself and get it done
Ben
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Yo Ben, because of this post I’ve decided to do 300 hubs in 21 days. All aimed in different ways at Amazon.
I’m gonna read through your guidelines here, read through some other people’s stuff on Hubs and get started sometime after midnight tonight.
By the time the clock strikes midnight July 4, I will have created 300 quality hubs that will hopefully convert me shitloads in Azon aff. sales over the coming months, etc.
Fuck it, might as well.
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admin Reply:
June 14th, 2009 at 12:05 am
Nat, that’s awesome news man! 300 Hubs is totally doable. This comes down to a solid 10 hubs a day. It’s going to be a lot of work and most of your day is going to be writing and planning, but you can do it. And, you know what? You will MAKE money. I just had a cool $25 today from my hubs — something you may be looking forward to seeing with your 300 hubs.
I suggest, if possible, get up a couple hours earlier. You should be able to pump out 2 hubs an hour, as a bench mark. I can do about 3 in 70 minutes if I don’t bother throwing up links or adding other modules besides the text + photo and I am very familiar with the topic (happens after writing 5+ hubs about it). But figure about 2 hubs an hour. If you get up 2 hours earlier, you can finish 4 hubs. Not sure if you can work a job where you can sneak another few in at the job. If so, great. If not, you are probably going to have to spend 4-5 hours straight to pop out the other 8 hubs. Keyword research will take some time too — but if you are trying to do 300 in 1 month, I suggest not spending too much time with research, otherwise you won’t be able to finish the hubs. Pick out niches then start to look for long tails and just throw them out there as fast as possible. With 300, you’ll have some winners for sure. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t make at least 15 bucks a day with that many niche focused hubs. You WILL make money. If you get lucky and find some real winning niches, making 30+ a day is not infeasible. Also, make sure you expand into as many niches as possible. I say make 5 hubs per niche. If you start to see some success in a niche with clicks, start adding more in the niche. This is a good way to do well with hubs.
Also, as I’m noticing, ebay can be really a nice bonus. I’d say focus about 150 or so hubs soley for adsense and get the other 150 orientated around products that flow right in with ebay (review type hubs work well here).
Go for it! I’m keen to get these 100 squidoo hubs done in 1-2 weeks, then maybe tackle inforbarrel with 100 hubs. I’m also going to try for 100 more hubpages.
We can duel it out with 300 hubs if you want, me with my 100 lenses 100 infobarrels, and 100 new hubpages.
Ben
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Based on hubs tagged for the Hub Challenge, 213 different users participated, creating a total of 3,565 hubs. There were 7 users that finished 100 hubs, ysdata, infinityplusone, travelerhubs, Julie-Ann Amos, dwilliamson, Anamika S, and themonyking
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admin Reply:
June 13th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
yea, 7 out of 213. Not exactly impressive numbers. Ah well. I wonder how many people actually made any money. I suspect that most people didn’t
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Thanks for responding Ben.
I won’t be focusing on Adsense at all. Can’t get it back.
Goin’ for Amazon and gonna try to get approved for eBay.
Got 5 up since midnight; not bad for the start but still too slow.
300 hubs in 20 days = 15 hubs / day.
That’s the goal.
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Amazon, I have not had much success with. As I’ve stated, I do have a website that makes about 10 bucks a day with book sales, but I don’t think any of my sales have come through my hubs. But, I have $150 the past 10 days from my hubs though ebay sales — so focus on that.
For Adsense, you NEED to get that back. It’s like trying to climb a mountain with one arm — you can do it, but it’s going to be much harder. Get your parents or your siblings to sign up for you if you don’t want to get a LLC (you should start several LLC’s anyways just to keep your ass covered). Call your ISP and demand a new IP, or if they won’t, then switch ISP’s.
If you try, you will be able to get Adsense, and for your hubs, I think it’s pretty important to get it. Now, you can try that Kontra ad thing, I don’t know how those perform though.
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Great post, Ben! I’m really impressed! Although I didn’t participate in the challenge - just watching and doing something on my own - now I would like to set some for myself. You inspired me man! Especially I liked your attitude towards work - I would be eager to have the same. I always find something which justifies my laziness. So now I have to change it. How right you are! Many people would simply DREAM of making (or better to say ‘getting’) a lot of money instead of actually working to achieve their goal. I know it as I did it myself. I watched the challenge, I started slowly, then I came across your comments, followed your blog, where you say we all have to work -darn! I have to work! I MUST - if I really want to make money online and you by your own example made me doing so!
I have 28 hubs for now, I’m averaging $0.43 daily now, consistent ernings are coming for around two weeks; I keep adding new hubs and want to increse the number of hubs to add per day. Thank you Ben, watching your success I realised I can do it too!
Regards,
Denis
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Nice Post Ben. I did participated in challenge first, but my internet connection was down for a month. And here getting another ISP is like impossible job. So now as soon i get it back i will start with the challenge. Getting inspired by you and waiting for your E-Book.
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Ben - what is the average score for your hubs with the minimalistic work that you evolved into (from update 3 and update 4 - reduced word count and no pictures or bells and whistles)?
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admin Reply:
June 15th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Thai, your hubpage score doesn’t matter one bit for making money. Your author score, as far as I’m concerned, is the only score that matters — you need 75+ to get your links “followed” which means you get the backlink juice to spread around. I have hubs that are in the 80’s and some that are in the 40’s — but as I said, it doesn’t matter one bit. I never put in videos, pictures (except for one), or anything else other then the news feed.
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Hey Ben - how are your tracking your hubs? I tried adding Google Analytics to one of mine but Hubpages is showing some message that says “do not use real code”. What the fuck does that mean? What other kind of code is there other than “real” code? And is there any way to track your Hubpages Adsense earnings that’s easier than adding each hub to your Adsense account individually? Because that’s a total pain in the ass…
Anyway, this Infobarrell thing sounds interesting - I’ve never even heard of them before. I’ll definitely be checking them out once I’m done with this whole Hubpages thing. I’ve put up 10 hubs over the past 2 days and made 3.12 from them today already. Not great, but it’s worth it if I can put up 90 more and get somewhere around $100 a day from this thing with minimal work - Gotta say I’m loving how easy this is turning out to be. And I think I just stumbled upon a kick-ass hubpages niche - 120k+ searches a month, $2 CPC, and the competition has NO backlinks whatsoever! Not sure how many people would actually click on the ads for that niche though when they could just go up to their local hardware store and buy one for less than 5 dollars… Guess we’ll see.
By the way, you need to make it so that people can use longer names when commenting so I don’t have to break out the Ebonics…
Sincerely,
The Real Spencer Pratt
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The Real Spencer Pratt:
All I did was simply add the hubpage domain to analytics and it’s tracking it. I didn’t ad any sort of analytics code (you can enable this on the hubpage website somewhere — there is some option to click or something).
Apparently, you can track all your hubs if you link up analytics and adsense. I just manually did the ADD URL thing. Now, I’m out of channels. I need to figure out why analytics and adsense are not linking up correctly…
Go for it. 120k and no competition? Sounds like a gold mine. Make sure you are looking at “exact” searches though in google keyword. The “broad” setting won’t give you accurate numbers.
Cheers,
Ben
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Oh yeah, and I agree - Amazon is bitch to make money from. I’ve had over 1000 clicks on my links and only managed to actually make ONE sale. Granted, I think I picked a niche that’s difficult to monetize online (clothing), but that’s still an autrocious conversion rate.
I just re-applied to Ebay after being rejected 3 times. Hopefully now that I’m claiming some random guy’s website as my own they’ll approve me this time - I really don’t understand why they feel the need to be so selective. They’re just trying to sell crap…
Love,
The REAL Housewives of Orange County
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Ben - did you do all 200 on one Hubpage account or did you spread it out over a bunch of accounts? I want to separate mine if it makes sense. But if you didn’t I probably won’t either.
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I spread it out. I like to keep things seperate a bit.
However, there is nothing wrong with putting 200 hubs on one account. If you are trying to hide from hubpages with multiple accounts for some reason, there is no point unless you have different adsense accounts and EPN and amazon accounts.
It’s a little more annoying spreaking them out, but it is nice not to keep all the eggs in one basket. 100 hubs per account should do nicely.
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Ok thanks. I’ll do that since I’m going to try to do 200 this month like you did.
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hi ben, great motivating post & great info. I’m a newbie that’s ready to take action with this. I’m having trouble, however, wrapping my head around how you come up with content for an article so quickly. If you find a keyword that works about something you have no knowledge or interest about, is there a method to the madness about how you go about gathering enough information for it that will provide for an information piece on the topic? This, for me, is what makes this seem like such a daunting task to accomplish in such a short amount of time. I’ve never really seen this process laid out anywhere, and would love to know what your process is for simply learning enough about something to post about it. Thank you for your time & insight!
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Hey Ben,
Nice to see your hubs are doing so well. I don’t know if you noticed but a good way to get some quick links to your hub pages is to submit your “latest hubs” RSS feeds to the directories. I just used the RSS tool the guys talked about in the shed that costs like $10.
–DeMerchant
PS - Also if someone has a hub that’s performing well, but they want to give it some serious backlinks without subscribing to a service they can always check out my site hyperlinked in my name lol
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admin Reply:
June 21st, 2009 at 9:49 am
Hey, thank’s DeMarchant. Yea, I have that traffic bot too. I’m actually to post about the deal.
I second DemMerchant’s service: if you want a lot of backlinks for cheap, check out his http://www.webseo.org — he’s submit your sites to all the paid directory services for cheap.
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Nice, going to check it out. One question, let’s say you have 5-10 hubs on a profitable niche. Would it be a good idea do create 2-3 infobarrels for links?
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admin Reply:
June 21st, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Ricardo, you absolutely should send 2-3 infobarrel links to your profitable niches. It will make a world of difference. If you haven’t signed up already, use my affiliate ID to sign up!
If you find hubs that are consistent, I’d throw 5 infobarrels, 5 ezines, 5 squidoos, and 5 go articles — do that and you are laughing. Infobarrel links are better than squidoo though. If you write an infobarrel, you get indexed like in a few hours, and from what I’ve seen, you get some serious link juice!
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I’d be curious to know a little more about how you trigger relevant ads for your Hubs. It seems no matter what I do or where I place my keywords in certain Hubs I don’t get the ads I want. When I do a search in Google with my keyword I get GREAT ads that are exact and spot-on but the ones that show up on my Hubs targeting that exact keyword are only slightly related to my main keyword. Maybe I just need to give it more time . . .
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admin Reply:
June 21st, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Ok, with hubpages, one thing you have to watch out for is that if you don’t have any traffic for a day or two (i am not sure how long exactly), hubpages will switch the ads showing on your profile to the most popular ads on hubpages. This means they won’t be relevent.
You can try testing this out to see what I mean. find a hub that has not received traffic for a day or more and visit it. Most of the times the ads won’t show any relevent ads. If you refresh, you will then see relevent ads. This means that you really need “2″ persons a day at least — be them hubbers or search traffic — to visit your hubs to stand a chance at getting a click — the first person ensures the second person will see the relevent ads. If you are getting clicks with low $ — it could be because someone clicked on an add that’s not relevent.
But as you get 1 person a day, your ads should be relevent to your keywords. Getting one person a day is not a problem if you pick a topic that gets searches, put at least 400 words of keyword rich content in there, and get a couple backlinks to your hub.
If you are getting traffic to you hubs but ads that are not relevent, I suggest putting in specific kewords in your niche that you know there are ads for, right above the fold of your ads or right next to them to “help” drive more relevancy to your ads.
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Thanks for the tips. I only have around 20 hubs right now so it’s hard to find a pattern between which ones are showing relevant ads and which ones aren’t. It’s weird though. Sometimes I visit my hubs and the ads that display on one hub are targeted for a different (unrelated) hub I just wrote about it. Maybe it has to do with my browser cookies or something. Oh well, I’ll just have to keep working at it while I build more hubs. Looking forward to your ebook.
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Well im now focusing on hubpages but i will eventually back the profitable ones with infobarrels. And of course i’ll use your ref id, i have to thank you in some way for all this information
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Great post! Can you say if you are using very low hanging fruit phrases if you think you can do pretty well just using your own domain despite not having the page rank of hubpages? I am thinking if there is very low competition then you can get the whole amt of the adsense money. Also can you say how much competition you feel you can get on page 1 for? Do you use a specific number in quotes marks? Finally, how much backlinking do you do to each hub and do you interlink them to each other?
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admin Reply:
June 24th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Hi Deb, i think you will find the answers you are looking for in my hubpage challenge posts. I’ve really laid it out all there — you just have to take the time reading it.
Cheers
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Hey Ben,
Okay I did spend more time reading yoru posts but one thing I didn’t see is if you check for competition using intitle:” . I know you wrote that you aim at 200-400 searches a month , low competition and top sites pr0-1, but what about competition number in quotes.
Also, who’s blog’s advice do you recommend for adsense income based on self-hosted sites rather than web 2.0 hosting. I am up to 20 a day myself with adsense but feel I need more tips because many I pick are total duds. That is why I like what you said about very low competition. I would rather just crank out a lot and have them be high up in google, rather than buried with occasional longtails getting clicks. Have you done any experiments yourself with just self-hosted adsense? I’d love to read that.
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admin Reply:
June 24th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
@Deb
With hubpages, to be honest, I didn’t check for the “” in title. I treat hubs a bit different. I’ll create a hub with PR 4 sites in the top spots if I think I can generate enough long tail traffic to make it worth while. I’ve found a good method of getting 10-40% CTR. Those 2-10 long tails a day have a 10-40% chance of clicking on an add. This is why I actually don’t really care at all about ranking with my hubs. Don’t get me wrong, I can get way more money by ranking high, but I’ve found I can make 40+ bucks a day just on long tail traffic. But you have to lay out everything right, pick good niches, write the right way for adsense clicks, etc. Even then, with 100 hubs, you only might end up with 5 hubs that are steady click pullers.
Now, as a general rule of thumb for niche blogging, I like to go after spots that are less than PR 4…but I pay more attention to the number of backlinks and anchor text used rather than PR.
Now, i’ve been treating hubs differently than I would for a niche blog. If I was going to set up a self hosted blog, I would check for title in ” ” to make sure it was under 100k — pref under 50k. I think court has some firm guides on this if you are in his academy.
I find I can’t rank for shit really with blogger.com blogs. I ALWAYS use self hosted sites for niche blogs — I find they get more long tail traffic. Comparing hubpages to a new self hosted site, hubpages win though. I can tell you that I had a self hosted blog with backlinks to it (UAW and AMA and some blogger blog links) and my hubpage ranked higher right off the bat…
You may be interested in my next experiment. August 15, I am going all out with 100-200 google sniper clickbank self hosted blogs. Once I start doing these in mass, you may find some interesting information. I’m pretty confident I can make 500-2k a month with these in as little as a month or two, but we’ll have to see what happens.
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Ben,
Thanks for your helpful reply and I look forward to your aug 15th experiment. It took 6 months for this one blog to make around 10 a day and somehow my other domains are also making the other 10 but not enough to quit the job yet. The one that is making 10 a day is pr2 but I do mostly longtails that have under 10k competition in quotes.
Good point you make about how the small percentage will be the ones that bring in money. I also am adding in more longtails to my pages as I check logs plus a little backlinking.
I am going to check your blog regularly and am curious if the hubs will be passive income by using minimal backlinking or if they fade out like ezinearticles do in google. I think they should stick as you are doing the type of keyword research few do.
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admin Reply:
June 25th, 2009 at 9:36 am
I’m pretty confident that hubpages will be a nice supplemental passive income. Remember, google now places a HUGE emphasis on domain age now. I expect my revenue, even if I just sit on my hubs without adding more or doing backlink work, will improve because as time goes on, google will give them higher SERP positions just because of age.
Keep in mind though — I am not saying you can just write a bunch of articles and make money. You have to do keyword research, you have to find niches that work for this, you have to use lots of longtail in your hubs, you have to write lots of articles, and you need to write the right way. And, you still have to do some backlink work, wether sending 3-5 backlinks from related hubs, adding ezine article/goarticle/info barrel links to your hubs etc. Yes, you can use the domain authority from hubpage to make money without having any backlinks, but there is no arguing that sending a couple related backlinks and ezine links will give you a lot more money. I suspect I wouldn’t be getting half of what I’m making without doing the backlink work I’ve been doing on hubs.
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Ben,
If I can just ask one more thing. You said I think in the 3rd hub update: “You can still make money entering a competitive niche, even if you don’t rank. You have to rely on long tails that bring in traffic relating to your main keyword but who find you site through a long tail google ranks you high for. This is why, if you look at my hubs, you may see this PR inconsistency. I’ll always go for a no comp niche, but if I see a high paying long tail niche with strong competition, I’ll still make a hub counting on long tail traffic to find the site.”
In terms of your first point, do you find that if the page that the 4 word phrase is on - ie how to solve whooping cough is on page 2 of google that people won’t find it and the click amt is lower than if somehow the page that phrase is on is on page 1? I did some backlinks to a page I have that has a 4 word phrase on it (and it is NOT the title tag or main part of the page actually) and found that things really improved once it got to page 1 of google.
What I’m wondering is if backlinks will raise the traffic to longtails that are scattered on the pages even if they aren’t the title, h1,desription of the page itself.
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admin Reply:
June 25th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Deb, I’m not sure if the click value is lower if you are not on page one. I know google gives you CPC based on if you are sending targeted traffic or not. I also suspect the more targeted traffic you send, the better they will give you in terms of CPC. BUT, I know you can get high paying clicks with sending only a couple people a day with hubs.
For the text in the anchor text, you get a vote from google each with each backlink; i suspect that for variations of that text in your page, you may get higher SERP rank, BUT this is guessing on my part. I have not tested this theory out so I don’t want to lead you down the wrong path there.
However, you can take matters into your own hands by looking at what enterance long tail keywords people are finding your site by and using those as backlink anchor text. Now obviously, if you have 50 long tails bringing in traffic to your “how to solve whipping cough” and 30 of those visitors are from “how to solve whipping cough” and 10 are from “solving whipping cough with squid”, then send some backlinks to your site with this as the anchor text. Basically, if I find unplanned long tails bringing extra traffic, I use these as anchor texts.
Ben
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admin Reply:
June 25th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
@Nat
Short term traffic. If you have some high PR, authority news/celeb/gossip sites, you can make a lot of money of short term trends. Grizzly is the master of this — there’s some posts about this. I think he said his record was like 15k in a week or something.
The thing is, you have to be in a position to really jump on news trends. This means you needs some powerful link sources to help keep your article high in the SERP’s.
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Deb, I’ll take a stab at your question. Yes the link will help raise everything on the page (longtails) regardless of the original target unless the long tail is 100% unrelated which it wouldn’t be.
Btw, yesterday I got over 1,000 hits to a hub I wrote that day. When Governor Sanford was on TV admitting his affair, I ranked #1 in Google for “mark sanford affair”. It was interesting to see that as soon as MSNBC, etc. posted their “Mark Sanford Had An Affair” articles I got shot out of the Top 200, then quickly came back to 10, then dropped onto the second page.
I noticed a lot of the traffic was coming in on keywords like “mark sanford gay”, so I reconfigured my strategy and built a hub targeting that keyword. Now I’ve got a double-listing on the first page for “mark sanford gay”, and it’s brought me a bunch of traffic today. (Useless traffic)
I figure at least I’ll get some high PR pages out of it which I can redirect to something that actually might have a sellable product associated with it!
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Actually, I think Griz got something like 1 million in a couple days. I remember reading that post a few months ago. He was doing a whole lot of complex stuff, though.
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admin Reply:
June 26th, 2009 at 8:53 am
I read it a while ago, I think he said he scored like 15k or so in revenue. He had like a million visitors.
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Ben and Nat,
Thanks for your comments. Ben, I will sign up under your infobarrel acct. Do you think it makes more sense to backlink to ezinearticles or backlink to infobarrel? I have been doing a few backlinks to ezinearticles articles to get them on page 1 and it seems to work for low competition phrases so now I’m trying to think it out with infobarrel in the mix.
In terms of the longtail keywords questions I am going to try to add 4-5 lsi phrases to different posts I have already on some blogs to see if those words get clicks or if I need to create specific posts/pages for them. I can’t wait for your next hub summary as things age.
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admin Reply:
June 27th, 2009 at 8:28 am
well, Deb, I’d say it makes more sense to push your infobarrel higher because you have the possibility of ad clicks. The day before yesterday, I made 5 bucks from Infobarrel, yesterday I made almost 3 bucks. I still have to throw in another 40 or so infobarrel hubs and build some backlinks to them (i have not been adding backlinks). With ezines, you only get the link juice.
This is what I would do. Add build backlinks to ezines, then link ezines to infobarrel, then link the infobarrels to your hubs (the safest way since it’s 4 tiers).
Or, if you don’t care about trying to hide so much, then link ezines to your hubages, then link ezines to your info barrels. It depends.
For now, I’d say just throw both ezines and backlinks directory at your infobarrrels, then send infobarrels to hubs. Once you get a system up you can play around with it.
LSI phrases are key. I’m actually going to write a post about “how to write for adsense” that talks about this. You should ALWAYS aim to add 5-10 LSI’s on each article; this will ensure you get more targeted longtail traffic — traffic that will CLICK, since it’s related to your main topic. I’m getting most of my visitors from LSI’s. Also, proper use of LSI will give you a SEO boost as well.
Cheers
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Ben-
Thanks for the linking structure ideas. I am very interested in learning more on lsi. I find that once I have a page that is doing well in google that the other phrases on the page also do well. BUT, conversely, if the page isn’t doing great than none of the lsi phrases are either. Does that make sense?
Like I typed in curling iron for girls and this site was on page 1:
ww.4tnz.com/content/does-zac-use-curling-iron (didn’t know if you wanted an external link so I deliberately modified it) and there is no phrase on the page curling iron for girls but the homepage has good pr. So it is beating out pages that may have that exact phrase on the page.
Soo, if you don’t have high page rank, what is best way to get those lsi phrases high up?
Also do you have a blog that documents your niche site or self-hosted blogs/sites? I am wondering if you do a lot of longtail adsense generally and if you just have to wait longer to get them ranked on page 1 or if they only have 300 searches a month anyway wouldn’t they do well pretty quickly?
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admin Reply:
June 28th, 2009 at 8:17 am
@Deb
You need to be careful. PR and SERP position really don’t have much to do with each other. You can be a PR 7 and still get your ass whooped by a PR 0. Now, I know, PR is usually a good indicator of the quality and amount of backlinks — but not always. I know for sure some of my hubpages ended up with PR 3 with like a couple backlinks and the domain authority of hubpages.
PR also changes. What you really should be looking for is TrustRank, not PageRank. TrustRank (or “authority status”) is what really counts. If you are going up against a site with authority status, you are going to have a hell of a fight. I’ve got a couple sites with this, and anything you post is considered gold by Google. You can even steal other people’s content and Google will give you ranking while giving the person with lower PR/trust the duplicate penalty.
That page you are talking about either has a lot of domain authority + trust rank. But given time the sites that are more focused should beat it out, with backlinks. LSI phrases alone won’t get you ranking up high — they just help. Some SEO’s feel that google gives a SEO bonus to sites that have a lot of LSI words. If you write a 500 word article, you don’t want to mention your keyword like 10 times — that kind of stuffing might actually hurt you. But if you mention a lot of LSI words, it let’s google know that your site is highly focused around a topic. You also get a lot more focused longtail traffic.
There is no firm rule. If I was going for niche site, I would actually want to try and target around 3k exact matches, maybe 2k. If there is absolutely no competition, then 1k. It also depends on the CPC. If you find a CPC with 3000 people that pays .10 a click, and you find a domain with 300 people a month with a dollar a click, they are the same, right? But you will find some niches have higher CTR (depends on your writing and content) while some have really low CTR.
I think you are over analyzing things, mate. Do you want to know how to make money? It’s not by asking me these questions, it’s by getting out there and making as many sites as possible and seeing how the cards fold. A lot of people want to find the perfect forumula to make money. There is no such thing. If you make 200 hubs in a month — you WILL make money. If you make 100 niche blogs in a month, you WILL make money. All this other stuff I’m talking about is just icing on the cake. LSI, writing for adsense, etc — it all comes down to just doing something.
Good luck!
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You are right on the “Money” my man - People just don’t want to do the work - They are always looking for the easy way out - Some magical formula - Either you have the greatest content in the world that drives traffic to your site and everyone is bookmarking your pages and linking to them because they are gold. Or, you work your ass off and get the links yourself. The latter is where the top 2 percent of Online Money Makers do it - and I salute you for accomplishing what you have in such a short time - You have a full plate in your work/personal life and you used what discretionary time you have/had in a way that will impact your income for years to come - So what if Hubpages goes away or changes their passive income strategies - what you have learned from this experience and created is worth more than most will ever know. Congrats!
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admin Reply:
July 26th, 2009 at 9:13 am
@Jon
Yea, most people aren’t willing to sacrifice the time it takes to do this stuff. That’s why that most people will fail — even with the best instruction in the world. Look at Grizz, how many readers does he have? Thousands. He has over 5k people who monitor his feed. Of his personal “students” that I know — people who actively do what he’s been teaching the past two years, I count a half a dozen who are making any decent money online, and only a couple who are doing like 7k a month+. Now maybe there are a few more that aren’t saying anything (I can understand why), but it’s clear that out of the hundreds of thousands of people who have visited his blog, only the slightest fraction of a fraction ever implement what he says.
why? Because people don’t want to work at it.
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Hi Ben, I found your Site via Griz’s Adsense blog, & just want to say thanks for all the great info you’ve provided here. You’ve also inspired me to try the 100 Hub challenge - I initially read about it at Court’s site, but was a little discouraged after starting my keyword research & having a very hard time finding enough keywords that met his criteria. So I’m glad to see that you’ve done so well with some keywords with less traffic & a lower CPC - I like this more flexible approach. I’ve signed up for a new Hubpages account through your link yesterday & have found about 35 promising keywords in a variety of niches already - now it’s time to start writing!
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admin Reply:
August 16th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
fantastic Cat! The key is to really just put out hundreds of hubs and to try different things until you find something that works. Most people give up after making 15-70 hubs and finding they don’t make any money. You need hundreds of hubs out there to see coin, and you have to backlink everything up and test out what works and what doesn’t, etc.
Best!
Ben
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Hi, ben
completed 61 hubs….in last 16 days. Made $5. Earning are very less.
You are right most peoples give up writing 70 hubs. Report back after 100 hubs.
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Ben, I have been reading this your hub experiment and I find it interesting. I have a question. DO you build backlinks to your hub pages(using ezine or any other way) or does the hubpages just rank by themselves.
Also, If you are going for a keyword, do you go for the monthly search or for last month search on adword keyword tool.
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