I’ve been at this whole internet marketing thing for over a year now and while I’m nowhere near replacing a full time salary, I do OK and more importantly I have learned a lot.

One of the things that I’ve learned is that you can’t keep checking your earnings. It’s demoralizing or frustrating or both.

I used to have this routine where I would start the time I dedicated towards developing my online business by checking my e-mail and then my Google Adsense, then I would research a whole shit-ton on what I wanted to write about and all of the ancillary details that weren’t relevant, I would go get a drink of something, I would come back and maybe write something and then I would check my Adsense account before going to bed.

What a freaking waste.

My earnings were pretty much always the same between the two checks and they were meager at best. I’d wonder why I wasn’t seeing results and just get frustrated with the whole venture.

Example 2. Early on I picked up on the Amazon Associates Program and they only update once a day. You wouldn’t believe how frustrated that made the insecure side of me.

Well, when it did update and on the occasion that I would make more than 2 sales, I would go to each one and add them up to see how much I made. No sense waiting for the items to ship and getting a real amount.

What I’ve learned

It really took some time but I’ve finally learned that checking your earnings doesn’t result in any improvements. It’s not moving you forward one bit. Don’t get me wrong, I still check them but it’s once a day and only for a few seconds to see what’s working, what’s not working and where I can allocate my time best (yeah, right)

I’ve grown confident enough to know that if you just keep writing your reach expands, your rankings improve and your earnings will grow.

I know that it’s easier said than done and you will eventually get there, but sometimes it takes different people saying the same thing different ways for it to sink in.

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Man, do I ever neglect this site? For anyone who does find themselves here, enjoy the read but realize it’s dated.

For those who want to delve into the world of internet marketing (or just want to waste time reading) I would recommend the following sites for the time being:

Making Money on the Internet for Free
Blue Hat SEO
or
AMXpert blog

In the mean time I hope to get back to spouting off about different tactics and strategies that I’ve found successful and finding ways to increase those earnings

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Squidoo is another one of the web 2.0 websites that allow you to create a webpage using a whole host of different modules. The idea of making money with Squidoo is that you write a website (called a lens) that is based around a product or potentially an ad and try to get web traffic to your lens. The reason to use Squidoo used to be based on the fact that they ranked well with Google without much work if any. You could put together a lens with an unbelievably big link (or picture as a link) and it would redirect them to an affiliate product. So tons of people would sign up for the usual (hair loss, weight loss, acne) affiliate programs, generate a keyword based lens (that looked like it took 5 minutes to make) and because of Squidoo’s clout they would be getting traffic instantly. The obvious problem is that it didn’t provide anything to the user and once Google caught on they smacked Squidoo around. Now to make money with Squidoo you have to play a bit of a diffrent game.

More about How to Use Squidoo

I’ve found that Squidoo can be picky about your lenses especially if they’re low on content. They will publish 300 word articles as lenses but they poke and prod you to make it more user-friendly. I think there’s some merit to this as the small crappy lenses I’ve put out have gotten shit for traffic, while the ones I spend some time formatting do a little better. You should definitely play around with the layout, but if you’re interested the layout I’ve had the most success with is as follows:

• Stupid Squidoo header that’s already up there. Use the Table of Contents or not; I usually don’t. I do try to add my intro paragraph and some cheesy stock picture. If I’m using the lens for only a backlink I’ll put a link in the intro paragraph.
• Another text module with some decent text. I try to make it 150 – 200 words if I can. Definitely put a picture with a link to whatever product you’re selling and add some instructions such as “Click Image for More Information” or “Click Image to Buy INSERTPRODUCTNAME”. Almost all of my success has been with the Amazon Associates program and it’s easy to find a product or a range of products that you can redirect to.
• Add an Amazon module and just type in the product keyword and let Amazon choose the products. You probably won’t get many people clicking on this module, but it makes Squidoo happy and there’s always a chance.
• Add another text module. More substance maybe another link
• Swipe a youtube video on the subject. It takes two seconds and adds some legitimacy
• You can try an RSS feed if you already have hubs on the subject
• keep the comment or guestbook module. People responding is free fresh content even if it’s just, “great lens. Keep up the good work.” Google loves updated content.

That’s more or less how I lay out my lenses give or take a module or two. Most of the lenses I create nowadays are solely for backlinks. There are a few lenses that I’ve had some success with that I made a long time ago that just started getting traffic a few months back. These lenses were product review type lenses where I took a topic (say bmx bikes) and did a brief review of 5-8 different bmx bikes. These were basically rewrites of the description plus a little bit of commentary peppered in that I got from the reviews. Each module had a picture link and a “Click Here to buy” link that was redirected to an aStore (amazon store) that I was just sort of dicking around with at the time. I didn’t keep very good tabs on it but I found that I kept seeing a “bike” that I hadn’t really been promoting show up in my Amazon reports. Whether or not the aStore format or the lens format (or some combination) was the key I don’t know, but the small amount of traffic I was getting certainly converted well. Just something to think about.

Making Money with Squidoo

The biggest factor in making money with Squidoo or any other platform is that you have to do a lot of writing. Putting decent to great quality writing on these sites is one part but you have to spend time writing for other sites and give your Hubpages or Squidoo sites the links to give them a boost. For instance, whenever I want to promote a product (to make money) I’ll usually start with Hubpages, do a decent quality product review with pictures and good content that isn’t just filler, play with the layout (add a pic and text module under the pic, put it in the right hand corner and make the text look like a caption and you’ll be amazed at your conversion) and overall spend some decent time on it. From there I’ll take the general stuff I’ve learned about the product, the people who use it/looking to buy it, other products that I can compare to it and I’ll write 1-2 infobarrels, 1-2 squidoo lenses, perhaps something on Bukisa (which counts for crap), xomba, associated content, then go for article directories that have revenue share (snipsly, allthatsolive, yousaytoo), then start hitting the article directories such ezinearticles, amazines, articlesupport, articlealley, articlesbase to really beef up the backlinks. If you’re really serious about making some money online, you’ve either got to spend money and have someone else do it, or put in the hours to do it yourself.

If you’ve bought into all of my hype about Squidoo, you should think about joining up. In fact, it’s a good idea to sign up for Hubpages and Infobarrel if you haven’t already. Once you have your accounts set up (should take you less than 10 minutes), pick one topic and write 3 articles on each site with the second two on each site pointing to the first one and the first one on Squidoo and Infobarrel pointing towards the top Hubpages article. This should take you a grand total of about 3 hours and if you give it a little time (close to 2 months you should start to see some results). More articles equals more links equals faster results.

I hope to be putting together a plan in the (not so) near future on how to create a system for making money online for free. It certainly possible to make money spending absolutely nothing, but it’s a lot harder that way. Because I don’t update the blog as much as I should, you may want to sign up for the RSS feed so you don’t miss my awesome system (said sarcastically).

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For awhile now I’ve been writing on how to make money online using a variety of different websites and methods. I have to admit when I started out I had a much different vision for the site than I do now. And as I make more money online, I learn about things that do work and don’t work. I learn which people I want to listen to and which people I don’t. All of this shapes how I direct my efforts and the direction of this site. Today, I want to share with you a bigger picture so that maybe some of the readers (or that one person who still gets the RSS feed) can see where I’m coming from and see how I use these ways to make money online and how they can benefit from it.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll notice that I’ve put an extraordinary emphasis on writing articles for making money online. This is a path that I’ve found myself going towards and it seems incredibly easy to do. The start-up costs are truly nothing (if you’re only using web 2.0 sites), the work is generally interesting (although can get tedious) and if you get it right the payout can be beyond worth it. There are plenty of other ways to make money online and just maybe I’ll get around to covering them, but first and foremost I’m trying to kick the day job and that means getting down to business. Unfortunately, writing about how to make money online doesn’t really pay the bills, so my involvement here has waned. If all goes well, I’ll be back to post more frequently with more sites, more comprehensive strategies and better information.

How I Make Money Online

Let me start out by saying I don’t make much money online. It’s been 8 months and countless hours and I still have my day job, I still have a mortgage and I still stay up late at night banging out articles. So why the hell should you listen to me? Well, for the first four of those months I spent time dicking around with methods that I wasn’t good at, or didn’t know how to do well with and I spent a considerable amount of time reading about other people’s success and fantasizing about how I could do that.

I know better now.

I’ve now seen some success and have a basic blueprint that I choose to follow and works for me. That being said, everyone’s different and it may not work for you. But if it does it will save you months of floundering around if not quitting altogether.

The other big thing is that it takes time to make money online. There is no way to make money online fast, and anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to take your money. It requires a lot of effort and while a Herculean work ethic can shortcut some of the time, there’s a natural progression to online success (much of it relying on the search engines) that you can’t avoid.

The ways that I’ve made money online so far has been by writing for web 2.0 sites such as eHow, Hubpages, Infobarrel and to a lesser extent Bukisa. The ways that I make money online is by writing volumes of keyword rich articles that begin by pulling in crazy long tails (stuff that you weren’t really trying for) and backlinking those articles from the other sites as well as from articles directories and basically anywhere you can get a link. I’ve chosen to use Hubpages as the main site that all the links point to because it has the best search engine authority and revenue share as well as additional flexibility to add Amazon affiliate links and position them in places where people will see them (see the make money with Hubpages posts for more information).

The ways that I’ve made money online is by playing the numbers game. If you choose to go with Adsense model, you’ll need a lot of clicks to start getting into the tens of dollars per day. I think my average click is somewhere around 40 cents per click. But if you get enough of those clicks they add up. They way to get traffic is to rank well in the search engines. I’d say that organic search has the best potential for making money and that’s why there’s so much emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO). And arguably the best way to rank is to have a lot of inbound links with the right anchor text. This is where all of these web 2.0 sites come in. Just write a ton of articles on these handful of sites and use the anchor text to boost the chosen articles ranking.

The ways that I’ve made money online include using a strategy that focuses on one revenue source and putting all my efforts into that. I was a little mixed up in the beginning and following numerous different people’s advice I tried a little bit of everything. Then I got some good advice from a guy who knows how to make cash online. So I just focused on using Amazon’s Associates program and try to find products I can write about that people who would visit my site are interested in. The best thing about that is Amazon’s tiered compensation program means that the more sales I make the more I can make per sale.

Plan going forward

There are a number of other things that play into the ways to make money online. In upcoming posts I plan on focusing on how to get the most out of your articles including how to choose articles that get good traffic, how to use internal linking structure to enhance your SEO and how certain sites are good for certain niches, why that is and how you can capitalize on it.

In the next post I plan to write about the revenue sharing site Squidoo and what role it plays in my online money making endeavors.

Because I don’t post that often, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed. That way you won’t miss anything when I post something 3 months later. That is if you want to.

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I know it’s been awhile since I’ve updated 1000 ways to make money online and that’s because I’ve been busy working on several of those thousand ways. One of the ways I’ve been seeing more and more success with lately is Infobarrel. My plan is to give the usual backdrop of the site, write a little bit about how to make money with Infobarrel and gives some anecdotes of how you can use Infobarrel to boost your earnings with Hubpages.

All you wanted to know about Infobarrel

Alright, probably not all you wanted to know but then again that’s why there’s the FAQ section. To cut to the heart of what Infobarrel is, they are another information site where you can write articles that displays contextual ads and amazon affiliate recommendations. Infobarrel uses several familiar types of advertising including Adsense, Chitika and Kontera (you don’t get Kontera money). Infobarrel also gives you a chance to install google analytics onto your articles which will come in extremely handy (see later in the post).

They have all of the usual rules (proper grammar, original content, no porn, yada yada) but they also have a couple of additional requirements. The first is that they want you to create an article of at least 325 words. This requirement is useful for two reasons:

• It keeps the integrity of the articles on Infobarrel higher because it deters small, spammy, “I only want the link” articles.
• Google tends to respect longer documents. Not saying you can’t rank for short articles but, in general, the longer the article the better. This also gives you a chance for some more long tail keywords.

The other requirement they have is to keep any external links out of the first paragraph. In fact when it comes to linking they require that you do it contextually. I had a hard time with this at first; I would use call to action phrases such as: “Click here to learn more about…” or “Check out these…”. This is frowned upon because it blatantly calls visitors away from their site and if they don’t have visitors they don’t have money. I’ve even been called on using the asides such as: “Infobarrel is a great way to make money (More Infobarrel money making tips)”.

Just so you don’t have to struggle through the review process as much as I did my advice is to use links like this: “Infobarrel is great way to make money online and with a little help from some money making tips, you can make some serious cash.”

The other important thing to note about Infobarrel is that they have a review process to make sure you’re following the guidelines. If you do everything I’ve said above you’ll have no problems. Just makes sure that you only have two links that leave IB and that they’re not in the first paragraph. If for some reason you are denied, they’re nice enough to tell you why and give you a chance to fix it.

How to make money with Infobarrel

Because IB is so similar to places like Hubpages, the methods for making money with infobarrel are pretty much the same. I can’t emphasize enough about doing a healthy dose of keyword research and on top of that competition research. Part of the reason to use Infobarrel or Hubpages as opposed to your own websites or blogs is that they have existed for many years and have built up the reputation in Google’s eyes that has gained respect when it comes to ranking in the search engine. Using Infobarrel, you can take a topic, say bicycle seats, write a 5-600 word article on it and watch it rank on the second or third page. This makes getting to the front page so much easier (and the front page is where the money is).

There has been some issue in the past about ad location with Infobarrel and they’ve switched stuff around. I would argue that the ad location isn’t as important as most would think and that if you write a good (meaning long, on topic article) you’ll get plenty of long tail traffic (using the example above long tail keywords would be black bicycle seats, bicycle seats for kids, bmx bicycle seats, etc.). Just keep that in mind when writing the article.

Part of why writing on these sites will get you good search engine rankings is that these sites (commonly referred to as authority sites [although Web 2.0 sites are far from the only authority sites]) have a lot of “linking power” or “link juice” that is passed along to either sites within their domain (i.e. www.infobarrel.com) or sites out of their domain (a.k.a. your webpage). So if you were following along at home you may have created a hub or two because of my make money with Hubpages series. If this is the case, you could easily construct a similar, on-topic article and plant a link that would send some “link juice” to your first article. This will help improve the first articles ranking in the search engine.

This will work internally as well. So let’s say you wrote an article entitled “How to install a bicycle seat” and you casually mention some of the above long tail keywords (black, for kids, and BMX). Upon checking your google analytics account, you realize that there has been a large number of searchers that found your site using the term “BMX bicycle seats”. While it’s really good to know this, what’s better is you can write an additional article on Infobarrel on bmx bicycle seats and link back to the first one (How to install a bicycle seat) using the term “bmx bicycle seats” and that first article will get a better ranking for that term. While this isn’t a great example because the first article isn’t trying to be an article about bmx seats, you could see how to apply this. Perhaps something like “How to make money online using Hubpages” being linked to the article “How to make money online”?

I wonder if this is something I’m trying?

Why I think you can make a ton of money with Infobarrel

So if you believe all of my ramblings and you’ve read down so far, you’re doing well and you might just be thinking about signing up for Infobarrel if you haven’t already. Let me tell you a little about my crackpot theory on why I think you can make a ton of money with Infobarrel.

I need to start with a brief history lesson. Back a few years ago, Squidoo was a power house on the internet in terms of ranking well in the search engines. This brought a lot of people over to their site looking to make money online. They would create some ridiculous page (meaning bad), slap it up there, rank and make mad cash. I’m not sure how it all transpired, but eventually Google gave Squidoo what was affectionately known as the Google slap. After that, Squidoo lost some if not most of their mojo and the people who were making money had to find some other way to do it.

Almost a year ago Hubpages was the next greatest thing. You could do some of the same things, but the important part is that you would rank easily. Then things got out of hand and it’s still debated whether they got the Google slap or not, but Hubpages aren’t nearly as powerful as they used to be (partly because of the 30 day hubchallenge).

My crackpot theory is that there’s always going to be a flavor of the year when it comes to these sites, and based on my Infobarrel earnings, and some of the things I’ve seen in the search engines, I think that IB is poised to be the next big money maker. That being said you’ve still got to put in the work to rake in the cash. If you’re serious about trying to make money online, take everything I’ve mentioned above and write yourself 100 well-tuned articles. Do it as a 1 month challenge. Do it as a 3 month challenge. No matter what, just start cranking out articles and you will see a return.

I think it’s only fair to mention that there seems to be a strong correlation between my earnings and my articles hitting the three month mark. Take that as a caveat if you want to. But know that you can start raking in some cash writing for Infobarrel.

If you’re wondering where eHow comes in to all of this, I’m not quite sure. I’ve thought about eHow a lot and I think their communist approach towards articles has helped them to sustain their ranking ability. I know that a number of my articles are hitting top 10 in the search engines without any effort to improve their rankings. In fact, I’ve tried to write follow up articles on Hubpages and Infobarrel and they still don’t come close. They’ve changed things up a little bit, but I still think they are a viable diversification strategy to Hubpages or Infobarrel (which both use Adsense).

No related posts.

This is the third post in a series to make money online using Hubpages. Check out the first two posts if you need to catch up:

Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online part 1
Hubpages and the Secret to making Money Online part 2

Time for the part that everyone loves to live vicariously through. Now that it’s been nearly two months, how did I fare at the hubchallenge?

Just to provide a brief recap, the hubchallenge was a contest posed several months ago to build 100 hubs in 30 days. The idea was to generate a substantial income just by doing proper keyword research for topics that have money making potential and grabbing long tail traffic. I decided to do the same task several months later and after much of what made Hubpages so successful.

My Hubchallenge Results

I mostly focused on writing for Adsense (Google’s ads) and at the end of the article would recommend the reader either look for the “best advertised deal online” if it was a product hub or “collect as much information as you could about ___ so that you can help your doctor formulate a game plan for how to handle ___” for health hubs. That’s unless there was a specific product being advertised, then I would find a way to suggest that product hoping that that ad would be served during that visit.

I did try a handful of Amazon Affiliate hubs which were mostly in the form of reviews. To begin with I would write about something that would have a high CPC but would then tack on some Amazon products as an afterthought. This had pretty limited success so I decided to switch it up and try to write product reviews of Amazon products. This had much better results most likely due to the style of the writing and the purpose of the hub. If I had to guess my hub portfolio is 75% Adsense oriented and 25% Amazon oriented.

How Much money did I make from the Hubchallenge?

For Adsense:
February – 67 Hubs (mostly un-aged, no backlinks) – $17.69
March – 80ish Hubs (mostly 1 month old, some now have backlinks) – $17.54

For Amazon:
February – $1.73
March – $9.05

Grand total: $46.01. I will say that I put in a ton of work to get all of $46! It was very discouraging at times especially when you weren’t getting traffic or even worse you were getting traffic but no clicks. But I have been reassured multiple times by multiple sources that in order to make money online you need to have patience. I did learn quite a bit though which you’ll find below.

Make Money with Hubpages Lessons

• When you’re trying to make money with adsense it’s a numbers game. I’ve mentioned how I tried to follow advice on writing style, format, etc. but if you’re not getting traffic then you’re not getting clicks. I did a smattering of keyword research, some on-page SEO and wrote for some long tail keywords. When it comes to getting traffic I’ve found more success with the few hubs I did bother to build links to…mostly.
• Targeting high paying keywords doesn’t mean you actually get them. I think most everyone targets those juicy $10 keywords when they find them. I started out with this in mind and found that the clicks I do get aren’t even close. I’ve also found clicks that are pretty damn substantial on keywords that are so-so. I don’t know how ads get served up, but I’ve given up on dollars in favor of traffic.
• It’s not only a numbers game but also a waiting game. The big draw that Hubpages had back almost a year ago was that you could write an article using the given strategy and it would wind up in the search engine results fairly high. Since then Hubpages has lost some clout with the search engines and now the hubs have to hang out for a while before their getting some love.
• While hanging out will help them over time, they need links! Having backlinks will help boost their search engine ratings and it really comes down to the more the merrier. Here’s a good primer on backlink theory if you’re not sure what I mean. The good thing about Hubpages is that they are an established website with plenty of trust rank and can handle a ton of backlinks being thrown at them. One of my next experiments will be to see what happens when you throw different sorts of links at these hubs.
• Making money online by writing is a hard work. It’s nice to think that you can just spend a few hours and *bam!* you get paid, but truth is there’s a lot of trial and error. If you could get platinum hits every time it wouldn’t be a big deal but unfortunately you don’t know what’ll take and what will flop. So it continues to be a numbers game just putting out lots of content (in an organized and strategic way) and then create some funnels to get people into it.

Making Money Online here on out

• As I mentioned before, I’m going to start throwing links at the hubs to see what this does to their traffic/search engine rankings. I’m going to use places like Ezine Articles, Infobarrel, Goarticles to write more of the same crap and then link back to the hubs. Everything I’ve read says this will help, but sometimes I can be stubborn and I want to see the results for myself.
• I plan to write more hubs, hopefully getting it past the 100 mark to help with the numbers game. I plan to experiment more with the Amazon affiliate method, writing reviews and recommending products.
• I want to take advantage of the economies of scale and take my topics across multiple content pages. The way I figure it is that you spend the same amount of time doing the research for 1 or 5 articles. I plan to write a hub, eHow article, Infobarrel article, and perhaps some Bukisa articles for all future topics. Ideally, I’ll get over 100 on each site but, honestly, I don’t see that happening this month.
• I’ve also purchase a handful of domains and plan to try my hand at sniper sites. In my mind, this is pretty much the next step. Basically, you purchase a domain write 5-10 articles (much like you would on hubpages) and slap some ads on there. The downside is that you don’t have any help with the rankings and search engines don’t necessarily like new sites. The plus side is once you do get ranking you get to keep ALL of the ad money. None of this revenue splitting shit. I know I’m a little behind the curve here and this is something people have been doing for a while, but I feel like there are plenty of niches left to exploit. I just got to put my head down and do it.
• I’ve also been toying the idea with putting together an authority site. This is basically a bigger version of the sniper sites and takes a long time to put together but once you’re there you can start to make serious bank. This is definitely more of a long term project.

Final Thoughts on Making Money with Hubpages

Related posts:

1. 11a. Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online part 2
2. 11. Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online pt 1

This is the second post in a series to make money online using Hubpages. Check out the first post:

Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online part 1

This is a long one so get settled in

How to Make Money Making Hubs

With this post I wanted to give a few tips on how to make hubs that will make some money. In the previous post, I mentioned that there are three main ways to make money with Hubpages: Contextual Ads, Amazon Affiliate Links, and Ebay Affiliate Links. The key is to pick a method starting out. You can utilize all of these monetization methods but, in my opinion, it reduces the effectiveness of the hub and your style of writing and layout are going to be geared differently depending on the method.

Let’s start with Contextual Ads

Contextual Ads are ads that rely on the text of the article to determine what the article is about and then serve an ad that is relevant. You see these all of time everywhere you go. Hubpages has both Google Adsense and Kontera. Google Adsense are served on the webpage in blocks and possibly as a text bar in the middle of the hub (it depends on the configuration you choose). Kontera’s ads are the double underlined link-looking ads that take a word in your article and if clicked are taken to a website that paid for this style of advertising. I’m going to be referring the Google Adsense ads as those are the ones that I’ve used but really this could apply to either one.

Because the main goal of contextual ads is to provide a relevant ad, you’re going to want to spend considerable time doing keyword research using google’s external keyword tool. Using this tool you can find the number of searches that are done for a keyword and the estimated cost per click that an advertiser pays. I’ve talked a little bit on doing keyword research for ehow and the process is exactly the same. It’s a good place to start if you need a primer on keyword research. Once you have your keyword identified you’ll want to write your article around that keyword making sure that the keyword is in the title at the beginning. There are different schools of thought around the internet on whether to include anything else in the title. I like to think that there are people searching for these articles and that if I can give them some additional info in the title then they might be swayed to click this article if it comes up during a search. Other SEO experts have reported that these other words dilute the strength of the keyword and that only the keyword that gets searched for should be in the title. If you’re concerned or curious, do an experiment: create 5 hubs with just the keyword and then another five with more. Just a thought. Anyhow, I like to use the keyword first in the title followed by a subtitle-esque phrase such as:

Make Money with Hubpages – Quick Tips to Ensure Success

Ok, so that might be a bit over the top, but my thoughts are that anyone who would search “Make Money with Hubpages” might be seduced by the fact that these tips will ensure success and not take forever to do and click my article over the webpage(s) above me. By the way, this is something you can’t do with eHow; their “How to” format is pretty restrictive in choosing a headline (both because you have to throw a verb in there (find, buy, purchase) and because the easy/good ones are already taken).

You’ll also want to put the keyword into a header if possible as the header provides more weight when the search engines are trying to figure out what your website is about. So to continue with the above example I might do something like:

Make Money with Hubpages – Easy but Requires Work

And then I’d go on to talk about how to setup hubs, do keyword research, read my blog, etc.

And to round out the keyword usage, try to slip it in a few times through out the article. Definitely start out the hub using your keyword (e.g. To make money with Hubpages you’ll need to dedicate a significant amount of time and energy and you’ll have no life for a while, but trust me it’s worth it). The other SEO tip is to end your article with your keyword phrase; however, this is done for you when they put the title as a link at the bottom of the hub.

Back to Contextual Ads

To get back to writing hubs for ads, you’re going to want to pick a keyword/topic that people are looking for a solution to. Again with my example, “Make Money with Hubpages” is a good one because there are people out there who are going to be searching for an answer of how to use Hubpages to make money. “Cure Skin Cancer”, “Find Cheap Renter’s Insurance”, and “Natural Rosacea Treatments” are all good because people are looking for these things. That being said you’ll also want to get “clicking” keywords because they’re already prepped for and more responsive to advertising.

Now the art of writing the hub (and it is a bit of an art). Because your main goal is to have them click on an ad, you’re going to write the hub in a way that suggests they check out the ads without blatantly telling them. This can be telling them that there are plenty of excellent websites that can tell them more about curing cancer or that finding a natural cure for rosacea will require some research but it’s worth it. I try to do a search in google on my keyword to see what ads pop up and keep them in mind as I try to figure out ways to allude to them. That may be easy but here’s where the “art” part comes in – you’re going to need to find a way to balance this with getting your keyword and related words (this is important) into the article in a relevant manner. Unless you’re hitting this rich, untapped niche, you’re probably not going to hit your main keyword without some legwork and probably serious legwork at that. So the money that you’ll see coming in, at least at first, is going to come from long-tail traffic. This means that the random (or not) combination of words is what someone typed into google and you came up first.

The second part of the art of writing a hub is to create content with limited substance. Unless you can solve their problem and point them to an advertised solution (which at that point you’re probably better off connecting them to that solution with an affiliate link) you’re going to want to provide them with info that points them in the direction of the ad without necessarily solving their question. I try to do this by using a lot of generalities and if it’s a topic that I’m familiar with I’ll drone on and on (kind of like this post) about some off the cuff stuff hoping they get bored and click a link. I’ll also use run on sentences and extra long paragraphs to intimidate the reader. Trust me, this isn’t something that you’re English teacher would be proud of.

The last thing to consider is the length of the hub. You’re going to need it to be 400 words or more or else you won’t make it into Google’s index. However, how much longer is a complete crapshoot – it depends on the niche, the competition, all sorts of stuff. Obviously, the longer your post the more chances for long tail keywords to be generated which will garner more traffic, so go as long as you can. But keep in mind that creating more content a) takes more time and b) might end up solving the question and diminishing your chances of a click. Mine tend to be in the 6-800 range. I don’t really worry too much about it anymore, I know when I’m done.

Amazon Affiliate Hubs

Writing a Hub for some affiliate action is a little bit different. You’re still going to need to include a lot of content to get traffic, but there’s admittedly less fluff involved. This is where learning some ad copy comes in.

Full Disclosure – I’ve had less success with this method of making money from Hubpages. While I have had some successes, it’s nothing to write home about. However, I’ve made fewer affiliate hubs and this is something I’m still trying out.

There are two ways that I’ve used to create affiliate hubs – regular content driven hubs that tack on the solution I’ve been talking about and product reviews. The content hubs have been a little more of an afterthought and so they weren’t really asking the reader to do anything, they were just there. Lately, I’ve started to put hints and suggestions in towards the end of the article mentioning that Amazon has the best prices or that I like Amazon because of their ease in use or free shipping. But this isn’t a call to action by any means and I plan to use more of those.

The second method, product reviews is far more successful. Anytime someone is looking for a review of something they’re already considering purchasing it. So that’s step one. In fact, you could probably do all of your hubs this way and make some decent coin because of Amazon’s tiered affiliate earnings schedule. Creating a product review is easy if you’ve had firsthand experience with it, not too bad if you know someone who has experience and have talked to them about it and somewhat difficult if you’ve never heard of the thing before. Am I suggesting you make up a story about how you love your twin draft guard or snuggie?

There are a number of topics that can help you with your selling skills that I’m by no means qualified to tell you. If you’re interested in more hints on setting up Amazon affiliate hubs or even affiliate selling in general check out Make Cash Online who has an excellent blog post on copywriting as well as good info on affiliate marketing.

eBay Affiliate Hubs

Using eBay to make money with Hubpages is a little trickier. Not that it’s harder to get sales but it’s harder to get an eBay partner’s network (EPN) number. Not too long ago, eBay revamped their affiliate program perhaps to get their quality standards higher and at the same time made it a lot harder to get into their network. The tutorial that Hubpages provides on becoming an eBay affiliate has been changed to reflect that they are no longer a good reference page and that you should use some other webpage to try to get an EPN number. Not that you can’t get an EPN number, but it’s extremely difficult and you’ll need to try multiple times and different avenues and all sorts of hoops to jump through. For this reason I have not tried any eBay affiliate hubs so any advice I provide here is all second hand. If you are lucky enough to have a number, read on.

A lot of the tips for the Amazon affiliate hubs hold true for eBay hubs. You still want to funnel in people looking to buy, you still want to drive them towards a sale, but there are two key differences that make eBay better. The first thing is with eBay you get a 7 day tracking cookie which is way better than the 24 hour one you get from Amazon. This means that any time someone clicks your ad, they have seven days to make a purchase on the site. The second thing, which may or may not be an advantage, is that eBay has the ability to have lower prices. Sure there are a lot of powersellers on their selling stuff a penny below retail, but there’s the true used and auction style markets that lure people into thinking they can get a deal. One strategy is to target things that people would want to purchase used – cars, boats, other motorcrafts are popular but less likely to make a sale; textbooks, books, cell phones, iPods are going to be better off. The key is to experiment.

The key to making money with Hubpages is Traffic

This is by far, the way that people make money with Hubpages, or with anything online. This is something that I initially dismissed thinking that SEO was only for companies trying to sell products. It’s not. Traffic and the law of averages are what make money online which is why so many people strive to rank high in search engines, pay thousands of dollars for SEO tactics and sell parts of their soul. You’re probably not going to get rich writing for Hubpages and if you do it will take decades because one of the factors that play into search engine rankings is time. But the great thing about Hubpages is that they have some authority with google (admittedly much less than even a few months ago, but it is still some) and it’s an instant way to get your article out there. And for that you split the revenue. However, this is only a small factor in getting traffic and most of your traffic is going to come from long tail, crazy combination of words that people search for. It’s going to be a lot of 1’s and 2’s and for that reason you need to create a lot of hubs. You can either go wide and create 100’s of hubs on different topics and just keep cranking them out, or you can go deep and create 100 hubs and write supporting articles that link back to your hubs as that is a tried and true way to bump up your hubs ranking. Either way it’s a lot of work which makes picking your keyword and your niche all that more important. If you can find a topic that doesn’t have a lot of competition in the search engine rankings but there’s still people looking for it, you’ll grab that traffic.

Final Thoughts

This was a pretty long post but I feel it only really covers the basics of making money with Hubpages. There is a near infinite amount of info and you could read for days. The biggest way you’re going to succeed is to write, test, evaluate, and write some more. In part 3 I plan to report how I did with Hubpages, and what I plan to do going forward.

Related posts:

1. 11b. Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online pt 3
2. 11. Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online pt 1

Suckered you in with that title didn’t I? So here’s the deal: I stopped the usual “blogging” about making money online for awhile because I stumbled onto something that really resonated with me. My plan was to keep going along with the make money online article sites and I knew that I wanted to do Hubpages next but the problem was I hadn’t really gotten anywhere with the site. I threw up a couple of half-assed attempts at hubs and waited for everyone to come pouring in.

In doing some research I stumbled across Make Money Online with SEO’s Hubpages Challenge. The author, Ben K, went on to explain his experiments with Hubpages and how he made $40+ dollars per day. The basis of the Hubpages 30 day challenge was to create 100 hubs in 30 days and was originally proposed by Court of The Keyword Academy back in May of 2009. From this point on I was hooked and decided I had to try it. I proceeded to devour the rest of Ben’s blog learning so much from it and really gaining a lot of inspiration. Well a month (or more) went by and I didn’t quite hit the 100 hub mark but I will go on to talk about the 100 hubs challenge and my experience in subsequent posts. There’s a lot of information I’ve learned and plan to share and I now have a clear game plan on what I’m going to do.

If you’re really for hungry for information on the 30 day challenge and how other’s have fared I would strongly suggest checking out Ben’s blog across Make Money Online with SEO. I have to warn you that you’ll spend (waste?) a lot of time as there is a lot of information and if you’re like me you just want more and more. In the meantime I thought I would provide an intro on how to make money with Hubpages.

Just like the other article sites, Hubpages is a web 2.0 property that will allow you to post your content (just about whatever you want). What separates Hubpages from other sites is that they have more flexible and creative layouts and have many more monetization options.

First the layout

Hubpages uses a modular format allowing you to create a plethora of different modules to make your hub. These modules include: text, photo, video, news, and RSS feed, polls, quizzes, tables, comments, and eBay and Amazon modules. You can select the layout that you prefer (there are a few basic templates) and then add, subtract and move around modules as you see fit. I’d have to say that out of all of the article sites, Hubpages has the most user-friendly user interface and is the most flexible. This is important because it allows for some creativity or more importantly, better ad placements.

Now the money part

Hubpages offers several ways to make money online. Probably the easiest and most successful way is the contextual ads through Google Adsense. These ads are shown alongside your hubs and you can gain a share of the ad revenue so long as you have a Google Adsense account. The catch with ads is that the impressions are split between you and Hubpages in a 60:40 split (your favor). This means that every time someone visits your hub there is a 60% chance that any ad revenue generated from their visit will go to you. So if 10 people visit and they all click an ad (wishful thinking) you would get 6 ad clicks and Hubpages will get 4. I hope I didn’t make that more confusing than it is. What I will say about the ad revenue is that getting the complete revenue far outweighs the revenue generation/splitting you get with eHow (I’ll give a more thorough comparison of eHow and Hubpages in the next post or so). Beyond the contextual ads you have options of earning affiliate income with Amazon modules, if you have an eBay EPN (eBay Partner Nework – basically eBay’s affiliate system) number you can make money referring visitors to eBay, or you can display Kontera ads which are the annoying double underlined words that are in the text of the ads. Because of this flexibility, you have a number of options in which to make money online with Hubpages and if you’re willing you can experiment until your heart’s content. It will still come down to doing your keyword research and testing to find out which subjects do better with ads, which do better with affiliate products and which do better with auctions. With a lot of hard work Ben K has shown you can make over $60 a day (I should caveat that statement with the fact that the internet dynamic that made hubpages successful has shifted and it would be a lot harder to achieve but undeniably possible).

There are a couple of other ways to make money online with Hubpages. Just like Bukisa, they have a referral program that gives you a 10% share of your referral’s impressions. This comes out of Hubpages share of the impressions and probably isn’t much but that depends on your referrals activity. They also have an interesting traffic referral policy. If you generate traffic to Hubpages you can get between 9% and 12% of the impressions. Again, this may not be much but if you can find a clever way to refer people to relevant and properly created hubs (those that are good at generating revenue) you can definitely add this to your passive income portfolio.

Hubscores and Hubtivity

I’m not sure how much this plays into your ability to make money with Hubpages, but there are two scoring metrics that are used: hubscores and well, author’s hubscores. Each hub you write will have a score that it’s given and will change frequently. The hub’s hubscore is based on the amount of traffic, the author’s hubscore, the uniqueness of content and the comments and other interactivity within the hub. The author’s hubscore is based on, among other things, the number of hubs, the activity on the hubs you have, how often you interact with the hub community, and the traffic you direct from other websites. The hub’s hubscore is a somewhat useless metric that you can maybe use to inspire yourself. Maybe. However, the author’s hubscore is a little more important. You’ll want to get your author’s hubscore above 80 (this number might be a little different, I’ve also heard 75 and 70) so that the links in you hub are “dofollow” (more on the importance of dofollow links in future posts). I’ve found that you can get a decent boost in your author hubscore by following someone (which I use to bookmark successful authors), commenting on other hubs, interacting on forums, posting more hubs, rating your own hubs a thumbs up, or linking in to some of your hubs (which you will need to do anyhow). Hubpages also has some hubtivity achievements that are supposed to motivate you when you reach certain milestones (published 100 hubs, have 100 fans, etc.). I can understand these from Hubpages point of view, they want to generate a community that creates content for them; however, from my (and your) point of view it’s sort of useless.

I’m going to break it off here as I only wanted to give you an idea of how you can make money with Hubpages. I plan on doing two more posts on this topic: Part 2 will focus on how to be successful and create money making hubs and Part 3 will talk about my experience with the 100 hub challenge and what my plans are going forward. If you feel compelled, go ahead and sign up for Hubpages and get crackin’ or you can wait for some more tips and possibly get inspired that way.

See you soon.

Related posts:

1. 11a. Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online part 2
2. 11b. Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online pt 3

To my 3 loyal readers: I just wanted to drop a quick note to tell you that I haven’t abandoned this blog but I’m working on something big. I plan to write a couple great posts once this is done.

Related posts:

1. 1000 Ways to Make Money Online Launch

When I started out on this blog I thought it would be real easy to just crank out descriptions and strategies for ways to make money online. Then I got distracted. Should have figured.

The plan is to periodically review the ways to make money online and examine the difficulty in getting started, money making potential, and skills or tools required. Below you’ll find the first 10 ways summarized. I tried to start out with ways that cost little or nothing to get started. Let’s get down to it.

1. Selling your stuff on eBay

I won’t waste your time describing the online auction giant; all you need to do is have something to sell. The best things about eBay is that they’re hurting for new customers so they’re enticing people with 5 free listings per month. As far as earning potential goes, consider this: powersellers make $1000/month. Silver powersellers – $3000/month, Gold – $10000/month. The very fact that they have these ratings means that people are doing it (btw, Titanium powersellers make $150K per month. Haven’t seen one of these yet). Getting there is going to take some work. No one is making $1000/month on stuff they have laying around so you’re going to have to find something to sell, preferably wholesale.

2. High-Interest Savings Account

High-interest savings accounts are kind of joke these days offering little more than a 1% return (FDIC insured return). However, they’re a safe place to put your cash in waiting. There’s a ton out there and you can get some ideas at Fat Wallet Forums or Bankrate.com. Technically, it’s a way to make money online.

3. Peer-to-Peer lending with Prosper.com

I screwed up with this one, there’s nothing free about lending money to people. What Prosper attempts to do is become the middle-man between lenders and borrowers. So, as a lender you can lend money to other people at rates that are a lot better than savings or CDs and the borrowers get lower rates than credit cards and possibly bank loans. Despite the optimistic name, Prosper earnings are little more dicey. On the successful end, Lending Stats.com reports people making upwards of 23% Return on investment. Looking at one of the portfolios, the loan amounts are for roughly $6000 dollars so a 23% ROI means about $115 rolling in each month. On the not so successful end, I’ve lost about 50 bucks so far. It goes without saying that a lot of research and a sound strategy are required to be successful. The person with the 23% ROI has a high majority of loans in the B grade category. I wrote a little about my strategy but you probably don’t want to lose money.

4. How to make money online writing for eHow

eHow is probably the biggest article site around and they provide a platform for you to publish “how to” style articles on almost anything. I’ve found the most promise with this so far and have seen my revenue steadily increase over time. The name of the game is writing good eHow articles and plenty of them. It takes a little bit of time to figure out what makes a “good” eHow article and I’ve tried to give some tips on what I’ve found works. Writergig’s ebook does a great job of laying out how she makes over $1000/month and can certainly help you jump the learning curve; but it’s not required in order to be successful. While not everyone is breaking the $1K/month barrier, Write for eHow blog interviewed top eHow earners and each one is making more than that.

5. Taking Stock in Photography with istockphoto.com

istockphoto.com is the photographer’s version of a content site, allowing you to upload your stock photos for sale to various interested parties. Being one of the “premier” stock photo agencies, they have some quality standards that may make it tricky to get started. The earnings schedule is a little bizarre but there are numerous people making $500+/month. The big caveat on this one is that it takes a decent amount of equipment to get started. Realistically, if you have a DSLR or a really good point-and-shoot camera you can probably get started right away; however, if you get into it and want to excel (and let your ego get the best of you) you’ll want higher quality which means more equipment.

6. Put your Graphic Arts Degree to use with Zazzle.com

Zazzle.com is a Print-on-Demand site that takes your pictures, artwork, or designs and puts them on a whole slew of different media (t-shirts, stationary, mugs, skateboards, etc.). It’s a great place to sell some items if you have good ideas for t-shirts or want to start a stationary style business (mostly wedding or graduation related) or you have some really good marketable designs (say, for a tie or t-shirt). The site is extremely user friendly and only takes a few minutes to set things up. The one thing you’ll need to have besides ideas is some sort of graphics editing software. Set up is easy, design is what you make of it but the real hard part to being successful is marketing. Zazzle has a prosellers account that gives you all sorts of promotional support once you make $100/month for 3 consecutive months. There are plenty of regular prosellers out there; however, I had trouble locating any of the higher performing prosellers such as the silver ($1000) or gold ($5000).

7. Freelance Writing Without the Commitment: Write Articles for Bukisa.com

I feel that Bukisa is an excellent compliment to eHow. Bukisa is a writing site that has a much more open format – you can write about anything and the earnings are driven by views so you don’t have to sell people on anything. The two great things about Bukisa are 1.) it’s completely free and 2.) the referral system is generously multi-tiered. They just published a spotlight on their top earner who made $2527.10. Honestly, this isn’t a lot for online article sites; however, Bukisa is still young and may gain traffic as they age.

8. Straight-up Cash Grab. $500. ING DIRECT

There is no two ways about it. This is a straight-up one-time cash grab of $500. ING DIRECT is looking to get more customers and are trying to sweeten the pot by dishing out money to both you, the referrer, and your buddy, the new guy. I’ve used ING DIRECT for several years now and have been very satisfied with their service. I’ve convinced a few friends and family to sign up using this offer, but it’s definitely not as easy as it sounds. Of course, the earning potential on this is $500. That’s it.

9. Earn Online Income with Amazon Associates Program

The Amazon Associate program is their version of an affiliate program. Basically you drive traffic to Amazon.com and get a commission on whatever they buy. Using Amazon as an intro to affiliate marketing is great because it’s very easy to get started and they have a shit-ton of tools to help make affiliate marketing easier. Their commission schedule is tiered so you make more percentage-wise as you get more sales. The earning potential on this is pretty much limitless, it all depends on how much traffic you can drive to Amazon and that means having content!

10. Annoy Your Friends and Make Money at the Same Time with Adf.ly

Adf.ly is a link-shortening system that inserts an advertisement between your link and its destination. They give you half of what they earn and if you followed my calculations you’d make $100 a year. Granted, my calculations were a bit conservative but there doesn’t seem to be an incredible amount of potential. It’s just one more tool in you online money making arsenal. I should mention that I did see a proof payment (Paypal Screenshot) for a $228 transfer. Not that it couldn’t be faked but why 228? You can always give it a shot; it’s free.

I’m hoping to pick up the pace on my ways to make money online. It’s very easy to get distracted and part of making money online is going out there and doing it (instead of writing about it). I hope that you have found this helpful so far and if you have any money making ideas I’d love to hear them!

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