1000 Ways to Make Money Online

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