1000 Ways to Make Money Online

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