1000 Ways to Make Money Online

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

During the 30 days that I was taking the self-imposed hubchallenge I was able to create only 67 hubs. Not great by any means. I did keep going though and now I am up close to 80 hubs. I didn’t have a super clear direction. I used some of the advice I gleaned from Make Money Online with SEO where I tried to pick topics that people were looking for answers and that were getting significant amounts of traffic without a ton of competition (over 1K less than 20K when using the exact selection of Google’s external keyword tool) and I would try to sprinkle lots of long tail keywords throughout the document. Health related hubs seem to be the most relevant for the “people needing answers” part (you could put natural cure for anything and write an article about it); however, it tended to have a lot more research to write the article (probably because I didn’t want to give bad advice) and the market was much more saturated for health related hubs.

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?

So after two months of hubchallenging, here are the earnings:

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

So while my earnings aren’t ground breaking I’m pretty glad I spent the time to do this. For one, they will always be there (well, they should be) so any money made from them is on bonus time. Secondly, it gave me both a glimpse of the hard work that’s required to go into it as well as plenty of practice; more or less for free. Unfortunately, I’ve taken to reading more than I have to content creation so my productivity as tailed-off. However, I have some pretty clear plans on how I want to continue so here’s my game plan:

• 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

Unfortunately I fell short on the 100 hubs in thirty days and my earnings expectations still exceeded what I actually made but I think that Hubpages is the perfect way to start making money online. I like it because it’s more or less training wheels for how to make content and webpages as a webmaster. It’s great because you can check out an idea for a niche for free and you still have some of the Hubpages clout to see if your idea is worthwhile. You can play around with keywords and long-tails, improve your ad copy and practice your writing style without spending any money or the frustration of not ranking on your own site. Then once you’ve found a niche you like you’ve got a handful of articles that can link to your own site and propel it forward with less of a wait time. Even the hubs that don’t work out can spread some link juice when used appropriately. If you’re at all considering making money online by writing content, I would recommend Hubpages as the perfect stepping stone and doing your own 100 hub challenge would get you a long way on your journey.

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