Yes it’s true.  I’m snuggled up in front of the computer looking very glamorous in my dressing gown and fluffy socks.  I love that I can wear whatever I like to ‘work’.  It’s lilac if you are wondering.  And I know you were. 

This week I’ve had quite a few people ask me why I love HubPages so much and to be honest I wouldn’t say I love them, but I do like them a lot.  However, they are still just a means to an end.  Right now they rank well in Google on their own and they are great for backlinks to your own sites but I’m fully aware that they are becoming more and more popular so the good times might not last forever.

It was the same with Squidoo – at one time Google loved them, but not so much anymore.  And also with Blogger – it used to be that you could get a blogspot blog ranked within 24 hours.  It seems to take a week or more now and they don’t have the same Google love as they once had unless you can point a heck of a lot of backlinks at them.

So I’m not naive enough to think that HubPages is going to be great forever.  But for now I like them.  They work.

And of course they are a free way to get a lot of different pages up online – so they are really good for beginners.

But if you are REALLY serious about making money online then you do need to start building your own websites.  Yes it costs money for hosting and domain names.  Yes it takes a bit more work to get them going when they are new.  But Yes you have full control of them and as long as you don’t create big ol’ spam sites it’s likely that you’ll get Google’s approval fairly easily.  And of course Yes any money that you make is 100% yours.

That should be the goal of everyone online – to have their own sites that they have full control over – but in the meantime, whether you are testing out which affiliate products are going to convert well for you, or what keywords are likely to bring you the most traffic then it’s perfectly acceptable (and I encourage you) to use Hubpages.

Using eBay and Hubpages

Last week I made a lofty goal of a making lots of eBay related Hubs so I could increase my eBay affiliate income and so far I’ve got less than 20 up.  Some on my regular hub account and some on another hub account I have (yes I have more than one account because I’ve started noticing people copying my hubs so I’ve got a ‘secret’ hub account to test further products).

What I’ve found so far is that hubs that I have the article and then the ebay listings directly below it are getting a few clicks but not that many.  The hubs where I’ve put the ebay listings to the right of the text are getting a much higher clickthrough.  I suggest that whatever you are promoting on hubpages that you take advantage of that top right area as the key place to put your monetisation.

More about HubPages for beginners

I’ve had some people ask me how they get started with hubpages, so if you are a beginner then read this (if you are already a seasoned hubber then you can skip this part).

Basically HubPages is a site where you can create one page ‘mini-sites’ on any topic you like.  You can have as many of these ‘mini-sites’ as you like on whatever topics that you would like to write about.  You can add text, video’s, polls, images, links through the use of various capsules that you can use with your hub.

Each hubpage has a score, and you also have an overall author score.  If you are using hubpages for backlinks to your own site then you’ll need to make sure that your hub has a score of over 49 and your author score is also above 75 to make the links do follow.  That’s pretty easy to do if you have a good quality hub.  Because the top level domain has a PR 6 they are good for high quality backlinks.

If you want to make a good hub that will rank well in the search engines then you’ll need to write at least 400 words of original content (placed in a text capsule).  While they will accept and publish duplicate content it will get flagged as substandard  and your hub score will suffer – so it’s worth the extra bit of time to write something unique.

Because hubs tend to rank well on their own, or with a few links pointed at them they are also great for directly monetising them.  You can use the ebay or amazon capsules that hubpages provides or place your own affiliate links directly into either the text or links capsule.  (Note: you can’t place a direct ebay link on your hub because ebay doesn’t allow direct links on sites that you don’t own).

If you are thinking of promoting Clickbank products then I’ve written a hub on how to do that as well – Promoting Clickbank Products on HubPages.  I don’t have a lot of Clickbank product hubs up there myself but the ones I do I get a few sales per month – I’m looking to expand that next year.

The way most people use hubpages however is for adsense income.  And money you make from your hub through the capsules or from adsense you’ll get 60% of the revenue (hubpages get’s the other 40%).  Think that’s fair?  I do.  I’ve got tons of articles up at ezineartlces.com and not once did they give me a dime for the ads on my articles.

You need to make sure that you take advantage of hubpages tag’s as well.  Many of the tag pages on hubpages are high PR as well which means more high pr links pointing at your page.  I usually try and add between 5 and 15 depending on the subject of my hub.

Because they are free and only cost you a bit of time to write something it’s definately worth your time in setting up a few hubpages to see how you go.

More Amazon Tips

Have you got some Amazon hubs up yet?  I want your goal to get at least 20 or so up before Christmas.  You’ve only got around 2 months before the Christmas selling season starts up and people buy physical products by the bucket load.

The usual pattern is October your sales will start to pick up and in November and early December they will explode.  You want to get as many sites up as you can because you not only get credit for the products that you directly promote, but also whatever else they put into their shopping cart.  Last year I had someone purchase a stripping pole in their shopping cart as well as the item I was promoting (which was a child’s toy).  Hmm not sure how they go together, but I get the commission no matter what they buy so who cares.

If you can afford it, I’d also suggest getting a few of your own sites up as well from the products that are selling well.  (Last year I’d notice that I was getting sales for lots of products that I wasn’t promoting, so I’d quickly get a site up as quick as I could).

Well I’m off to curl up in front of the TV now.  I’ll catch you all next week. 

Take care
T xx

I’ve had quite a good week in terms of getting things done but surprisingly I haven’t made one ClickBank sale as an affiliate. Not one!

I think perhaps this week I need to spend a bit of time increasing the ranking and amount of pages that I have out there. The more pages you have, the better chances you have of making some sales.

Autoblogging Update

I told you last week that I was trying out Instant Blog Submitter to test autoblogging on one of my old domains. Well the program up and stopped working on me last Tuesday. It keep coming up with an error about sockets or something. (I don’t know – I’m so untechnical).

I was still keen on the idea of autoblogging though, so I’ve downloaded a free wordpress plugin called wp-o-matic. That does all of the stuff I was using Instant Blog Submitter for (pulling rss feeds and publishing them to my blog) but it’s free. Can’t do better than free I say.

So far I’ve got 81 posts on the site – and I haven’t written one myself. Google has indexed about half of them. I’ve only had 4 search engine visitors so far though. Once I get to about 10 per day then I’ll add some eBay monetisation.

Just a note. If you want to try this I suggest that you DO NOT put adsense on your sites to monetize. It creates kind of junky posts and some don’t make much sense. Use either clickbank, ebay or amazon (depending on your niche).

I also suggest adding some youtube video’s and articles (grab them from ezinearticles keeping the resource box intact) so you get even more content.

Making Money Online with Amazon

I had quite a few people want to know more about making money with Amazon so I thought I’d let you know exactly what I do. This method can be applied to clickbank, cpa or anything really. I should really write an ebook and charge you all $27 for it – and if I was a good internet marketer that’s probably what I’d do, but you know what, I don’t care about that anymore and I really don’t have the time.

Anyway the biggest trick for making money with Amazon is to target actual product names. This way you’ll get people at the end of the buying cycle who are looking to buy with credit card in hand. Don’t bother yourself trying to find related long tail phrases, go right to the people who are ready to buy.

I usually head over to Amazon and check out their bestseller lists first, then look in Google Adwords to see how many searches they get. Finally I check out competition by using the intitle search parameter to see my competition. I usually do this for around 10 or so products and then set up hubpages or squidoo lens (I’m preferring hubs at the moment) around those products. If one product starts to make some good money then I’ll build a website around it to further capitalise on it.

Let’s take a look at this in more detail. I’ll take you through a process so you can follow along.

Let’s say that you want to target kids bicycles. Looking at Amazon’s bestselling products the top seller (as I write this) is a trike called Schwinn Roadster 12-Inch Trike. It’s a good price so you’ll earn a decent commission (although I rarely worry too much about price).

Heading over to Google Adwords Keyword Tool I plug in a few variations to find out the exact match searches for various phrases that people might use when searching for that item.

Make sure you have exact match selected in the match type drop down.

The results I get for this trike is:

schwinn roadster – 1,600
schwinn roadster 12 inch trike – 720
schwinn roadster trike – 590
schwinn roaster 12 inch – 36

Right now the top three look promising. I like them to have over 500 exact match searches – preferably over 1,000 though.

Now let’s look at the competition for the first three. I go to google and type in intitle:”keyword” to find competition. That’s just how I do it. You might have a different way.

Using this I find that I get the following number of competing pages:

schwinn roadster – 12,800
schwinn roadster 12 inch trike – 1,020
schwinn roadster trike – 163

I usually look for results under 1,000. I’d probably made an exception for the second one because it’s so close. The top phrase has too much competition – it’s unlikely to make you any money, but the bottom two are good candidates.

Next I’d create a hub or lens using that exact phrase in the title and probably a few extra times through the text too.

There you go. Easy! Now go and build yourself some pages.

JV Auction Profits Review

My former coaching teacher John Thornhill has just released a new ebook called JV Auction Profits and I was lucky enough to get a review copy from him. In his latest guide, he talks about how to use eBay to secure joint venture deals.

You can use his ideas whether you have a product or a list. He even gives help and advice if you have neither of these, and how you can still make money using this method.

He will give you his exact email that he uses to send to potential JV partners, what to say and how to set up the deal. The best part of the guide however is Chapter Nine in which John goes into detail about how he used this method to make $34,000 from one deal. The ebook is worth it just for this chapter!

It’s only a short little guide – 30 pages – but it’s got some really great information on making money this way. And the best thing is that John is only charging $10 for it. An excellent price for some good information.

Find out more …

My plans for this week

Well I’m going to concentrate on my adsense sites this week. I’m getting some good rankings for long tails, but I’d like to get my main keyphrases a bit higher in the search engines. I’ve written a few articles and I’ll also do some more backlinking from commenting and using Angela & Pauls links as well to get this higher if I can.

Phew, my fingers are starting to hurt. I think I’ll leave it there for now, but I’ll write more soon.

Take care
Tracey

As many of my regular blog readers will know, I was a huge Info Product Killer fan last year, and I made quite a healthy profit using their method last Christmas making lots of little Amazon Niche sites. 

Well I’ve just updated my Info Product Killer blog with the results from the last six months and thought you’d like to know what they have done since then.

Last Christmas period (October to December) I made over $10,000 profit from the Amazon Affiliate Program. That was with just 10 small websites and very little work. Which is why I love being an Amazon affiliate it’s very easy to make money with.

A lot of people avoid using Amazon to make money online because of the small commission levels (why promote a $20 book for around $1 commission when you can promote a ClickBank product and make $40 per sale).

Of course I do promote both, Amazon and ClickBank, but I actually feel it’s far easier to make money promoting Amazon products simply because physical products are much more in demand than ebooks.

So let’s go over how I made so much money in such a short period of time. First of all, I used the techniques outlined in Info Product Killer (which is an awesome ebook) so they weren’t entirely my ideas, and at the time I did have an Adwords campaign running as well (although I only had a very small budget).

I only ran the Adwords campaign over Christmas and since then (in the last six months) I’ve still been making a consistent $500 to $800 per month commission from Amazon and I’ve barely touched any of the sites or promoted them in any way since then.

So how can you do the same? How can you make money as an Amazon affiliate?

First you will need an Amazon affiliate account (duh!), so if you haven’t already got one then head over and apply. They usually take up to a week to approve you so sit tight and be patient.

Once they approve you, you’ll be able to start promoting their products.

Some people will tell you to only choose high cost products like TV’s, but to be honest I’ll promote anything that’s hot – one of my best selling items this month was a $15 book. It may only pay me around $1 each time someone buys it, but I’m selling around 10 to 20 of these a day. It all adds up.

And of course, you also get an Amazon affiliate commission with anything else your customer decides to put into their shopping cart, so I often get credit for items I wasn’t even promoting!

Choosing A Product to Promote

The best and easiest way to choose a product to promote is to keep your eyes and ears open to hot trends. Anything that is being advertised on television is a perfect thing to promote online. I like to watch The View or Oprah to see what products or books the guests are flogging and create a website around that.

Or you can think seasonally, people buy coats and scarfs in Winter and pool supplies in Summer.

You can also take the easy option out and go right to Amazon itself and check out the bestselling items in each of their categories.

Once you have a list of potential items to promote then it’s time to do some keyword research. Ideally you are looking for something that has at least 1000 search per month and less than 250,000 competing sites. Keyword research only works if the product has been around for a while though, if it’s brand new (I like to promote new products because no-one else has jumped on them yet and you have virtually no competition) then your keyword research won’t help because there will be no stats available yet.

If you’d like to test a few products before you decide to build a website then start a free hub or blog and see what converts for you.

Next use the product name in your domain name (or hub name if you hubbing) only if the company allows it – some companies don’t care, other’s are very sensitive about it. That will give you the best search engine juice.

Write a review mentioning the product a few times and put a big picture on the page and of course links to buy the product at Amazon.

That’s how easy it is.

You should start to see some sales as soon as your websites / hubs get indexed and traffic.

Of course, if you serious about making money as an Amazon Affiliate I really recommend that you get Info Product Killer as well. It worked great for me.