Just a quick little blog post today to let you know that I’m going to be doing the new contest over at HubPages called The Helpful Health Hubs Contest (try saying that five times fast).  I’m not going to be doing it for the prizes (I guarantee that my hubs won’t be good enough – I’m there to make money not perfect long hubs) but I still think it will be a fun challenge anyway.

I wanted to start winding down the amount of work I’m doing online this month because I’ve only got 7 or so weeks to go before the baby gets here (and in that time we’ve got to find a new place to live) so thought this might be a fun little project to do for March that shouldn’t take up too much time but still has the potential to earn some cash.

Anyway if you want to have a go as well then head over to HubPages and read the rules for their health hub contest.  It officially starts 12.00pm PT.

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

This week has been fairly good online, and while it’s been fairly boring doing the same old thing everyday (except for weekends which I now take off), I’ve been quite productive.

I have to say that Internet Marketing isn’t all that glamorous. I know you hear all these stories and false promises of how you can make a million overnight just by doing this one easy thing, but really it’s like anything in life – the more you put into it, the more you get out. There aren’t any shortcuts – it’s about putting the work in: building websites, writing articles, getting backlinks and so forth.

And while you are likely to make a little bit of money in the beginning, the real money comes when you have hundreds of websites up, hundreds of articles directly traffic to them, hundreds of backlinks pointing at them.

Yes it can seem overwhelming, but just start with that first blog or first hubpage and take baby steps and build from there. If you can make $10 a month from one website, then build 100 more and you’ll be making $1,000 a month. If you can only build one hubpage or blog per day (5 days per week) then by the end of the year you could have over 250 pages out there that could potential be earning you income.

Imagine if those 250 sites/blogs/hubs (whatever you build) were making an average of $10 per month each. In 12 months time you’ve just made yourself an income of $2,500 per month. Of course you could make more or less than that – but I think that estimate is pretty reasonable.

But it does take commitment and action.

Autoblogging Update

My auto blog that I set up two weeks ago has now got over 100 posts indexed online, but the problem seems to be traffic. Yes I already knew that this was a highly competitive niche but when I had BANS on it I was still getting a trickle of traffic. Now it seems I’m getting none at all. In the past week, the search engines have sent me a total of 3 visitors. 3 !! Hmm . Perhaps this experiment isn’t turning out as lucrative as I would have hoped.

I know it’s still early days, but I might hold off adding any more new posts to it for a while until I can see that it’s going to pay off.

Making Money Online with HubPages

I’m still really enjoying the income and rankings that I’m seeing with Hubpages. Of course not every hub is paying off, but the more hubs you have out there, the more chance you will have of making some money.

Recently I’ve just started experimenting with Hubpages and the eBay affiliate program. My goal is to get as many eBay hubs going as I can. Right now I’ve only got 5 up, but I want to get at least 100 up if I can manage it over the next few months in the lead up to Christmas.

Now using the eBay affiliate program is a little different to using the Amazon one in that eBay don’t allow you to add your affiliate links directly into websites that you don’t own. You can however use the eBay module that hubpages supplies. Same goes with squidoo – no direct links, but you can use their module (or capsule or whatever it’s called).

This of course does limit the income you can make since the revenue is shared with Hubpages, but it will be a good way to see which products are winner’s so that you can then go on and expand on them.

I’m choosing the products by going to eBay Pulse and seeing what the popular searches for different categories are. Then I’ll use my usual method of choosing suitable keywords which I’ve now named Tracey’s 1000:1000 method of keyword selection.

Tracey’s 1000:1000 Keyword Selection Method

I’ve already gone over this in a few of my previous post, but for new reader’s the rules are this.

Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and enter your keywords. Change the match type to Exact Match. You only want the keywords that have 1000 exact match searches or more per month. Next you go to Google and check out the competition. You enter intitle:”your keyword” into the search and see how many search results you get back. If the results are 1000 or LESS then you have found a good keyword to use.

That is the method I use, it works well for me.

ClickBank Update

I don’t know what happened last week, as this week my ClickBank sales are back to normal. Admittedly I’m not a huge Clickbank affiliate since I think most of the products suck but you can make a decent living promoting them. I will probably try and increase this over the next few months though.

Making Money with Amazon

I had quite a few questions regarding the Amazon method I’ve been taking about in my last few pots which I’ll briefly go over here. Mainly asking how many incoming links you need, how many supporting sites you should have, if you have to write articles, if you can choose products not on the bestseller lists, and so forth.

Here’s the deal. Yes you will probably need some sort of backlinks to your hubs for them to rank well. Hubs do rank quite well on their own, especially if the competition is crap, but some do need more work.

How do you tell which ones need backlinks and which ones don’t?

Easy. Write a hub. Leave it two weeks. If it’s on Page 1 for your main keyword then hooray you don’t need to do any more work.

If it is not then you’ll need some backlinks to it using your keyword as the anchor text.

How do you get backlinks?

Other hubs that are related – say your first hub was promoting a certain tennis racket, then have a second hub for another tennis racket with a link back to the first hub. Or even a tennis ball, heck it doesn’t even have to be that related, link to it from your weight loss hub if you like – the whole myth that you need backlinks from related websites is a crock – I have links from all sorts of places and do well.

Articles are another great source of backlinks. Ezinearticles, GoArticles etc.

Other Web 2.0 sites. Write a blogger blog linking to your hub. And a squidoo lens. And an InfoBarrell. And a free wordpress blog. Heck if you wanted to, you could go right ahead and create your own linkwheel to boost your rankings. I’ve often done that for more competitive items.

And finally, no you don’t need to target only the bestselling items on Amazon. Target anything you like. I only suggested that as a starting point because it’s easy. Any product that fits the 1000:1000 keyword selection rule is fair game.

I suggest you get started making up some Amazon and EBay product related hubs now because come Christmas (when everyone is in a buying mode) you are likely to pocket some very nice cash. If you get all your websites and hubs set up now, you’ll be in a very good position come October/November (when Christmas buying seasons starts heating up).

Well I’m getting hungry so it might be time to end this post and go make some lunch. Hope you enjoyed it. Catch you all again next week

Tracey xx

I’ve been a bit slack about updating my blog lately as I’ve been busy with other projects, and of course I’m also doing the 30 Day Hubpages Challenge.  I’ve been writing one hub a day for the last 25 days (I’ve got 5 more hubs, and 5 more days to go).

So far it’s going ok, I’ve made over $80 in the last 2 1/2 weeks from Adsense and Amazon sales which I’m assuming will keep ticking over nicely once I finish.  Just another income stream to add to your belt. 

Of course, I’m nowhere in the league of Court Tuttle over at The Keyword Academy who is making far more money with hubpages than I am.  Although to be fair, he writing 100 hubs in 30 days, and has loads more experience with making money with Adsense that I do.

In the last few years online, most of my money has been made promoting affiliate products and writing my own online guides and ebooks, so Adsense is new to me in how you set out your pages and get traffic, but ever since I joined The Keyword Academy my eyes have been opened to new money possibilities.

If you are thinking about making money online, and specifically using adsense and SEO then you really should consider joining The Keyword Academy Course as well – members get some killer resources and the video’s are worth every penny (first month is just $1).