Making Money Online in your Dressing Gown

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