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 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

July Earnings

I had a really good month last month, which is funny because I probably did the least amount of work online than I normally do. My total earnings were just over $3,000 for the month which was a mix of affiliate sales (primarily Amazon), and also some Adsense and sales of my own products.

I must admit that I’m getting pretty good at making money with Amazon, but that’s probably because it’s the one way of making money online that I enjoy the most. I mean what girl doesn’t like shopping

$3,000 isn’t the most I’ve ever made in a month, I made over $10,000 last Christmas promoting Amazon products, but I used PPC then to drive traffic to my sites. Now I’m using SEO baby. I love SEO. So I’m actually more excited about the $3,000 than I was over my Christmas earnings because it means that I’m learning this SEO game.

So my next goal is to get to $5,000 per month. That’s $US too – not $AUS which would be considerable less in my pocket

So I’ve decided to be a little more open about what I actually do in my blog so that I might hopefully be able to inspire you to do the same and earn money from home as well. Because after all, who actually wants a real job – I certainly don’t! LOL

My Plans for This Week/Month

At the start of every month I usually go and do the backlinks that I get from Angela’s and Paul’s backlink packages. I try and space it out over a period of two weeks or so. I usually do around 6 to 8 backlinks a day using their guidelines to one site only. This get’s me a total of 80 backlinks over the course of the month.

There has been a lot of controversy over their backlink packages now that they are becoming more common and more and more people are using them. Because the idea is to place your link inside a profile page on a high PR site some sites are getting wise and when a few hundred people all sign up to their website for the sole purpose of placing a link on it, some of them are getting a bit cranky.

Therefore people are saying that Google is going to crack down soon on links from profile pages. I have no idea whether that is true or not, in fact I don’t like to speculate what Google will or will not do. It would be hard to determine whether you are just signing up to place a link legimately or for spamming purposes. These sites ALLOW links on their profile pages – which means that you ARE allowed to do it. They are just pissed that you don’t stick around longer.

My personal take on it is that while I do agree that it’s borderline profile spamming by just signing up to place a link, I make sure that I only place links to good sites (so no porn or viagra sites – not that I have any of these anyway). In fact I mainly link to my hubpages. I’ve found that it only takes around 20 to 30 links to get my hub on Page 1. I’m thinking of using a different hubpage name lately though as I’ve noticed that many people are following and copying the hubs that I make. LOL I guess I should be flattered.

Secondly I also plan to write a lot of articles this month. Ezinearticles have a challenge on at the moment called their #HAHD challenge (Hundred Articles Hundred Days). I’ve always been a fan of article marketing both for traffic and backlinks so I’ll be ramping up my article writing efforts to my sites this week. I’m not sure I’ll make the 100 in 100 days (although that’s a reasonable amount to do) but I’ll see how I go. Even if I only do 50 in 100 days that’s still a big jump in traffic and backlinks.

Finally I’m going to try and bring more traffic to some of the resell rights books that I purchased and hopefully make some more sales there.

I like the fact that money goes straight into my PayPal account rather than having to wait months for a check to arrive like with Amazon. I’ve got around 5 or so ebooks that I’m trying to sell this way – mostly straight from article marketing. I currently only have around 1 or 2 articles pointing at each salespage, so with this article writing challenge I should be able to increase that and thus ‘hopefully’ increase my income.

Making Money Online by Autoblogging

I was also asked to take a look at Instant Blog Submitter and give my opinion on it. It’s a neat little program that allows you to make quick posts to your blogs but more importantly it has a feature where you can grab rss feeds and get content submitted to your blogs over a period of time.

I’ve never got into auto blogging before but I kind of like the idea of it. So I’ve taken one of my old domains that had a BANS site on it that get’s virtually no traffic. Last month this site got a massive 41 visits and made 0.50 cents on eBay. I know I’m already planning on what I can buy with my profits.

So I’ve taken BANS off and put up a Wordpress blog. I’ve scheduled a few blog posts and twitter feeds to be ‘autoblogged’ onto it over the next week and I’m really interested to see how it goes. If it’s a success I plan on rolling it out over a few more of my blogs.

It takes a bit of getting used to (probably because I’ve never used an auto poster before) and I had to watch the video on the sales page to understand what I should be doing, but once I did I think I’ve got the hang of it.

One thing I wish it did have was the ability to insert keywords so you can get a more specific feed to your blog, but alas it does not. That means you’ll have to do a little more work finding relevant content to post.

I haven’t monetised the site yet as I’m waiting to see what will happen with traffic first.

I’ll keep you updated on my results.

 

Wow, this is the longest post I’ve written for a long time on this blog – I think Ben & Griz influences are starting to rub off on me

Now I need to go and do some work and start making money online (have I said that keyword enough yet LOL). Catch ya!

The latest software that my friends have all jumped on is called Niche Devil and it is created by a well known hilarious internet marketer named Victor Franqui.

By the way, when I say friends that’s not completely true as most of them don’t have a clue who the heck I am, but I do devour their blogs every time they write a new post since they have so much good information about making money online.

I was first alerted to Niche Devil when my favourite marketer Griz posted it on his blog and since whenever Griz posts ANYTHING on his make money blog I’m there in a flash.

Then I went over and checked out the sales page and video’s that Vic had put up about his new software. The video shows how he creates a complete eBay affiliate store online within 36 seconds (or something crazy like that). Heck I can’t even login to HubPages within 36 seconds so that’s impressive.

Now on the face value of it, it seems a pretty neat little script and I can definitely see its potential. It’s kinda like BANS (Build a Niche Store) on steroids. The advantage it has over BANS is that it creates lots of content on the site rather than just eBay ads which should please the big G since they love content.

Believe me, I was tempted at first.

But here is the reason I’m not buying it.

It has nothing to do with the cost or whether it could make me money or not. And it has nothing to do whether I think it’s a good script or not – heck I have no idea, I’ve not actually used it – it could make you millions within a week for all I know.

No, the reason why I’m not buying Niche Devil is because I don’t have the time to commit to it. A program like this needs time to set up AT LEAST 100 websites – probably more. Another of my favourite marketer’s, Ben from Make Money with SEO plans on making 1,000 Niche Devil sites. Yes, 1,000 !! I know. Ben is a cyber robot from another planet – I’m sure of this.

I have no doubt he’ll make money. Just as I have no doubt that if you commit to 100+ sites you’ll probably make money as well.

But this isn’t for me right now. I’m too busy with other projects.

So if I’m not buying it, then what on earth is the point of this post – I haven’t even included any affiliate links to Niche Devil (I know – what sort of internet marketer am I?).

Well my main purpose of this post to let my regular readers know it’s ok not to jump on the latest guru product for whatever reason and that’s ok.
Just because you follow someone and admire their marketing strategies and even follow some of their ideas doesn’t mean you should try and become a clone of them. You should be trying out things yourself and learning as you go. Buy products if they make sense to you and your business plan, but skip them if you can’t find the time to commit to them (because most products or eBooks DO require action and commitment for them to be successful).

Like I said, I have no idea if Niche Devil is good or not, that’s not the point. I don’t have the time to commit to it in my current business plan so I’m not buying it. That’s it really.

Peace
Tracey