Court and I have spent the last couple of years together building our brand in the world of making money online. We enjoy it, and we’re not going anywhere (at least we hope to hang around if our audience and subscribers will have us for a few more years!).

At the same time, we’ve realized that there’s a whole world out there we’ve ignored - the world of the small business owner looking to find new customers and clients through the search engines. So we’ve decided it’s time to establish a new brand that gives us a chance to reach out to that market. We’d like to introduce you to SEO Educators (http://seoeducators.net - the site is under construction at the moment). SEO Educators is looking to help the small business owner that knows she could be pulling customers and clients from Google and Yahoo! every month, but doesn’t have thousands of dollars to pay an SEO firm to help her get ranked. Our goal is to give this kind of entrepreneur an SEO plan she can implement with the resources (time, money, and staff) she already has.

But the point of this post isn’t to sell you on SEO Educators, so I’ll stop there. You can check out the site in the next week or so when the copy is written if you’re interested.

So what is the point of this post? There are actually three:

1. Help Us Out with Our Logo Design Contest

Court and I are notoriously bad when it comes to design. Not only do neither of us have a shred of design ability, we can’t even really say what we like or don’t like in a design. Some friends of ours turned us on to 99designs.com. For somebody as design-impaired as me 99designs.com is an absolute heaven-send. In a nutshell, you sign up to run a design contest, write a brief about what you need, and then tens of thousands of designers have the chance to submit an entry in hopes of winning the cash prize you established at the beginning of the contest. Seriously, this is brilliant. You can read more about what 99designs can do for you here.

Court and I would really love to have feedback and suggestions on our logo design contest. Pop over and check it out if you like. We need all the help we can get.

2. Do You Have Access to Small Business Owners? Join the SEO Educators Affiliate Program

We need affiliates! 99% of our traffic is geared toward making money online, and we need to talk to small business owners. If you’re a web designer, developer, marketing consultant…or anybody else that knows some business owners, send me an email (mark[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com) so I can get in touch with you about becoming an affiliate. We’re tentatively planning a lead-based affiliate program where your job will be to get people to reach out to us, and you’ll be paid healthy commissions when we convert those leads to clients.

3. Sales Experience? Become An Independent Sales Rep for SEOEducators.net

Some of you may know I spent four years as an inside sales rep and sales manager before quitting to work full-time with Court. I miss sales and I’ve looked forward to creating a product with Court that would give us the chance to partner with a solid group of independent sales reps who could take our product to market and earn a great living at it. We know there are quite a few corporate sales types out of work right now, and we’d like to give a good opportunity to a few people who want to make a full time living talking to small business owners about our SEO educational products.

Initially, we’re looking to work with three or four people who’d like to earn upwards of $50,000 per year as a rep for our business. Wow, did that ever sound like an MLM pitch, so let me clarify. This will be commission-only sales; you’ll be paid one commission if you prospected the client yourself and a different commission if we generate a lead and you make the sale. The reason I say upwards of $50,000 per year is not because we can make any guarantees about your earnings, or the number of lead you’ll get etc. I say $50,000 because we’re looking for people to work full-time on this, and I don’t think it would be worth it if you were going to make less than $50,000 for your trouble. Ideally I’d like to see our reps making in the $75,000 to $100,000 range.

As I said, I was in commission sales for years, so I don’t throw those numbers around ignorantly or lightly. If you have sales ability and confidence, get in touch with me and we’ll talk about whether this could be a good fit. I can tell you this would have been my dream sales job when I was in sales - working from home (or wherever I wanted) making as many sales as I decided to make, and not having an annoying sales manager bugging me all the time because he’s trying to beef up his bonuses. We’re looking for some independent spirits with the ability to explain value and close. Most people reading this just shuddered in semi-horror. We’re looking for the three of you who think that sounds friggin cool. Again, email me if this has any appeal at all to you and we’ll talk about the details.

And that’s it! Check out our logo contest, become an affiliate for SEOEducators.net, and let us know if you’re interested in an independent sales job.

Have a great one everybody.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been conducting a make money online experiment to determine if HubPages is a viable tool that can be used to make money. The official start date of the experiment was May 11, 2009. This experiment didn’t come out of nowhere, in fact the main reason that I wanted to do this with HubPages was because I had created a few hubs here and there and they had done surprisingly well for me. I decided that I would create 100 hubs in 30 days and track the results to see how well those hubs could produce.

Before I got started the Marketing Manager (Ryan Hupfer) at HubPages contacted me and got involved with the experiment. We turned it into a contest and a lot of people that already use HubPages joined in.

Week 1 Recap

I worked really hard the first week because I knew that in order to make anything within 30 days I would have to get a lot of work done in the first week. I was able to create 40 hubs during the first week. I knew that the hubs would produce some money during the first week but honestly they exceeded my expectations. By the time I published the week 1 update I had already made $56.20. I didn’t start tracking with Google Analytics until after week 1, so the best I can do for the first week is a screen-shot of the Adsense channel I used:

Week 2 Recap

The second week went amazingly well - read the week 2 update here. Between May 18 and May 24 my hubs produced $112.56 with Adsense. I had a day during that week when the hubs produced $23.21. The performance during week 2 was definitely more than I expected when I started the experiment. During week 2 I didn’t create as many hubs as I did during the first week, but I had over half of them done by the end of the week. Here’s a screen shot of the results, taken from Google Analytics:

Week 3 Recap

Since I didn’t create as many new hubs during week 2, week 3 didn’t go as well. I had a pullback in the income from the hubs I made during the first week and didn’t have many new ones to take their place. The pullback didn’t really surprise me because I have had this kind of thing happen on almost every experiment I’ve ever done. The income for week 3 was still solid and the hubs made $88.88:

A ton of work was done during week 3 and I completed all of the 100 hubs. Originally I thought that I might be able to create them all in the first two weeks but that didn’t happen. Fortunately I got them done in the third week and that led to a solid fourth week.

Week 4 Recap

During week 4 I was able to focus on making the hubs more useful. I did this by creating a lot of links from my hubs to other hubs that had related content. This makes it more likely that a reader finds information that they’re looking for and also allows them to see multiple sets of Adsense ads. It also provides an SEO benefit.

During week 4 the hubs made $164.11. Google Analytics wasn’t working when I created the week 4 update so I had to use an Adsense screen shot for the results:

I have now run a report with Google Analytics and that’s returning slightly different results because Adsense resets at 1:00 in the morning where I live and my Google Analytics resets at midnight. According to Analytics, the hubs produced $160.04 during that week:

Overall Recap

The total amount made during the 30 day experiment was $475.26. This includes the income from the first four weeks plus the income from days 29 and 30.

By my standards this experiment went amazingly well. A lot of other people have also created a lot of hubs in fact I know of more than one person who took this experiment bigger than I did. This makes me really happy because those people learned during this month that you can do really great things if you’re willing to work harder than other people.

Things That Contributed To The Success Of The Experiment

1. Keyword Research. I never could have done as well as I did without choosing keywords that I know I can rank for. My basic philospohy is that you need to know whether you can rank for a keyword or not before you decide to use it. You should also know how much you can make with a keyword before you go after it. Some of this information is available in The Keyword Crash Course ebook, which you can download by entering your email at the top of our right sidebar. Guys choosing keywords is huge and honestly if it isn’t clear as a bell for you, you need to become a member of  The Keyword Academy. It costs a total of $1 for your first month and you can cancel at any time. We get email after email after email gushing about how clear keyword research became for people after watching our first video.
2. Keyword Targeting. Targeting a keyword with a page really isn’t rocket science but it’s definitely something that I used. Look for the four steps in that post and follow them. Along with this I tried to create value with my hubs. Most of them are around 800 words. Some of them are longer and some of them are shorter. Part of my goal for this next month is to make them more useful and longer.
3. Links. The Keyword Academy members know exactly what I did to get links for my hubs and I’ll say this: If you can get a clean link or two for your hubs you’ll be able to make more money. Hubs are strong on their own but a solid link or two will only increase that strength.

The Future Of The Experiment

I’m not done with this experiment, in fact I’m just getting started. I have a new goal to turn these hubs into a full time income ($3000 per month) and think that I can do it within the next three months. I’m going to be adding content to the hubs and as they get older they will definitely do better with Google and other search engines.

To be clear I won’t be creating any new hubs for a while. I am going to increase the income by improving the hubs that I already have. I’ll provide updates as I go and am also looking at a few other experiments.