What troubles me the most is that it’s blatantly obvious that some individuals aren’t seeing things clearly. They don’t want to accept the realities of being in business for themselves. There are a lot of core principles that are missing and I want to help as much as I can to fill in the gaps. To get this started, I want to explain a simple example:

Driving Around The Block

Driving around the block is super easy right? Assuming that you live on a square block, there really aren’t many steps that you need to follow to make it around the block:

1. Turn right out of your drive way.
2. Drive to the end of the block.
3. Turn right.
4. Drive one block.
5. Turn right.
6. Drive one block.
7. Turn right.
8. Drive one block.
9. Turn right.
10. Drive until you get back to your house.
11. Pull back into your drive way.

Seems to be very black and white, doesn’t it? Assuming that your goal is to make it all the way around the block, at what point in the process can you stop driving? Can you stop at the 3rd step? Can you stop at the 7th step? These questions are almost insulting, aren’t they? Everyone knows that you have to complete all of the steps before you’re going to make it back to your house.

HubPages As A Business

People don’t want to see their work with HubPages as a business. Frankly, it’s easier to see it as a hobby. If it’s a hobby, you don’t feel like a failure if it doesn’t work out. Once it mentally becomes a business, that all changes. Most people will feel like a loser if their business doesn’t become successful.

Anyone can increase their earnings on HubPages. However, most people won’t. This doesn’t mean that they can’t, it simply means that they won’t. They either won’t learn the necessary steps or they won’t follow through – they won’t complete the necessary tasks.

When we did the original HubPages experiment, quite a few people created hubs. Some people created a LOT of hubs. Some did really well with their hubs while many didn’t do well at all. The differences are easy to identify for people who understand what it takes to have success with the internet. People who don’t have this understanding seem to be totally mystified.

Steps For Creating Successful Hubs

1. Identify keyword phrases that have both solid potential for making money (decent search volume and advertiser cost-per-click) and reasonable competition (keyword phrases that have low PR sites currently ranking in Google).
2. Create a well written hub that covers the topic well, using the keyword phrase in the title of the hub.
3. Create or edit existing hubs to create links for your new hub. Getting links from other hubs that you own will help you to strengthen the hub you’re working on.
4. Promote your hub so that you can get links from other sites.

If you see this as a business, you will realize that you need to complete each of these steps to produce earnings from your hub. If you see it as a hobby you do some of these steps, however, you may be missing the knowledge required to complete all of them. Or, you might not WANT to do all of them.

If you know right now that you aren’t going to complete all of the above steps, don’t do anything. Any effort that you put in without completing the steps will be a complete waste of time.

When you have a business, you don’t make anything until you complete everything that has to be done. This unfortunately is completely contrary to the way we are trained to think. We are trained from the time we’re young to trade time for money. When you have a business, you work for free and you continue to work for free until everything is done. For some businesses this will require working for free for many years. Fortunately with hubs, it won’t take nearly that long.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read about people who have created a ton of hubs without completing all of the steps. What should they expect them to earn? Absolutely nothing. Thinking that they will earn something without completing the tasks is like thinking that you can drive around the block while doing only steps 1-5 of the above steps. It’s simply ludicrous. What happens when you don’t complete the steps is you don’t make it to where you want to go.

The funny thing about my work with HubPages is that it’s the exact same thing that I do on my own sites. I have to find solid keywords, create well written content, give that content links with my site, and promote that content so that I can gather links. If I don’t complete that work I won’t make a freaking thing.

I have spent a lot of time in my life mentoring others and can tell you that when people fail, it’s because they don’t complete what has to be done. At the end of the second block, they start to question whether they can really drive around the block. Even if they keep going, they won’t make it past the second turn.

The people who will simply execute what has to be done always seem to find success no matter what they try. If you aren’t getting better with your hub earnings or any other type of online earnings, go back to the basics. Figure out which step you aren’t executing properly and get better. Complete what has to be done and you’ll find that your earnings will increase significantly.

One of the coolest things about creating web properties like hubs is the residual benefit. Naturally I see my earnings from HubPages each month and know exactly what’s going on with them. They are fairly stable and while there are natural peaks and valleys, my hubs have continued to produce very nicely. Since the date of my first hub’s completion (April 7, 2009) until today (February 11, 2010), my hubs have produced $4,003.43:

I know that these numbers aren’t enormous and in all honesty, I could have done a lot better with hubs if I had continued to work on them. I could have updated the hubs, let websites and other ‘hubbers’ know about them, and I certainly could have written some articles to help strengthen the hubs with links. I haven’t done that so it’s pretty dang cool how well the hubs have done. I noticed in my Adsense account that my hubs produced over $400 in January of this year and it’s been more than seven months since I set them up:

There are definitely a lot of ways out there that can be used to make money online. HubPages for me has been a pretty solid one. I have a total of 105 hubs which means that each one of them on average has produced $38.13. If I compare that to the amount of work that it took to set them up, it’s a pretty dang nice hourly wage. It will get more and more exciting to watch the earnings as more and more months pass by.

The Future of my 105 Hubs

I have a lot of stuff going on right now but I think it would be pretty cool to make an extra $20,000 or so from HubPages this year. There’s no question that it’s possible. I’m already on pace to make more than $6,000 in a 12 month period and in all honesty, I’ve put very little effort into it. I did all of my work on my HubPages within a 45 day period and almost all of that work was within a 30 period, working on the project for a couple hours per day.

I plan to create some more hubs and I also plan on doing some work to improve the ones I already have. I can update them with fresh content and I can work on getting a few links for them. Generally when I do this kind of thing I see things shake up quite a bit. The earnings will either start moving up immediately or they will fall for a month or so and will move up after that. Either way they will end up in a much better place than they are right now.

How to Succeed with HubPages

I’ve given a lot of advice on hubs in the past but wanted to give a little again. As is usually the case with this type of web property, picking keywords is crucial. You want to pick keywords that have decent volumes and CPCs with limited competition. The Massive Traffic 101 webinar can help you to learn what I’m talking about if it isn’t making sense to you right now.

Hubs are like any other web property, they require content and links to get traffic. If you create a premium reference article on a topic, it’s possible that it will attract a lot of links. There are obviously other methods that can be used to build links to your hubs, including article submission and trading. The amount you earn on hubs will be fairly proportionate to the amount of hubs you produce and the amount (and strength) of links pointing at your hubs. You will of course want to include the keywords you pick in the title of your hubs and in the text of the hubs.

How To Increase Your HubPages Earnings

1. Create more hubs. Simple math tells us that if I set up 100 more hubs that were designed around keywords that were as good as the first 200 that I set up, I could double my earnings. A lot of people never reach their potential because they aren’t willing to put in enough effort. Making money with the internet requires quite a bit of work, especially in the beginning. Learning how to use math to see how big you can take any online business can be extremely useful.

2. Work harder to promote your hubs. Linking to your hubs from blogs, or getting other web sites to link to them will help you to increase your earnings significantly. Most people who have HubPages never do anything to promote them and that leaves them a lot weaker than they could be. Those who do really well with hubs generally do the ‘behind the scenes’ work to improve the strength of their hubs.

Spread Your Effort Around

HubPages certainly isn’t the only method out there for making money. I have been working on a lot of different projects in the last year and my hubs have taken a back seat for the most part. I’m going to start putting some effort there but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be working 24/7 on them. There’s something really nice about working on your own site. It can be sold at some point and you of course get to keep 100% of the earnings. However, there are benefits to working on hubs as well. You start with more authority than you would on a new site so you can often earn more quickly (this doesn’t mean that you will earn more overall) with hubs. They are certainly worth putting some time into.

1. Lack of understanding – Most people don’t understand the basic concepts required to build traffic on a large scale. Even if they are willing to put in the work, they are working on the wrong things. I’ve been there and I know exactly what it’s like. It is excruciatingly frustrating. Step 1 is to learn the concepts required and step 2 is to execute.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the most crucial concepts that I have used to make money and honestly, most people don’t understand them well. Let me give you a few examples.

Most people know that they are supposed to do keyword research for their sites but they really have no idea what that means. They don’t know what they’re looking for and they certainly don’t know how to integrate keywords into their sites properly. They don’t know how to create a structure that will help them to rank for keywords.

This causes major problems in their businesses. They start off by picking overly competitive keywords that would have no value even IF they ranked for them. Then they move on to improperly targeting the bad keywords with their sites. They then finish it all off by NOT creating any kind of authority for their site. If this is your method, you will have to throw an unbelievable amount of mud at the wall to have a few speckles stick.

Another concept that most people don’t understand is how to build the right links, to the right places. Bloggers and other site owners know that they are supposed to build links BUT they don’t know how to do this properly. They don’t know the underlying factors that could help them to dominate their niches and keywords.

This causes people to spend massive amounts of time trying to get links that will make little difference. They don’t point them to the right places so they have little effect. On top of that, most people don’t know where to get links in the first place.

2. Overload/misinformation – When I first started blogging, I had a distinct advantage. I already knew how to build traffic and let’s be frank. Making money with the internet is 100% about building traffic and making money with that traffic.

You would think that since I already understood both of those principles, it would be easy for me to make money with a blog right? Ironically, that wasn’t the case. It didn’t happen that way for me because I got sucked into the same trap as everyone else. I started reading all of the Make Money Online/Internet Marketing blogs. This caused a change in my belief system that was hard to recover from.

The problem is that many of these guys are SO good at presenting their ideas, they get you to believe concepts that simply aren’t true (sometimes they’re true but aren’t as effective as other ideas). You start reading this stuff and pretty soon your idea of what works and what doesn’t is completely warped and this causes you to put time into a bunch of activities that will make very little difference to your success.

I can’t believe how long it took for me to snap out of it. I spent over a year of my life putting in 16 hour days, mostly on tasks that didn’t work. After all of that time, I still couldn’t crack $1000 per month as a blogger, even though I had previously created other sites that made a lot more than that, with a lot less effort.

I forgot a lot of what I knew to be true. Other people convinced me that their ideas were better than the concepts I already understood and I did the weak sauce thing – I believed in them more than I believed in myself.

I was completely overloaded. My new list of tasks that had to be done was so long, it would take literally every waking hour to complete all of them.

The other part of the scenario that I got myself into was that I became addicted to the information. Every day I read more and more and every once in a while these guys would publish something absolutely ’spectacular’, something that seemed like it would send my online business to the moon. I would get all excited and would start executing this new technique, adding to my completely out-of-whack workload.

This was a completely vicious cycle and to be honest I started thinking that I didn’t know how to make this stuff work anymore.

As you can probably tell, that wasn’t the greatest part of my life and you don’t yet know the worst of it. I was so sold on the kool-aid these guys were selling, I let my already successful websites completely self-destruct. I completely stopped working on them for almost 18 months. My income was in a negative slide even though I was putting more time in than ever.

I believe that most of the people who are trying to learn how to use the internet to make money are in that same cycle. What concerns me the most is that most of them never learned the fundamentals so it will be extremely difficult for them to pull out of it.

I’m grateful that I was somehow able to escape that vicious trap. At some point in that terrible slide I hit a bottom and started looking at the facts. I started analyzing the results of all of the nonsense I had been working on. I threw out the garbage and I went back to the basics. I worked on my fundamentals again and I went back to the logic that made me successful in the first place. I completely recovered and grew my sites to many times beyond what they had ever been.

Many of you already have websites and for you, all you need is traffic. Building traffic is easy if you understand the fundamentals. It shouldn’t seem complicated and if it does, chances are that you are in a cycle of overload. Today is the day to snap out of that cycle and I’m going to help you to do it.

3. Time Management – Most people spend almost all of their time learning/researching/thinking instead of working on tasks that will produce benefit.

Don’t misunderstand – you REALLY need to learn and understand the correct principles before you’ll be able to make money, but learning them is never going to be enough. Finding the balance between research and real work is something that can’t be ignored.

This principle stands out in many areas of life. For example, let’s say that two people are overweight and want to get fit. Neither knows a lot about fitness.

Person A decides to learn everything possible about fitness and buys every book and course that he/she can find. This person then spends two hours every single day for a year studying fitness. In a year it’s likely that this person will know a LOT about fitness, right?

Person B decides that the best course of action is to spend two hours per day running (or walking) on the treadmill. This person knows little about fitness but knows that lack of exercise caused them to be overweight in the first place.

Let’s fast forward to the end of that year. Which person is going to be better off? Which person will get the most results in year one? Person B will be the clear winner in this time period.

To be fair, it could be argued that even though Person B will have a lot more success in the first year, Person A will have a tactical advantage in the second year – at least this is what we tell ourselves. We want to believe that our failures are caused by lack of knowledge. It’s a lot easier to accept them that way. It doesn’t make us feel weak if we simply don’t have the knowledge to succeed. On the other hand, recognizing that we don’t work hard enough to succeed is a lot harder to swallow.

What would actually happen in this example is that Person B would come out of the first year feeling great and Person A would come out of the first year feeling like a failure. This would happen for Person A because they will have made no real progress. Person B will have accomplished something tangible so Person B will feel good about the year. I’d be willing to bet the farm that this will cause Person B to be more likely to continue while Person A will struggle to begin down the path of effort required to change.

Two addictions would develop in the year. Person A would have failed at making a real change but would have learned some really cool things. It feels good to learn really cool things and it can become an unhealthy addiction. Person B would also likely develop an addiction, an addiction to positive growth. It feels good to grow, to change in a positive way. Person B will continue on the path that helped them to change their body.

Making money online isn’t that different from this example. Most of us allow ourselves to be Person A. We allow ourselves to spend an unlimited amount of time on activities that we believe will perfect our knowledge but spend very little ‘on the treadmill’.

Most people that do really well with building traffic become addicted positively to growth. The day before yesterday one of my sites had its best day ever, it was a HUGE day. It felt completely awesome. What did I do? I spent a bunch of time working on that site. I’m addicted to growth and this is a healthy addiction. It pushes me toward real growth.

All of that said, let’s not be naive. Making money online isn’t as simple as running two hours per day on a treadmill. There are real principles that have to be understood and executed and they aren’t principles that everyone understands.

If you feel like you don’t understand the basics, I want to help you. The basics aren’t hard and they aren’t complicated. Today is the day to learn them.

How To Solve These Problems And Build Massive Traffic

Tonight Mark and I are going to be doing a two-hour webinar called Massive Traffic 101 for our members and for the first time, we’re going to invite everyone to attend. The webinar will be free of charge, even for those who aren’t members of The Keyword Academy.

Update: We held the webinar on January 28, 2010 and it is now available for download, at the bottom of this page.

Here are some of the fundamentals that we will discuss in detail:

• Choosing keyword phrases that will produce maximum results with minimal effort. One of the biggest keys to my success is choosing easy to rank for keywords that pay. There are millions and millions of such keywords out there and if you can find them, you’ll be well on your way.
• Properly targeting keywords for optimum search engine relevancy. This process is simple and easy, once you understand the concepts.
• Link building techniques that improve search engine rankings. Many people know that they need to build links, but they don’t understand where to get them from and they don’t understand how to structure their links. I can promise that if you’re in this boat, after tonight the mystery will be solved.
• Time management. Putting time into the wrong things will cripple everything you’re working for. Learning where to put your time is critical.

Update: Download Massive Traffic 101 here:

Massive Traffic 101 – Audio Only
Massive Traffic 101 – Full Video

How crazy is that? It’s obviously a lot easier to produce a lot of money when the world is your marketplace.

Making money online is one of the most exciting things out there, but it’s also one of the hardest things to learn. There will be more money to be made in 2010 than ever. However, it will also be harder to learn. Why? Because there will be more and more garbage to sort through. There will be more crap blogs to read and more ebooks written by people who only know how to make money by selling ebooks. If you get sucked in by too many of these products, you will find it very difficult to get anywhere. You will find the information to be very contradictory and that will cause you to freeze up as you try to implement what you have learned.

If you would like for 2010 to be an awesome year for making money, this guide will serve as a road map. If you get off track, revisit the concepts presented here. They have helped me to create a lot of income for myself and have also helped me to avoid putting time into things that don’t pay off.

1. Follow your interests. I believe that one of the biggest reasons I have done well is that I have always either created sites that I was really passionate about, or have been able to get really interested in the topics I wanted to create sites about. I have made plenty of money with other types of sites (that I wasn’t as interested in) but my sites that have really flourished are that ones that I like the most.

2. Develop web real estate, aka build web sites. There are a lot of ways to make money online, but there’s only one that can provide you with near-residual income. Plan out sites, get them up, and start developing. If you want to produce in 2010 you need to start now. Income doesn’t appear overnight.

If you have already created some sites you’re ahead of the game. If they aren’t producing, move on to #3.

3. Research, research, research. Liking the topic of your websites can definitely help you to grow your income, but this won’t happen if there isn’t a market for the information/products your provide. Take a look at whether there are already sites that cover the topic you’re thinking about. If there are, it’s a good thing – it means that there’s probably money there and you’ll be able to emulate some of the things that those sites are doing.

Digging into your markets to discover additional keywords and subtopics is a hugely important aspect of the game we play. There are probably a lot of untapped traffic sources that you haven’t found, simply because you haven’t looked hard enough.

4. Help a lot of people. Your site will produce 100 times more if you want to really help people along the way. I get a lot of satisfaction out of knowing that what we’re doing here at The Keyword Academy helps people to produce real income. In our forum we have earnings badges that help us to see how our members are doing and there’s a huge payoff every time I see people with new badges (this is especially true when I see earnings badges pop up for members from third world countries). Since we really care about helping the people who use our site, it makes it a lot easier to market. Our members help us to get the word out because they know how much we can help the people they know.

If you’re only in it for the money, it’s going to be a lot harder for you. No matter what the topic of your site is, there will be people who have problems and questions. If you can figure out ways to provide them with solutions to those problems, you won’t have any trouble getting business or traffic.

5. Reduce your information intake. The people I know who make a lot of money online spend very little time reading blogs, watching videos, and interacting with their online pals. A certain degree of interaction is important for everyone, but money comes because of work. If you spend all of your time trying to learn, you aren’t getting much closer to actually producing income. In fact, you might be filling your mind with knowledge that will be detrimental to your success.

Don’t get me wrong, knowledge is very important. However, it can also become a huge addiction that can waste way too much time. Be wary of unproven sources of information.

6. Focus on volume. If your site provides information, provide a lot of information. If your site provides tools, provide a lot of useful tools. Creating more content will help you to increase your site’s traffic, especially if you’re creating keyword rich content. You may be trying to figure out why you have little traffic. A mental shift toward increasing volume can be extremely beneficial. A site that only has one keyword rich article would perform a lot better with 10. A site with 10 keyword rich articles would perform a lot better with 100. A site with 100 would perform a lot better with 1000.

Think about the people who would read your site and map out all of the information that they will need to accomplish their goals. In a lot of niches this will give you an unlimited supply of topics to cover.

Ask any real marketer and they will tell you that search traffic converts better than any type of traffic, for sales, clicks, and leads. In order to create that traffic you will need to do your research well and then create content based around your research. If you create more content, you can obviously plan on getting more search traffic. You should read our 100 blog posts experiment if you need further proof.

7. Squeeze the orange. In other words, think about how to get more from your existing traffic. Is there a product that you can create and sell? Can you upsell from that product? Can you sell more advertising? Can you use better placement on pay-per-click ads such as Adsense? Can you sell more affiliate product?

Some of the biggest gains I have been able to make in income in 2009 came with no traffic increase. Mark and I talk all the time about how we can get more out of our projects and when you have it on your mind, ideas will manifest themselves.

The first step in the process was to plan out the posts. That actually took almost a full week in itself. After I had everything ready I started writing.

Results July 27 – August 2

So far I have been able to write 25 posts and they’ve been absolutely killing it. I didn’t in my wildest dreams think that they would produce $371.98:

As you can see, I’m monetizing with Google Adsense and am using two ad units on the posts. One of the ads is placed within the post and the other is placed under it.

Obviously anyone would be happy with these results. Assuming that I don’t improve over the next three weeks, this experiment will put an extra $1594.20 in my pocket.

Planning Is Everything

Honestly I couldn’t have done this without a lot of planning. You can’t just throw up any 25 posts and expect this to happen. Before I even started writing posts I found 100 keywords with two important characteristics:

• They had the potential to make a lot of money.
• They were somewhat easy to rank for.

In order to make good money with Google Adsense, you have to have a solid foundation of keyword research and SEO. If you can’t pick the right keywords, you’re not going to be able to make it work with Adsense. The days of throwing up content and making a lot of money are over. You have to be a lot more put together than you did in the past. Choosing the right keywords to go after is crucial.

You can use the Adwords keyword tool to check both search volume and CPC and with these numbers, the higher the better. I use a formula to calculate exactly how much I think I can produce with a keyword in a month and these 25 keywords are worth $7366.47 per month. I honestly didn’t think that they would start producing this quickly but if you consider the potential of the keywords, it isn’t too, too crazy.

We talk about using this formula in our members area to decide which keywords will be worthwhile.

The Next Week

During the next week, I’m going to try to finish at least 25 more posts. The strategy is obviously working and I don’t see any reason to change it. I’m secretly hoping that I’ll be able to finish more like 35 posts but we’ll see how much time I have. Life is pretty busy right now!

Note to TKA members – watch for an update in the forums within the next two hours.

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.

It was nice to already have the hubs done (as I said in week 3 of the make money online experiment, they were completed in the first 3 weeks).

Week 4 produced great results and the hubs made $164.11, nearly double what they made in week 3:

Google Analytics is on crack this morning, so the report was created in my Adsense account. I’ll switch it out for a prettier version when they get Analytics working again.

Right now I’m REALLY happy about how this experiment is going. I have a nice upward trend going on and expect these 100 hubs to make some solid income in the near future. The income should continue to produce because I’m taking the time to make sure that the hubs are useful.

Don’t Make Low Quality Hubs!

Lately I’ve seen some comments that have been of a philosophy that’s different than mine.  Some people are saying that they are going to make crap hubs because Google can’t read content, more people will click ads, etc. Don’t fall into this trap. Google CAN read content, in fact eventually you will probably have a Google search engineer looking at your content, especially if you start to produce significant income with your Adsense account. Do you really want to have crap content on all of the pages that your Adsense is on? Let me answer that question for you – no, you don’t.

The way that you’re going to make a lot of money in your lifetime on Adsense is by keeping the properties you have and creating new ones. If your current properties are total garbage, your entire portfolio is at risk. Creating a bunch of hubs that are total garbage might make you some short term cash but it’s only a matter of time until Google figures out that all of your content blows.

All of my hubs are at least 500 words and most of them have a lot more. I believe that they provide the information that people are looking for. Sure, this will lower my click through rate on my ads, but it will allow me to have income from the hubs for years. A high CTR doesn’t really seem that great anymore once your sites get deindexed for being MFA (made for Adsense).

A problem that I see is that some people are having success by publishing garbage. The problem is that some of you are believing that this is an ok idea in the long term and it’s compounded by people publishing on their ‘make money online’ sites that this is a good idea because it saves time. It isn’t in fact this is a terrible idea. It might be true that Google’s algorithm isn’t going to know the difference right now. However, what do you think is going to happen when you’re producing $5,000 per month or $10,000+ per month? Do you really think that Google isn’t going to look into the sites you’re making the money with once you start producing well?

I’m definitely not saying that you need to spend all day making one hub, but if you aren’t at least trying to give people the information they’re searching for, I think you’re going to run into trouble eventually.

A Few More Days In The Experiment

Those of you that are participating in the experiment have a few more days to finish up! It’s all over June 10th.

As you can see, the hubs during week 3 made $88.88, down from $112.56. That brings the total so far to $257.64. We still have another 10 days in the experiment and it will definitely be interesting to see how the hubs do overall.

Why The Hubs Produced Less In Week 3

During week 3 I focused a ton on getting all of the hubs up and did very little to them. I didn’t give any of the hubs links from other hubs. Overall that makes the hubs less useful and makes them weaker. I’m going to be catching up on that this week – I simply didn’t have the time to get it done. Fortunately I have all 100 hubs published and that means that I can focus on other aspects which will help the hubs.

The hubs that were created in the first two weeks dropped a little (as is expected) because they lost the fresh content bonus. That means there’s less income there and the new hubs didn’t make up for it because I haven’t completed what needs to be done on them.

The next few weeks will be really interesting and I’m really excited to see how well the hubs do in the second month of the experiment – that’s when we’ll be able to tell how well it’s going to work. I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone so far.

I have never (and I do mean never) seen a site or project go up and up and up without losing ground. You will always see natural dips no matter how hard you’re working on something. It’s part of the game we play. You have to learn how to keep working even when things don’t improve. Week 3 was one of my most productive weeks on the HubPages experiment and will create a ton of long term value.

Week 2 went really well. During the seven days of week 2 my hubs produced $112.56:

On the worst day of week 2, my hubs made $8.01 and on the best day they made $23.21. The average day of week 2 produced $16.08. Multiply that out over a 30 day period and you’re looking at $482.40. I still expect that number to grow a lot for month 2 – that’s just how it works. With a little more age these hubs will start to do better in Google, Yahoo, and MSN and that will bring more traffic and more revenue.

New Income Estimates

Since week 2 was surprisingly strong, I need to adjust my estimates for growth. I thought that the experiment would make at least $300 for the month and it has already made $168.76. I think that it should make at least triple that number in month 1, which would give us $506.28. The hubs should easily be able to triple that number for month 2 so I’m going to raise my month 2 estimate to $1500.

I now have over half of the hubs done. I planned on having them all done by this weekened but I’m a little behind that pace. It might take me the entire month to finish all 100.

General Advice For Making Money With HubPages

• Target non-competitive keyword phrases that have decent Adwords CPCs.
• Make solid hubs. Most of my hubs are at least 800 original words and contain useful links, feeds, news, and videos.
• Give links from hubs to related hubs that you have.

The whole point of using sites like Ezine and HubPages to get links is to increase your site’s link juice, and ultimately its rankings. You can of course use a bunch of different methods but links from HubPages and Ezine are quite strong, which is why I recommend using them. Stronger links make a much bigger difference in rankings than links from weaker sites.

Steps For Getting Links From HubPages

1. Sign up for a free HubPages account.
2. Build a hub that’s related to your topic. If you need help, check out the HubPages quick start guide.
3. Create a link back to your site, within your hub.

It’s that easy… BUT there are a few things that you should know about getting links from HubPages.

First, they are extremely efficient at not getting spammed. In order to get real links from HubPages you’ll need to create some quality hubs. If your author score isn’t 75 or higher, your links will have nofollows, which take away the link juice. You will have to create a handful of decent hubs to be able to get your score above 75. I would make sure that each of your hubs has at least 400 words of unique content – most of mine have around 800. Yes, that’s a lot but is also the reason that my hubs rank well in Google.

Second, you are only supposed to link out to your site once within your hub. If you link out more than that it will make the hub overly promotional, and it will be de-published until you fix it.

The bonus that comes with this method is that you can use Adsense and affiliate programs to make money with HubPages.