Posting my HubPages earnings seemed to spark up quite a lot of discussion in comments and in the forum. People took a look at their earnings from HubPages and compared those earnings to the amount of effort that they have put in to their hubs. I find those discussions to be very interesting, uplifting, and disconcerting – all at the same time.
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:
- Turn right out of your drive way.
- Drive to the end of the block.
- Turn right.
- Drive one block.
- Turn right.
- Drive one block.
- Turn right.
- Drive one block.
- Turn right.
- Drive until you get back to your house.
- 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
- 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).
- Create a well written hub that covers the topic well, using the keyword phrase in the title of the hub.
- 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.
- 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.
Is there one typical part of the necessary tasks that people never do?
I’m pretty sure that doesn’t matter. Just do them all and you will get results. Skip one step and the entire system falls apart, which means you will end up with “almost” nothing.
But just to go along with the Q, (IDK about Court) I would personally have to say link building is what people don’t take seriously and stick to. If you don’t get links you won’t rank well in search engines.
Usually people are lazy with both keyword research AND promoting with links.
I would also say link building.
Hmmm… building links… yup!
That would be me then!
I thought that using UAW to drip feed articles linking back to the hubs would be an excellent idea – and set the rate to be 1 per day. At least you can then build links over time which will look more natural.
Must admit I tended to slack on link building when I started out. The keyword research and content writing are more interesting (to me anyhow) – link building is just dull. I made some money without tons of links, but not nearly as much as I should have. Now I force myself to do the whole thing, & my results have improved.
Court, thanks for this post.
I am wondering if you can comment on something that’s been in the forums quite a bit: that not all hubs will work out. You have said yourself that when you did your experiment, for every 16 hubs you built only 1 were producing money.
If I am building quality hubs for green KWs with good search volume and good CPC, and building links to them the way you have outlined, why wouldn’t they all work out? Would it be that they don’t get ranked or just don’t produce any money once they do? Or, is it that these ones just take longer than we expect?
Any help in elaborating on that is much appreciated. Thanks Court!
Hey Matt! You would have to define ‘work out’. The way I outlined the linking in the forums isn’t going to be enough to get you to rank for every single keyword. In some cases you would need to get a lot more links than that.
Also, you need to keep in mind at what point I made that comment. Most people are extremely short sighted and don’t want to look at the long term and big pictures. I have 105 hubs and as of today, 99 of them have made money. That said, only 51 of them have made over $20 for me.
If you want all of your hubs to work out, it’s actually pretty easy. Keep promoting them to get links until they have worked out. The only thing that makes them ‘not work out’ is if they don’t have enough links to get up there for the particular keyword.
Thanks Court! It’s good to know that I can just keep building links to hubs if they don’t “work out”. By that, I meant get ranked, but I wondered what you and others meant in the forum. I understand that not every hub will live up to its monetary potential but that’s okay with me. Even if just one does I’m happy.
Hopefully in a few months I’ll have some badass outsourcing money to work with!
Court…I think you have bamboozled some of us.
I think the impression exists that link-building for HubPages are restricted to a few EZA, TKA’s etc. If a competitor has high quality/quantity links: 5 PR-4’s and 19 PR-3’s, can I really expect to topple my competition with low quality/quantity: 4 PR-2’s and 5 PR-0?
I think your statement in the post makes it pretty clear to me:
“The funny thing about my work with HubPages is that it’s the exact same thing that I do on my own sites.”
The key word in your post is ‘restricted’. It makes no sense to me that people will find out about a strategy that I use (or a strategy that anyone else uses) and will ‘restrict’ themselves based on that. SEO 101 – more links is better.
Hi Court,
You’re so right about having to do all the steps to be successful on HubPages. I built a bunch of hubs way back when I didn’t know about SEO and most of them tanked. But a few accidentally made money, so after I learned about SEO I was inspired to go back and optimize them. Now I earn between $1,000 and 2,000 a month from 157 hubs.
It’s important to note that there’s more than one form of monetization on HubPages. I use everything but eBay and make money with all of them every month. I also promote several affiliate programs. I’ve found that hubs are quite effective at driving traffic to my affiliate links. You’d think that the various monetization forms would fight each other, but for some reason they don’t on HubPages. So it’s good to load them up with Amazon (and eBay, if you use it) links. Those links are also perceived as content by the HubPages rating system, so it pushes up the hub’s score. Most people think that the score doesn’t mean much, but if a hub has a higher score it pushes it up to be featured in the HubPages category navigation. I’ve seen my traffic double for a hub that’s featured, so it’s worthwhile to make the content solid and diverse.
In case anyone is interested, I’ve written a r-e-a-l-l-y long hub that details how to monetize and optimize hubs. It’s linked from my name above. (If the inclusion of that link offends you, though, Court, obviously you can feel free to remove it.)
Thanks so much for publicly legitimizing the use of HubPages. I used to feel bush league using it, but now I’m laughing all the way to the bank.
You’re right, Court. Treating Hubpages like a business helps.
I’ve been trying to build a little hubpages franchise, but I failed in something important – link building…and treating it like the business it is. Taking your advise, I started really working on promoting my hubs, and ALREADY I can see click rate improving! I’ve only fixed up about two hubs and started linking a small group of hubs together, so this is very promising!
I guess it’s hard to see myself as a business woman, but your article kind of slapped my in the face and woke me up. I think I will finally start to see true earnings just accepting that one fact! Thanks, Court!
Thank you
This post is really helpful for me and push me to examine my mistakes.
Although I am in business for long time developing cool websites for other, but started on my own website few months back with no success so far, but I never give up.
your article is like a slap on my face to wake me up on things that I am not doing right.
Thanks again.
Hi Court,
I’ve been a Hubber for just a year now and agree with everything you’ve said. I work full-time in affiliate marketing and know that you have to treat it like a business to succeed.
Each day, I write 3 to 5 targeted hubs and provide many backlinks. As a result my HubPages earnings are routinely over $2,000 a month – and I’m seeing a nice increase each month.
I enjoy your aggressive work ethic and willingness for experimentation.
This is just a great post. Don’t know what else to say.