Posts Tagged ‘hubpages’

How To Improve Your HubPages Earnings

February 22nd, 2010  |  by Court  |  Published in Content, SEO  |  16 Comments

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:

  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.

$4,003.43 Earned on HubPages

February 11th, 2010  |  by Court  |  Published in Keyword Research, Link Building, SEO, TKA News  |  33 Comments

In April of 2009, I created my first hub on HubPages. I had solid success with my first few hubs and decided that I would try a larger experiment with them. That experiment started on May 7, 2009 and ended on June 7, 2009. Those of you who were around back then know that the experiment went quite well and earned about $475 during the test period.

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.

Make Money Online With HubPages Experiment Complete

June 16th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Content, SEO  |  81 Comments

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.

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