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.

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.

I’ve already done a lot of work, but it has definitely been worth it. The nice thing about committing myself to this experiment here on the blog is that it’s easier to motivate myself to get it done. So far I’ve been doing the experiment for a week and have written about 40 solid hubs. So far the experiment has made $56.20 (it’s 100% Adsense income). I expect the experiment to yield at least $300 this month and more than $1000 next month. I’m sure that you’re going to want to know where I’m getting these numbers from. I haven’t made a spreadsheet for this or anything but generally speaking, any web property will perform better as time goes on. I see this time and time again and know that these hubs probably aren’t going to get worse, they’re going to get better.

By the end of the experiment I will also have 60 more hubs out there and that adds to the potential. I would expect them to perform just as well as the ones I have so even if the hubs I already have stay the same, I should make $140.50 during the last week of the experiment. That’s approximately $56.20 for the hubs I have and $83 for the 60 hubs that I still need to make.

The total income for each of the next two weeks should be somewhere between the $56.20 and the $140. It could be better than that or slightly worse – we’re just going to have to see.

The $1000 number for next month is based on the fact that there is almost always more traffic to be had after the pages are up for more than a month. If they produce $140 during the last week of the 30 day experiment, they should for sure average over $200 for next month and probably over $250.

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.

• 30 Articles In 30 Days
• Results – 30 Articles In 30 Days

What led me to this next experiment is actually quite interesting…

I have created some hubs lately on HubPages to help promote some other sites and pages that I have. Hubs seemed to be pretty strong pages so I figured that I could pass some link juice to other sites and pages that I have. I created my first hub and pointed a link to a page, only to find that the link was nofollowed. That means that the link wasn’t going to pass any juice to my page so I did some searching and figured out that HubPages gives you a score as an author and you have to maintain a score above 74 (out of 100) to get links that don’t have nofollows on them.

I did some more reading and figured out that it isn’t that tough to get a score of 74 and that I could get there by creating a few more hubs. This REALLY annoyed me lol. I thought it was stupid that I had to do extra work just to get a link I mean I was giving them free content, after all. I dediced that I had already created one so I might as well create a few more so that I can get the juice from the first one. I figured that I could get some juice from the additional hubs I created as well so I thought ‘what the heck’.

I ended up with five or six hubs and let them sit for a few weeks so that I could get the juice to my original pages. It was during that time that I decided that I might as well use the Adsense feature on HubPages because I figured that they would get some traffic eventually. HubPages does a 60/40 split with you on Adsense impressions. That to me was really annoying because even though you get 60% and HubPages gets 40%, it seemed like a lot to be giving when you’re the one that creates the content for the hub. Even though I was annoyed I decided to do it anyway because I created the hubs to get the links and I figured that a click here and there wouldn’t be that bad.

I activated Adsense in my account. The next day I checked it and found out that I had made like $4. I thought, “that has to be a fluke.” I checked the next day and had made another $3. I was honestly shocked. I figured that I really wouldn’t make hardly anything because I hadn’t done that much and HubPages was getting 40% of the Adsense impressions.

Since then I’ve made some more hubs and have figured out that the authority of the domain makes it pretty dang easy to get search traffic. At first the math didn’t make sense in my head and if you know me you know that if the math doesn’t work, I can’t move forward. It wasn’t working in my mind until I realized that getting rankings seemed much more than 40% easier on HubPages.

I had never really seen HubPages as a viable method for making money online but suddenly I find myself very curious and surprisingly confident that I can make a ton with HubPages and Adsense.

The Experiment

I find that if I’m going to really find out how viable any system is as a money maker, I have to jump in full steam. So far I’ve only been flirting with HubPages and I’m ready to take our relationship to the next level. In the next 30 days I will be creating at least 100 hubs. That means I’m going to have to do some serious planning over the next few days and then unleash a fairly large amount of content. I know that the amount of content I’m going to want to use for each hub (around 400 words) will cost me either 30 minutes or $5 if I hire someone. I don’t have 50 hours to spend on this but I’ll figure out how to make ends meet somehow.

I would like to invite you to join my in this experiment. I know with 100% certainty that I will make some extra money with this. It’s impossible to know how much but I feel that it’s going to be pretty significant. There will also be huge benefits from having additional, juicy pages that I can use to link to projects that I already have.

If you would like to join in, run over to HubPages, sign up for an account, and leave a comment here telling the group what you’re willing to commit to. I don’t really want any “I’ll see how many I can get done” stuff going on. Commit yourselves to a number of hubs and stick to it. I am excessively busy and I’ve still committed to creating between three and four hubs per day for a month straight. I better go buy some Mountain Dew.