Make Money Online With HubPages!

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:

How to get your website onto Google, free!

Some people believe that submitting their website to Google is a good way to get Google to include their site in the search results. Amazingly, there are still people making money out there by charging for their "submit website to Google" services. This honestly blows my mind and shows me that people are just taking the word of others instead of testing things themselves.

I have tested Google’s tool that allows you to submit your website several times and can tell you that using it is probably the worst thing you can do. The last time I tested it I had to wait six full weeks before Google including my site in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and the site took more work than usual to rank. That doesn’t really ‘make sense’ and I’ll admit that but once you have started a few hundred sites you start to get a feel for how things should happen and that site did not act right for a while.

The Proper Way To ‘Submit’ A Website To Google
I know that I’ve talked about this briefly in posts before, but I wanted to lay this out in a post of its own just to be 100% clear. The best way to get your site into Google is by linking to it from a site that has decent PageRank.

Adsense Click Variations Explained

"Do you know anything about what drives the sometimes wild variation in day to day click values…".

It is a good question and something that I know many people ask so I’ll answer it publicly. There are a variety of factors that could explain the phenomenon of the variation of click values.

Geo Targeting – the global positioning of the reader clicking on the advertisement can have significant impact upon the value of the advertisement. I know of two bloggers who started blogs at the same time on the same topic – one of which has a .com URL and gets traffic from around the world, the other of which has a .nz (New Zealand) URL and gets quite a bit of NZ traffic. The .com blogger’s click rates are significantly higher than the .nz one’s. In my opinion this is largely due to the fact that advertisers targeting NZ readers are not paying as much for the ads as advertisers in other parts of the world due to market size and competition between advertisers. This could explain quite wide fluctuations in click values.

Adsense Smart Pricing Explained

Smart Pricing is an attempt by Google to give Advertisers value for money and to guard against click fraud. One of the dangers of Adsense is that publishers set up temporary, trashy and/or un-authoritative pages of content on topics that they know attract high paying ads. Clicks on such pages (whether fraudulent or not) are not really good value for advertisers.

Smart Pricing sets a click value for each ad clicked based upon a variety of factors – none of which have been made public. There has been much speculation by publishers about what these factors might include – guesses as to what is included that I’ve seen in forums include:

• site relevance (ie is the whole site dedicated to a topic or just one page?)
• Impressions (is the site well trafficked – which could indicated authority)
• site size
• Page Rank (another indicator of authority)
• Age of site (some believe that click values go up over time once Google determines whether your site is in it for the long haul)
• Inbound Link Relevancy (if lots of other sites link to you with the keywords relevant to your content – and the ads)
• CTR

How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page

The more I dig in mentally to the world of making money with the internet, the more I realize that there are a lot of different ways to go about it. When I first started making money online, I would create simple content sites that got 99% of their traffic on the homepage. For some reason I was living under the misconception that home pages could rank better than other pages. I now know that this isn’t true in fact I have quite a few post pages that bring more search traffic than their corresponding home pages.

Almost all of my sites make more at the post level than they do on the home pages and this is because I understand how to write posts that target keywords. This is a basic process that a lot of you probably already understand, but I wanted to cover it so that everyone would know that they aren’t missing anything.

Here’s a simple step-by-step of how to do this:

1. Make sure that the keyword is used in the title of your post.
2. Make sure that the keyword appears in the HTML title of the post page. This should happen automatically if you’re using WordPress or Blogger.
3. Make sure that the keyword appears a few times within the text of the post itself. This should be fairly easy to do if you write posts that are large. I would recommend going with a post that’s at least 300 words and I prefer to make them a lot larger. Most of my post pages that rank are at least 500 words and many of them are over 1,000. I like to make sure that these pages are meaty and provide a lot of useful information.
4. Use the keyword as a tag or label on the post. This helps you to get the keyword on the post page one more time and also creates an extra page within your site. The tag page not only covers the topic but links to the post that you’re targeting the keyword with.
   
   

How to get paid to blog!

There are literally millions of people who blog. Most of these are personal bloggers who use their blogs as a platform to provide updates about their lives to friends and family. It’s no surprise that blogging is huge. It’s fun to keep track of friends and family.

After people have been blogging for a while, they start to hear that it’s possible to make money blogging. This usually leads them to articles like this one.

Types Of Blogs That Make Money

The blogs that make the most money are almost always blogs that share advice. News blogs also make money but it’s significantly harder to make money with a blog that provides news. Personal blogs rarely make a lot of money. In order to make a lot of money, your blog needs to line up with information that a lot of people are looking for.

Advice Blogs That Make A Lot Of Money

* StevePavlina.com – Personal Development
* ProBlogger.net – Blogging
* Digital Photography School – Digital Photography
* CopyBlogger.com – Copywriting
* Lifehacker – Productivity
* Get Rich Slowly – Personal Finance

Top 15 Reasons You Aren’t Making Money With Google Adsense

15. You don’t understand how to brainstorm for keywords. This isn’t meant to offend anyone, but there’s a solid chance that you consistently choose the same keywords as everyone else. Niche keywords that you wouldn’t easily think of are by far the best keywords for Adsense and ‘make money online’ keywords are probably some of the worst.

14. Your ad placement is poor. I still see a lot of people that are only using vertical banners in their sidebars. These honestly don’t get clicked nearly as often as larger, rectangle units. Inserting large and medium rectangles in your posts will almost always lead to getting more clicks. Vertical banners are a nice addition but are best used as a supplement – not as the primary unit.

13. You have Adsense on too many pages. Yes, I said you have Adsense on too many pages. Adsense should be on pages that do a good job of targeting keywords. When you put it up on pages and posts that don’t target keywords well, you will have poorly targeted traffic that either won’t click an ad or won’t convert well for the advertiser. When your clicks don’t convert well for advertisers you get SMART PRICED.

8 Brutally Straightforward Tips For Making Money On The Internet!

1. Start now. The temptation for anyone who’s making money on the internet is to read, read, and read some more. You may believe that you have to wrap your mind around every possible technique before you get started and if you follow that path, you’ll still be reading 2 years from now. You have to get started and get started now. Most of the people that I talk to feel like they can’t handle another failure in their life and that makes them freeze up.

I have had TONS of sites fail and honestly that’s one of the biggest reasons I do as well as I do. You might think you’re different – you hope that you can hit a winner every single time. I’m getting a lot better at that because I’ve had lots of losers. At this point I’m pretty dang good at knowing what will work and what won’t.

Honestly I get a little tired of people who try to piggyback off of what I have learned through my failures. I try to impart all of the knowledge that I can and one of the most fulfilling things in my life is getting emails from all of the people who have found successes through what I have given them. That said, there is no substitution for trying things for yourself, even if that means failing a few times and no matter how many times I tell you what works and what doesn’t, you won’t have a firm belief until you have done it yourself.

The funny thing to me is that there really isn’t any risk for failure here. The total start-up cost for a niche website is under $20. If $20 makes you freeze up I would honestly take a hard look at what you’re spending money on. I sometimes have people email me saying that the cost of hosting is a huge risk for them. Are you freaking kidding me? $8 per month is a huge risk?

I guess what people are telling me is that they can’t afford to have cable television or a cell phone because obviously those should be lower on the priority list than investing $8 in your future. What you’re really telling me is that you’re afraid of failing. You have to get over yourself. Sorry for the extreme bluntness but that’s the honest truth.

If you asked me, the people that are really failing are the ones who are still researching. You’re afraid to put effort and money into ‘yourself’ but are perfectly fine wasting loads of time ‘researching’. To me that is the epitome of failure. Moving forward is the only way to get things shaking.