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.