Make Money Online with Hubpages

Some of the readers here at the Monetizer blog may have participated in the Hubpages 30 day challenge which encouraged "Hubbers" to create 100 Hubpages in just 30 days time (the challenge ended about a week ago). To this day, I completed 23 of them, simply knowing it wasn't realistic for me to ignore the other projects I'm working on regularly. However, I've already enjoying the potential of Hubpages as a moneymaker and also a great source of "link juice". Thanks to Courtney Tuttle for the inspiration to start with the Hubs again, since I had left them for dead a year ago and turned to Squidoo. I found Squidoo user friendly and fun, but in all reality Hubpages offers much more potential because of the kind of profits you can generate. I've read several success stories of members who are pulling in anywhere from $300 to over $1000 a month from the site, by using unique monetization strategies. And there's no reason why you and I can't enjoy similar success. After all, more money/passive income is always a good thing. Those of us with current web properties (blogs, niche sites, etc) can benefit from making hubs to support those as well.

I took Courtney Tuttle's advice from The Keyword Academy and just started finding topics which were somewhat competitive, with keyword CPC's (Cost-per-clicks) of anywhere from $2 and up, using the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Court recommended you find those with a $5 or more CPC, but in my experience using the Google Adwords Keyword tool, those can be quite competitive. Kudos to Court who really knows his stuff, I think it'd be interesting to be a fly on his wall and see how he finds good keywords (and how long it takes him). I focused on several gems I found in various niches, and also went for a few more competitive ones just to see how they might fare. I figure if you add plenty of relevant tags on your hubs you may draw traffic that way. Also, your hubs may show up as related pages on other people's hubs. As for how I selected keywords, I went for those with at least 3,000 searches a month, and at least $2 CPC. Generally the gurus say that you can expect to make 25% of whatever the average CPC is for keywords. So if you're keywords are in the $5 level, you'll make $1.25 a click and so forth. I figure that sometimes if you pick the right niche, even if you're making 50 cents a click, yet getting 20 clicks or more, you're doing well.

I did my research for my various topics, and in some cases discovered the hubs are easy to write, but it's not something I'd want to do 5 or more of per day. I'll tell you that probably the best and easiest hubs you could set up are those about various products you own. Consider doing product reviews for everything and anything you own (tech may be best but there's other areas), even if you're not seeing it on the Adwords top keywords searches. There's most likely other people out there who may be searching for that same product as you have already. They could be the lucky moneymaker you stumble upon too. Also consider those products and any issues you had with them and found yourself frustrated at how tough it was to find an answer to your questions. That may be another way you want to go with your hubs, by helping others answer the question you had to search for.

Hubpages are in fact much like Squidoo as they offer various components you can add to your hubs. Those are the text, photo, video, rss, news, links, ebay, amazon and poll components in addition to several others. You simply click to add one then edit it as you see fit. You're able to position the eBay, Amazon and photo's very nicely right inside your text blocks to give a wraparound look. Quite helpful if you want to "pitch" or talk about various products and then have 4 eBay auctions for the product next to that.

The forms of monetization for your hubs are Google Adsense, eBay partner network, Amazon Associates and Kontera. If you're a member of all four programs, great. If not, you'll need to sign up and be approved. Adsense is the easiest to be approved for, followed by Amazon, then Kontera, then eBay. When you're official, there's a spot called Affiliate Settings where you go and plug in the required ID's from your various accounts. Google Adsense ads are pretty much automatic on all hubs, and you'll receive 60% of the impressions revenue. Hubpages makes the other 40% which is generous considering they house your free web properties. The 60-40 rule applies to eBay and Amazon ads as well. Those you'll need to implement into your hubs on your own, but they allow you to control the keywords that bring up the various products. As for Kontera, you'll need to specify whether you turn it on for each and or every hub. Hubpages recommends that unless you're earning at least $50 a month with Adsense that you consider keeping Kontera turned off. They also note that if you don't earn at least $5 with Kontera in a given month, your earnings don't roll over to the next month. Good to keep in mind.

I strongly recommend that you add Google Analytics into your Hubpages account, and also create URL tracking channels for each and every hub on Google Adsense. When I first started out I was seeing some money in my Adsense earnings which I couldn't account for. It's much better to know what's making you money and what's not. Also, with Analytics you'll be able to see just what keywords/phrases are bringing you search traffic and then you can work to either make that page stronger for the keywords, or create a new page just based on a new term that looks hot.

Use Hubpages to help your current web properties and niche blogs get better rankings too. But don't overdo it, play by the rules. Here's some words of wisdom about linking from hubpages:

1)Maintain a Hubber score of 84 or above to make links you put in your hub pages "Do Follow". You can up your score simply by creating at least 5 or more hubs.

2)Don't make hubs spammy. Don't place more than 2 links to the same site (i.e. your blog or site) in the same hub page, and don't make a hub that's all affiliate links.

Folks, Hubpages is definitely a moneymaker and way to get some nice link juice to your other web properties. I sent some hubpage links to a particular blog page that I had been trying to rank page 1 on Google for over a year. Within a week, the page ranked on Google search results page 1 right behind two very prominent companies' listings for the same thing. I also discovered in these few weeks I devoted to making more hubs that I earned more money off just one hubpage in about a week, then I made in total with all of my Squidoo lenses last month! Think about that, because while Squidoo may look cool and be talked about more, Hubpages seems to have better Google rankings, and the ability to help your blogs or sites rank better.

So, if you're not a hubber yet, why wait? Sign up here and start your hubpages!