IM Beginner - HubPages Challenge

[markan]

Hello to everybody, I'm new here, both in the forum and the IM world, and I have to get this thing going and make some bucks before long, because I want financial stability in order to be able to write the rest of my life (books). In order to achieve this, I'd like to get to 1500 bucks per month, since this is the minimum salary in my country, and I'd like to start there in order to live without too many worries for some time and to save some money for later on.

I didn't really know where to start so I began by looking through some blogs and I decided to start with a HubPages Challenge since I thought that positive results would be easily scalable if they'd turn out as promising as I was hoping. So I wrote 100 Hubs in 10 days, I started backlinking them, and I recently found out that HubPages isn't so easy to make money with as it was some one or two years ago...but I'm going to finish this challenge which I set myself and which I turned into a case study on my blog. I'm in the middle of my backlinking now, and I'll finish that whole thing and if all goes well, I may even be doing another 100 Hubs using what I learned during the first 100 in order to get them to produce more. After that I'll probably be diversifying and moving on to other strategies.

I think IM as a one-person-business is really inspiring because it really seems to be a mental exercise and some kind of meditation to just keep going and do the boring work everyday. It's something that really makes you about whether hard work is actually rewarded or not in life. And it's wonderful to live in the 21st century pushing buttons on a box called notebook and being able to make thousands if you push enough buttons over a larger time frame. That's pretty smashing if you think about it. (Even though with Google crashing down on thin mini-adsense sites and their algorithm update changing the way the system works a little it really seems as though I picked the wrong moment to begin with)

Anyway, I just wanted to say hello, present to you my challenge (maybe inspire some people) and make some friends I could talk to during the next months and years. I'll keep you posted here and on my blog on how it goes in a few months so we see if actually they still do have enough potential to make a few hundred bucks each month.

[Josh]

I have heard a lot of people say its too hard to make money with hubpages right now but I still do better with hubpages than I do with just about anything else.

I have also heard lately that you should be using amazon more than adsense but I'm not doing this myself.

Also, in my experience its better to pick high volume keywords(though still fairly low competition) and spam links at them rather than going for 0 competition terms and only give it 1 or 2 links.

[lissie]

IM as a mediation - that's a new one - quite like that! I'm with josh I still make most of my money on hubpages - its zero cost and therefore zero risk ...

[BenK]

As a case study, kudos to you. That's more effort than most people put into their business, even more effort than a lot of people on this forum, I'm sad to say. It's a good start and it shows you have work ethic -- the # 1 thing required to make money online, hands down.

You can certainly still make money with hubpages. As I've stated elsewhere, you need to have a clear plan of attack though. Just creating a bunch of random hubpages without keyword research is a path to no money. Creating hubpages without a decent amount of backlinks will make you very little money, unless you are very lucky in your choices. Creating hubpages and expecting results in a month or two will also leave you frustrated.

Way to make money with hubpages

1. Keyword research. If you don't know how to do this, then you are wasting your time no matter what medium you try. Court's school has a decent program, as Lisa suggested. Grizzly talks about keyword research. I've written about it and so have many others I've linked to on my sidebar. Get the basics down.

2. Backlink. Backlink. Backlink. Hubs. Treat each hub like a page on your own website and send those backlinks to them, as many as you can. This will take the bulk of your time, but it's where the money comes in.

3. Time. There's no path to quick money with hubpages now. It takes time now. I'm talking months, maybe 6 months to a year even, depending on the niche.

There are two arguments people have about spending time creating your money making network with web 2.0s. One side says use web 2.0's because they are free, tend to rank better (initially) over self hosted domains, and you can use them for keyword research. The other argument is that you essentially build up other people's properties and you really don't "own" your own network.

I think the right choice lies in between: build up your own networks first, use hubs, etc for backlinks.

My feeling is that you should invest most of your time into your own domains. Instead of creating 100 hubs in the same or similar niches, getting 30 backlinks for each hub, and waiting 6 months to pull in decent coin, why not create 1 website with 100 pages and 30 backlinks to each page? Or why not create 5-10 sites with 10-20 pages each, same number of backlinks. No matter what choice, it will take the same amount of time (though if I had to put money down, I'd say it will take 50% less time to make money with hubpages, since they are more trusted initially). And with the present way google's algorithm is working with sites like hubpages, it may take your around the same time to start pulling in decent coin with either choice.


I can't tell you how many people (always new to internet marketing) keep asking the same questions: "how do I make money with hubpages." And I can see why, there is 0 monetary investment involved and it's easy to create hubs. But let me tell you something I've learned in 2 years of this game. The easier something is to make money with, the less effective it becomes over time.

People, especially newbies to this game, never, ever want to pony up the few dollars it costs for domains and hosting (even though you spend more heading to starbucks a couple times a month) or the effort to learn how to host your own domains, etc. And you can waste a year or two bullshitting around because of this, then look back and say, why the fuck didn't I start on a couple high quality sites a year ago?

Start at the very beginning building up your own quality websites an in a year's time, you'll have something that's earning you money and can be even built up into something that earns you serious money.

Trust me, at the end of the day, you'll wish, no matter how much work you put into any web 2.0 property, that you have your OWN websites ranking for those same keywords. Create your own website, then use hubs as backlinks that make some money.