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Online Business Search Engines

Shake Rattle and Roll

Drizzle with a chance of earthquakes in the afternoon…

On Saturday morning I was asleep – I usually am, but I was late getting up and getting online.  I noticed that Skype was flashing a message – it was SY from Hospitalera Blogs asking if I was OK. Hmm I thought yes – why? I turned the radio on – it was talking about the big quake – obviously not  the long awaited Wellington earthquake, and was in fact a huge quake of 7.1 in Christchurch.

Its been an interesting few days – and I don’t just mean the minor earthquakes that we  have had in Wellington (and yes quakes do come in swarms, and no I didn’t even notice them).  Two things came out of this: trends blogging and business continuity and communications in the Twitter world.

Christchurch Wordsworth Colombo Streets (c) NZ Herald
Christchurch Wordsworth Colombo Streets (c) NZ Herald

Trends Blogging

OK in my defence I knew no one was dead – but my second thought was – hmmm wonder what happens if I Google “earthquake insurance New Zealand” -ah I find my own Earthquake Insurance  hubpage (which was written almost a year ago after Hubpages did a disaster hubmob) ranking just below the government site. Interesting because the hub was about earthquake insurance  in the US – but not specifically about earthquake insurance in NZ. So that wasn’t a difficult topic to choose.

When something like a earthquake in Christchurch happens – people want information – and they want it fast.  Turning on the radio was a good start – they apparently started broadcasting about 7am – 2.5 hours after the initial shock.  But finding virtually no information in Google on Christchurch related seismic terms and seeming my semi-related hubs ranking well told me what to write about. Why did I put the articles on hubpages – not here? Authority – I knew I’d get fast indexing and fast promotion – and I have every new earthquake related hub I’ve put up is ranking for at least long tails within 4-5 hours (as fast as the hubpages analytics could tell me).  Now if there were just some relevant ads…


My office before the Earthquake – honest!

Frankly for the traffic stats it would have been better if I live in California – but in real terms I am more than happy to live in New Zealand. For those of you who consider earthquakes as terrifying acts of God – you are right – unless you happen to live in a country with good building standards. Both the dismal Haiti quake and Christchurch’s quake where about the same magnitude and depth and proximity to a city. No one died in Christchurch, maybe 230,000 died with a further 300,000 were injured in Haiti. Three were seriously injured in Christchurch. Now OK the population of Christchurch is 400,000, Haiti had a lot more – but this is all about building standards. And anymore who thinks New Zealand building standards are over the top have probably been silenced for at least a generation.

Oh and there some disasters which are just too easy to predict … Meanwhile – if  I’m not online and there has been a quake in Wellington, I live and work in modern wooden house which is on bedrock and at the top of the hill – I will be fine 🙂

Online Business Continuity

One of the shocking stats coming out of Christchurch is that some small retailers will be bankrupt if their business is out of action for a week. Frankly I’m shocked I had no idea they lived so close to the line.  I’ve already proved that I can ignore my business for months. But what I will lose in an instant in a quake is power – which will stop my modem working instantly – even though the laptop would last for several hours (if it survived being thrown on the floor hmm).

In Christchurch the cell phones stayed up for several hours until the batteries operating the towers died. The traditional phone system lasted through out (though I suspect younger people discovered that there are phones that don’t need power). Maybe I need to remember how to connect via dial up (and a cable..) and/or a cell phone which knows about the Internet. Maybe I need a decent phone which could at least allow me to update Facebook and my blog.

I probably need some more cash too – I rarely have more than $50 in my wallet – and of course EFTPOS and ATMs need power and phone lines! I do actually have a cheque book – it would be interesting trying to persuade a retailer to take one though.

You see frankly if the big one does hit Wellington I’m not hanging around for the aftershocks and waiting for the essential services to be connected. If it hit during the day my partner will probably have to walk home from the CBD – it may take him 3 or 4 hours. Assuming that neither of us are injured  – we will be walking (the roads are a disaster waiting to happen and will be impassible to a cute little urban car) north until we can hitch and find civilization (aka Gin, broadband and power) – probably Levin or Palmerston North.  Our house is fully insured – I feel no need to hang around and protect if from – well exactly what?

Do me a favour – if in future you do hear about a big eathquake in Wellington (100% chance in the new 1000 years by the way) – and you haven’t heard from me online for 24 hours – please link to this post in the forums that are asking where is Lis, and put it on my facebook wall again.

Meanwhile what are your business continuity plans in the case of a natural disaster? Must admit its the first time I’ve really thought about it…

Categories
Adsense HubPages Making Money Online Online Business

You Really Can Make Thousands on Hubpages

As most of you probably already know I have been on Hubpages for a very long time – it will be three years in October actually.  I knew Hubpages very well, I liked the site, the community and my ability to publish there – I thought it was an adjunct to my “real” money sites.  I was wrong.

Over that time I saw it more as a hobby than serious online money making. In fact hubpages has earned me thousands of dollars  -indirectly – by getting me several freelance writing gigs – but I’m not talking about that.

I also used hubpages to jump start this blog as my earliest readers were fans who followed me over from hubpages – thanks guys. Its a good place to build “a brand” – but I don’t mean that either.

I knew hubpages was great for backinks – I have PR4 and PR3 pages there and they were easy to get.

I knew I could make some income on HubPages  – April was a good month it was the first month I hit over $100 in Adsense – from hubpages alone.

But I didn’t realise you could make serious money on hubpages –  I was an idiot.

I started the HubChallenge but used the wrong approach.  I started again focusing on Adsense income. I have, since the 29th May I’ve made $51 from my 40 new hubs.  In fact of those 40 only 9 have made more than $1.  Most of the hubs that have made money I published in the first week …Do the math and you will understand why I am very,very happy.

What was my secret – two things: keyword selection and building backlinks.  What are the details on how to achieve these results?

I’m following Court’s approach as detailed in broad terms on his blog with his final posted titled: Make Money with HubPages Experiment Complete he made $475 in the first month, his aim is $3000/month  – I’m not as experienced as him – I’m aiming for $2000/month to start.

You want more detail? The details are available to Keyword Academy subscribers. Am I going to repeat them here – no I’m not. One because the technique is Court’s IP and two because if you really aren’t prepared to spend a $1 to have a look – you don’t really want to make money online.

Oh and if you have been on the fence – or you still not convinced that you can really make more than hobby money from hubpages then sign up before Thurs 25 June 6pm  MDT because that’s when Court is doing a live webinar on exactly how he made his money on hubpages. (The content will be available afterewards as a video download for subscribers if you missed the date, but you won’t be able to ask live questions obviously). That self-serving affiiate link again: Keyword Academy

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Adsense HubPages Making Money Online

Passive Income: Hubpages Challenge FAILURE!

Yup I did it again – I failed! But its a glorious failure let me explain! You probably heard about the 100 hubs in 30 days challenge and I want to say up front – I failed I didn’t make 100 hubs: I made 62 hubs spread over 3 accounts.

Now to date only one of those accounts which has a grand total of 14 hubs in it is the money winner. The hubs specifically targets long tail keywords with a high cost per click and little competition. The hubs are long – 800 words and I have been building backlinks to them as well.  They are using this Adsense placement layout.

The first hub I published on that account was on the 29th of May – to date – 12 days later I have made $14.60 in Adsense from that account. I have virtually no Google traffic to the hubs yet – I have build a few backlinks, not enough.  Now $14.60 may not sound much but do the maths. I am making that sort of money because I am getting clicks worth up to $5 not 5c. That’s the difference – and to date I am nowhere in the SERPS. When I get to the front page of those SERPS suddenly Court’s claims of making $1500/month on Hubpages don’t sound like good luck at all – just hard work and understanding.

If you want to read about someone who is really making money online with hubpages he’s going for 200 hubs in 30 days! Is he for real? – yes he is, I know that for a fact.  We hang out in the same forums. For the last 2 weeks I have been confused as to why my Adsense figures didn’t add up – he’s the reason.  With HubPages affiliates your Adsense ID is served on 10% of their page impressions and his ID is making me so much money it was causing a serious gap between my channels and my overall Adsense figures LOL!

So what’s the secret formula for making money with Adsense on Hubpages?

  1. Keyword research  – that’s the number one most important thing – find high value/low competition keywords. How do you specifically  do that –  well to be honest I’m not telling you cause I am using the system taught at The Keyword Academy which is a paid program – and its their system I’m using. Its a legit above board and logical approach which happens to work. Its nothing new but the detail is what made the difference for me. Its their system so I’m not spreading their IP all over the Internet – sign up and try it!
  2. Write an adequate amount of unique content – the debate is raging as usual about what is adequate content of course.
  3. Throw a lot of shit against the wall until something sticks. I feel that I got lucky getting such quick success – statistically I could have done 50 hubs before I started to get some income.
  4. If you decide you need a new ID for this experiment – feel free to sign up with as my HubPage affiliate!

hubchallenge-button

Categories
Back Links HubPages

Passive Income:HubChallenge Taking Over My Life!

This will be brief – the hubchallenge has got bigger – I am really trying to optimize some hubs for Adsense – you might want to check out my thoughts on Adsense placement on HubPages.   The reason the challenge got bigger: I’m now doing 800 word hubs not 400 word – and also articles for backlinks – so that another 450 odd words per a hub. I don’t think I am going to make the “deadline” of next week – but I am determined to have some income producing hubs not matter what! Some of the writing will be outsourced but I am planning on a serious writing fest for the next few days as well.

If you think I’m mad check out Ban over at make money online with SEO he’s attempting 200 hubs in 30 days – how he quite manages to produce that amount of content plus the work finding the keywords of course is a little bit beyond me – but I’m very impressed.

Categories
HubPages

Passive Income Hub Challenge After 2 Weeks

OK  another week and I now have a total of 23  hub published on one ID plus seven on my lissie account.  The search traffic for the other ID is now up to 423 views (73% from search engines – mainly Google).

What I wanted to talk about are the “public” hubs I did as lissie. Most of these are are a number of earthquake related topics. This was the “hubmob of the week” – why you might ask? Well there have been several earthquakes in California this week – and not much is guaranteed in life – but earthquakes in California are one of them!

What’s a hubmob?

Its a question asked in the forums – which is then open for a week. Every answer to the question is supposed to include the RSS feed of the other hubs answering that question. You are encouraged to add your hub to the original hubmob forum thread – self-promotion is encouraged, and the hubmob coordinator also gives you a backlink in the “official hub of hubs“.

So you get a free backlink from the forums, you get a free backlink from the hub of the hubmob and you show up in the RSS feed on every other hub on the topic – depending on how high up the voting you are on this page: that was a hint BTW 🙂 You also get a fair number of comments from other viewers because of the visibility of the thread at the top of the forum – I have a lot of comments from people who have never commented on my stuff before.  And HubPages gain authority on what is hopefully a topical subject – and in this case also an ever-green topic with random demand! So far I am getting traffic from some very long-tail keywords (7-plus) which was probably helped by the second shakes in California and Mexico which happened after I published several hubs

Earthquakes happen every where; even Australia!
Earthquakes happen every where; even Australia!

So just in case you missed it here are my earthquake hubs:

Earthquake Insurance varies between countries and I think the Californian model is deeply flawed – though the increasing costs of infrastructure in earthquake prone countries are always going to be an issue. Specifically earthquake insurance California is the biggest problem of all!  Earthquake insurance is of course just one type of disaster insurance which has been around for years but maybe earthquake preparedness from the historic Napier earthquake may teach us a few lessons on earthquake survival.

If a hubmob fits your niches then its an excellent way to get some hubs ranked quickly – this week’s topic is 4th July.

Categories
HubPages

Passive Income Hubchallenge After 1 Week

Well its been a week I have published 15 hubs which have had a grand total of 210 views 66% of which are from search engines (mainly google.com).  Income earned – 0.28c from Adsense.  Several of them went straight to page 1 in the SERPS though and then dropped off so guess which ones I will be building backlinks to!

I personally think that Court got a bit lucky with his earnings of some $8 in his first week   – that or he was building links to his hubs from day one – which I definitly am not at the moment.

Oh and yes I know I behind schedule – but that’s only because cyberhub has a tone of outstanding articles which they are later delivering.  Over at infobarrel I have published Affordable Small Business Websites: Domain Names and am just 2 articles off hitting the magic number to get 90% Adsense income there – mind you I haven’t actually had any Adsense income from them yet …

hubchallenge-button

Categories
HubPages

Passive Income Day 3 HubChallenge

Just a quick update – I have 12 hubs up now and still only an author score of 71 – ie no-follow. A commentator gave me an idea on how to up it so I am trying that out today!

One suggestion was to make really long hubs – but I don’t think that does it cause I notice that Hup Challenge (hubpages own marketing manager with a new ID) has published five really long hubs and has 24 fans and still has an author score of  41.

There are 791 hubchallenge hubs this morning.

Categories
HubPages

Passive Income Hub Challenge Hubbers Reactions

Yeah not sure I can be creative on the titles on hubchallenge-buttonthis hubpages challenge series people! I might stick with the same nice graphic for consistency and see what I can do with the titles tag.

Over at Infobarrel I finally got my 3 long articles about online business models published and now have 19 of the required points for May.

Categories
HubPages

Passive Income Goes Daily – Maybe?

OK so this whole 100 hubs in 30 days game  has been on for a whole day and I thought I might actually go daily on Passive Income just to keep you all up to speed! And to persuade Google that this blog really is about earning passive income online too.