Tag: HubPages

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Article Marketing Back Links Free Tools Lis Recommmends

Wizzley Review: The Answer to the Hubpages Scam?

Are Lissie and her scams right? Well its hardly my fault that scam is a the word Google likes to give this blog authority on. Well OK maybe it is my fault! And so yes I can use it to my own benefit as in HubPages Scam, SEO Scribe Scam, Keyword Academy Scam, and of course the one that started it all SiteSell Scam. 

What is Wizzley?

Wizzley is a place to write articles and get paid via affiliate programs plus get backlinks to your sites. It has a nice set of tools which are drag drop to build your “wizzes” (yeah really that’s what an article is called, where I come from is what a little boy does when he stands up to go to the loo – but whatever!). You have to have at least 400 words, the usual topics (porn, guns, drugs) are banned as are some other rather commonly over-used topics including acne, credit card debt, forex and weight loss. 

What does Wizzley offer? 

  • revenue share starts at 50% – goes to 55% after 50 articles and 60% after 100 articles; 
  • revenue is from Adsense, Amazon, Zazzle and AllPosters – and you are paid direct by those advertisers – you know like hubpages used to be. You get paid for referrals too 10% of impressions from referral’s articles – paid from Wizzley’s share. 
  • instant indexing – I created a new user on Wizzley – added an article I’d been forced to remove from HubPages – and it was indexed within the hour! 
Stuff you should know: 
  • they have human editors, don’t submit crap – they will reject it.  
  • don’t submit duplicate content – they will reject it. 
  • minimum article length: 400 words. 
  • its a new site – it opened to the public about June 2011, therefore its not huge, and it doesn’t have the internal traffic hubpages has. 
  • you can control the urls (the default is the same as the page’s title), as the site is new, you can probably get your URL of choice. 

Wizzley Compared to HubPages

  • if you want to use the site for backlinks you have to have some advertising enabled, if you don’t want Adsense on the article, turn advertising off and then add an Amazon (or Zazzle, Allposters) module somewhere. They won’t accept articles solely for the purpose of backlinks
  • unlike HubPages you don’t have to run Adsense – turn off “advertising” on the right side of the edit page if you just want to use the other modules
  • unlike HubPages Wizzley has a nice little contents module
  • unlike HubPages there are quite a number of different ways to use the Amazon module – examples  here 
  • a brand new identity of mine on Wizzley had my first article indexed in Google inside an hour. With my 4-year old ID on hubpages recent hubs have taken days to be indexed
  • others are reporting getting keyword targeted articles on the 1st or 2nd page with little backlinking. I’ll comment when I have tried myself. 
  • Wizzley has partner sites which accept German and French articles! 

If You Make Money With HubPages You Might Want to Move to Wizzley ASAP

As of 2012 – HubPages’s Amazon modules will be paid via the HPAds programs, NOT via your own Amazon affiliate ID. If you are making good money with Amazon I shouldn’t have to explain to you why this is a terribly bad idea, and why, I have spend hours today un-publishing hubs on one of my accounts so I can move them over to  Wizzley. 

If you want to know the details of why this is a bad idea: check out my Move Amazon Earning Hub to Wizzley

Ideally of course if your articles are making money, they should be on your own sites. But I haven’t time to create a bunch of sites, so in the meantime I am moving them to Wizzley. 

On the face of it I like the layout of Wizzley and think I can use it to create a good CTR to Amazon. If the site stays in Google’s good books and pages rank easily – then as they say YAH CHING! 

Oh and here’s that EVIL AFFILIATE LINK AGAIN

Categories
Rants

Bullying Online is NOT OK – Even for “Adults”

Tropical Beaches - the only one's worth swimming on!

If you’re bored with the making an income online – you are bored with life in my opinion. Normally I stay out of the day to day online dramas – but hell – what the heck – so here’s my thought of the day.

Don’t Let the Bullies Win

Today a blogger (and I’ll get to that term later) – wrote to me and said he’d removed a post, that I’d commented on. The post was written celebrating that he had resigned from a job that was “sucking the life out of him” – it rang a very loud bell with me – so I commented. Then he deleted the post – because the company that he hadn’t named was threatening to withhold his final pay (and his name isn’t on the site either). Now he probably shouldn’t have posted until he had the final check cashed, but either way the company was bullshiting – and he fell for it – it happens a lot online.  Bullies win, because people think they need permission.  I hope he puts the post back up once he has his final pay banked.

I don’t like bullies, I’ve mentioned that before. Its one of my trigger points, bullying.  My bet is that anonymous blogger’s boss was a bully in primary school too.

But online bullying is hard to do. Because bullies work by playing on people’s fear. The victim wants everything to go away – unless they stop and think, and realise that the free speech is a what most of us think is the basis of a decent society.

And writing your opinion of what you think about a product or service, on your own blog, is the right of anyone really.

Here are some of my opinions:

  • MacDonald’s makes bad food;
  • there’s no point swimming in water colder than 24C;
  • rugby sucks and Rugby World Cup is a complete waste of my (taxpayer) money;
  • Ken Evoy Googlebomb are three words that go together.
You may chose to disagree – but I warn you now – any pro-rugby comments will be deleted forthwith!
Tropical Beaches - the only one's worth swimming on!

Own Your Own Website

There’s an awful lot of people out there who are looking for a work from home opportunity – it seems quite a lot of them can write passably well. So they believe that they can make money writing for revenue share sites such as Suite101, eHow, Squidoo, HubPages. Scam  or for real?

I used to promote HubPages on this site – as a way to make money -because I earned my first online money with them.  Now I don’t. Because they have made changes to their site and their terms and conditions, which I don’t like. And there is not a darn thing I can do about it.

And don’t just own your website (hosting and domain name) – make sure you own the technology behind it. For example if you use a proprietary site builder like – hmmm, let me think,  Site Build It!, and for any reason you decide to leave the program – you will have to move onto another technology (I’d recommend WordPress). This is of course entirely possible – if you are pretty technically able, which you probably aren’t as a newcomer. You will have to pay someone to do it right, and if they aren’t very careful you will lose quite a lot of your rankings. If your site is large, you might even find that paying $300/year for your site’s hosting with Ken Evoy, will be cheaper than moving to to your own hosting.

Commentators – Read This First

Let’s get this very clear. I am bored to tears with SBI!, sitebuildit, Site Build It and related keywords. I’m not writing this,2 1/2 years AFTER my first post on the topic, to re-kindle the fires.

Dr Ken Evoy did that. Read the first link to Ken Evoy Googlebomb. Let’s be clear – I really don’t care if Evoy has declared war on Google, let’s face it, Google probably doesn’t care either.

What I care about is that Ken still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that the reason that my original post has dropped into obscurity, its nothing to do with the original post – its because of the appalling behavour of his hit squad that descended on my site. This is, and has never been, about the post – its about the comments.

I thought maybe he’d figured it out – after all he’s a smart guy. But apparently not.

He is rallying the troops again. The same goon squad is currently forming in the private SBI! Forums and he’s telling them to start attacking my social media profiles and to write pro Site Build It Reviews and link to them. The reviews I don’t care about.

Though there has always been plenty of positive SBI reviews out there – that was what started this whole saga – there were ONLY positive reviews.

Because of Ken’s – shut down the opposition policy.

Still I don’t give a shite – but it bothers me that third parties are scared for me – scared enough to contact me and warn me, genuinely.

Its still bullying guys – and it still doesn’t work.

Sending me pornographic suggestions doesn’t work – frankly I enjoy sex – and some of your suggestions are interesting …

Abusing how I look – why would I care? I have spent nothing on my appearance ever – I think I’ve had good value for money.

Praying that I or my family die of cancer – yeah sweet – confirms everything I’ve ever thought about the religious fringe – glad they are not on my side – don’t want to spend eternity with you either.

So fill free to comment, but I may delete you comment without warning – or I may copy it and send it to anyone I feel like. Might even tweet it …

Oh and yeah – maybe before you do anything your favourite guru tells you to do you might want to watch this:

Debate is fine – bullying is not – its not hard to tell the difference – discuss.

Categories
Back Links Free Tools HubPages

Hubpages – Can You Still Make Money in 2011?

Traffic drop on Hubpages.com as measured by Quantcast

I started on Hubpages.com – because of Hubpages I made my first $100 online and got paid out by Google’s Adsense program. In fact the precursor of this blog was built to support my hubpages – not the other way around!

Until recently I highlighted my pages explaining how I made money on Hubpages – the posts were genuine – but I also made money from those writers who signed up using my affiliate ID – personally I’d moved on from Hubpages, Hubpages is no scam, but I prefer  to put time into my own sites – but my hubpages were still making me hundreds a month – until recently.

Panda Update and Hubpages

I’ve already written about how the Panda updated failed to deliver quality to the searcher – and still my niche sites are  ranking pretty much where they were before the so-called update.

But Panda was originally nicknamed “Farmer Update” by SEO’s – because the update seemed to particularly focus on large content sites – sites like HubPages.

The official figures – as provided by Quantcast – seems to support this:

Traffic drop on Hubpages.com as measured by Quantcast

Looking at my own analytics for the same period – its the same but different :

hubpages traffic drop April 2011
Analytics on my main Hubpages Account - same period as Qantcast

My point is that – over all comments about the site – you need to look at your own stats and apply the data. The peak on 1 March was because my Wellington Earthquake hub ranked well in NZ before the local news papers woke up to the fact that locals were panicking about about a barely felt shake in the wake of the wall-to-wall coverage of the previous week’s major Christchurch quake.

Ignoring this outlier – my traffic seems to have only slightly dropped – unfortunately that drop is much more dramatic when I look at my Adsense stats for the last couple of months compared to the same period last year (my traffic is seasonal so the only fair comparison is the same time of year).

Its against Adsense TOS to give you details but I can tell you that my eCPM  is down over 50%.

My best ranked hubs have dropped – but are still on page 1 or 2 in most cases. However the drop in traffic from position 1 to position 7 or 8 is huge – as anyone who has been there will attest to.

Experiment to See If I Can Get My Rankings Back

I’m lucky because I have two cases study where I have hubs and sites which target the same keywords.

Case 1: Adsense Niche

In this case my hub has been in #1 position for a couple of years – after Panda 1 in early Februrary it dropped to position #2, in April’s Panda 2 (Panda roll-out worldwide) the site dropped to position 4 for its main keyword. This is a seasonal niche that peaks in the US summer so I want it back!

I also have a niche site sitting in position 7 for the same main keyword  – frankly I haven’t built a link for either the hub or the site for at least 2 years – its not the world’s most profitable niche – but its perfect for the purpose of answering the question.

Will backlinks still work for Hubpages?

Now lets be clear in the past – hubpages didn’t need backlinks – or not very many – if you had a trusted profile and wrote a good long hub – the hub in question above is nearly 2000 words you could get the hub to rank for a non-competitive keyword using a combination of site authority and internal links.

In May I will be building 60 links to each of the hub and the niche site. The links will be based on a mixture of the main keyword and related cousins – using  Keyword Academy methods.

Case 2: Product Hubs

I have a product orientated site which I have also used hubpages for back links from. I’m going to try adding a new hub on the product – backlinking it from related hubs and then backlink the hub to see if it will rank – this is on a different user from my main one – so will be interested to see what happens.

Issues with HubPages reactions to Panda/Farmer Update

Some would say that changes to Hubpages TOS has caused more damage to their earnings on HP than the actual Google changes.

1. Hubpages has launched their own Ads program.

I’ve signed up for the HP Ads program to see if it will give me a better return than Adsense. I signed up all my accounts about 10 days ago but my two more niche focused identities are reverting to Adsense – I’m not going to hit the $50 payout without decent traffic. In contract my main profile has made that $50 minimum in 10 days  – I’ll leave it on for another month to see how the eCPM compares to Adsense. I have a lot of popular hubs on that account that get traffic but few clicks so the HP ads may work for this account.

2. Hubpages  may be struggling to stay in business.

There has been pandemonium in the Hubpages forums but I doubt that its even 1/2 of what is happening in Hubpages HQ – the company has got to be hurting a lot and probably wondering how to make payroll. Whether they  survive the next few months – will be of interest – there is always lots of knee-jerk changes being made. In the meanwhile I advise anyone who has content on hubpages to back it up.

3. Hubpages is losing a lot of “marketers” because of their changes to TOS

Recent changes in hubpages have varied from the incomprehensible (banning pixelated images), to the odd (reducing the number of Amazon and eBay capsules allowed), and from  the sane (banning duplicate content) to the not sane (banned affiliate links).

This is losing some hubbers a lot of money – some at least are unpublishing and removing their content. Its very hard to know how significant this is – but it could be that hubpages is losing a lot of high ranking content and suffering from a lot  broken links both internally and externally – this would certainly hurt my websites – so I imagine its hurting hubpages too.

Unfortunately the hubbers they are loosing were the ones who knew how to promote their content – those that are left are the “write it and they will come” camp – which worked so long as someone was promoting the site – if no one is…

4. Hubpages has reduced the number of Adsense ads on hubs

The loss of a the well-placed links unit on hubpages is unfortunate – I continue to make great money from link units on other sites.

At the moment I ma pretty sure that Hubpages isn’t a good way to make money anymore – what I’m trying to establish though is if it still has enough authority to be useful backlinks – watch this space.


Categories
HubPages Lis Recommmends Making Money Online Passive Income

Hubpages 3 Years On

On the 19th of September 2007 I published my first hub – it was short, it was self-promotional – the url was wrong  for SEO. Over 3 years it has gained a total of 1143 page views – almost all of which are from search engines. It may have made me some money – I doubt it – but I don’t know, I didn’t track that hub 🙂 The hub was about midlife travel. That month my total online income was  $1.98

One of my most recent hubs was about the chances of a Wellington earthquake . It was indexed within a few hours – I expect it will have PR on the next update – I’ve built no links to it.  In August my online income from passive sources was $1600.

When I started on Hubpages – I had two  sites – I had made next to nothing (like less than $10 nothing) – I was newly a full-time “Internet Marketer” and I was going to making a good income my Xmas… This was long,  long before Keyword Academy, I don’t think I would have survived long enough to get to The Keyword Academy – if it hadn’t been for HubPages

What HubPages Has Done for Me

  • It taught me what a buying keyword was .
  • It was the first place that anyone ever read anything that I wrote – I sat up all night watching 100’s arrive to read a hub someone had stumbled for me, then I learnt that stumble traffic doesn’t click.
  • It made me realise that I really did want to make money online – that I wasn’t interested in writing for the sake of it (well that’s my justification for spending so many hours on the forums arguing about it).
  • HubPages prompted me to start this blog – I started wanted to write in a format which didn’t quite work with HubPages.
  • HubPages made me realise that a lot of other revenue sharing sites have what to me are “obvious” flaws – some of those sites are struggling or are gone now.
  • It taught me that you really can make passive income – I have hubs published in November 2009 which still make me money each and every day – all I do with them and go back and delete broken links from time to time.
  • It taught me that you can make even better money from referrals – yup ever hub link on this page is a referral – those 10%’s do add up…
  • Hubpages made my dream of making a living online a reality.

Top 5 Reasons Why Hubpages Works

  • Authority – because the site has built a self-policing community spammers are flagged and shut down quickly. New users find it takes a time for their hubs to be indexed and ranked – there is a reason for that – what is published and indexed are generally pretty good quality. This has meant that pretty consistently Google has trusted HubPages – I’d say even more so in the last 6 months.
  • Internal linking. Some sites seem to get it right – and you can tell because it means that good content, or content from trusted authors, should be indexed fast and get PR easily. Both happen on HubPages and has for ever as far as I am concerned.
  • Strong “hints” from management as to what to write about. You could do a lot worse as a new writer by entering the “contests” and challenges that they often run. The topics are not chosen randomly – some of my successful hubs were topics suggested by HubPages themselves.
  • Diverse content – because of the diversity in the writers at Hubpages there is a huge range of content (check out the latest hubs feed) – some of its completely non-commercial in the traditional sense – you don’t see that on many other revenue sharing sites.  I suspect that it gives them “trust points” with Google because the ONLY purpose of the site is not to make money – any writer can produce content with no ads on it – if they chose. You can’t do that on Ezinearticles for example.
  • Self Policing community. In recent months there has been the addition of many factors which allows writers  to rank other hubbers and hubs with “accolades” not just a general vote up/down (which has been there since the start). I suspect that those accolades add to a hub’s hubscore. Higher hubscores means that the hub gets more internal links both automatically (best hubs in categories for example) and both by showing high on the list for “suggested links” tools where other hubs may link to the hub with a contextural link.

If you are interested in more details on how I use HubPages to make passive income then check out my HubPages my make money with HubPages series

Top 6 Reasons Why I Recommend HubPages

  • Its easier to rank a hub than a page on your website – its faster, it stays ranked and you will get useful statistics that will tell you what works and what doesn’t (particularly actual CPC and CTR).  This advantage well over-rate the revenue split IMHO.
  • If you study what is being suggested as far as topics are concerned you won’t go far wrong with SEO.
  • It’s free – there is no cost whatsoever to try out your idea.  If it works you can always launch your own site – and you already have the back links available…
  • It works stunningly well for recent event blogging and for events that haven’t happened yet (hint earthquakes…). The authority of the site means that the hubs get indexed instantly – the search traffic will then tell you what the search terms are…
  • My  public persona’s profile page is a PR3 and routinely gets new sites indexed for me – do you know how hard it is to get a site with a consistent PR3 which you can put any link on that you want…
  • I am confident that the site has a long future ahead of it – the people behind it are well-connected in Silicon Valley and I’ve seen the staff expand from 3 to 20 and to continually improve the site for both writers and advertisers.

So do you write for hubpages? If not why not …

Categories
Online Business Search Engines

Shake Rattle and Roll

Christchurch Wordsworth Colombo Streets (c) NZ Herald

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

Warning From Adsense!

I think a few people at HubPages recently have had warning emails from Adsense – in censorshippart the email goes something like this:

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying
Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For
instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as
h**p://cdn.hubpages.com/hub/XXGoogleXAdsenseX.
Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may
exist on other pages of your website.

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to
make prominent use of “Google Brand Features” on sites displaying Google
ads. This includes any sites that attempt to create a false association
with Google or use Google trademarks in the URL.

So apparently you can’t use Adsense or Google in urls – note this was just in the end part of the url as well not actually the domain name. Not on a site which uses Adsense anyways. I’m not the only one to have been affected on HubPages and the Hub support team suggested I unpublish or change the url’s on any hub which contained “google” or “adsense”.

So I did – about a month ago – and now they are all gone from the cache  now they – are back right here on this site – which does not, never has, and will never run Adsense! Unfortunately I have lost the comments – which as usual on hubpages were useful – anyway here is the text!

Adsense Placement on HubPages

This never made me a lot of Adsense – but it ranked pretty well because it had so organic links – oh well. Useful information if you want to know why you have a single digit click thru rate on your hubs.

SEO Google Explains How to Do It

I went through the latest Google Webmaster guidelines and applied the “official” “suggestions” to hubpages.

How to Earn $1000 a Month with Adsense

Obviously sarcasm doens’t work with Adsense employees! This was actually the hub they named as in breach of their TOS! I must admit though I made a few dollars because yes  I was triggering plenty of get rich quick Adsense ads and the odd idiot did indeed click on them!

Photo Credit

Categories
Affiliate Marketing HubPages Making Money Online

eBay Rule Change Leaves Blogger, HubPages, Squidoo Out in the Cold

eBay Bans Blogger etc

Its official – as of 1 August 2009 you cannot not use eBay (EPN) to monetize Blogger (blogspot) blogs, HubPages hubs or Squidoo lenses or InfoBarrel articles. This one is a bit a of a shocker – the time frame of less than two weeks is pretty bad too. Actually eBay will tell you that they “told you so” back in May when they mentioned that both:

Ad Networks:  Using any graphical ad network to place eBay ads (ads that go directly to an eBay domain) on websites not directly under the publishers’ control…Sub-affiliates:  Any arrangement where publishers distribute their earnings from eBay Partner Network to other publishers.

were no longer acceptable to EPN. Source EPN Official Blog.

The Ad Networks paragraph reflects the HubPages and Blogger business models, the Sub-affiliate model reflects the Squidoo model.

This is a huge change and will take some affiliates out of business and for many more will mean that they will take a huge income hit while they rebuild their business.

Is eBay evil?

Is  eBay is bad, ugly nasty company who treats their sellers like dirt and their affiliates worse? Nope, the point is that nothing has changed: he who has the gold makes the rules.  eBay would rather the buyer bought from direct from them – they don’t really want to pay affiliates – it costs them money.

No eBay isn’t evil – they are in business and they have, and will continue to make business decisions with their own best interests in heart, the interests of the shareholders, not the interests of their affiliates.

Is Building Your Business on Free Sites Bad?

Using sites such as blogger (blogspot) and HubPages meant that you could make money from eBay affiliate commissions without investing any of your own. Now don’t get me wrong – I think making money for nothing down is fantastic! But it leaves you doubly vulnerable – either the affiliate or the website you are using (or as they say these days “the Web2.0 property”) could change the rules, ban your account – and you are back to where you were with nothing.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket : ironically when I used to invest in property for passive income I used to say the same thing:

Build a diversified business
Build a diversified business

Diversification is Everything

If you have built a successful income stream from eBay affiliate sales on blogger and hubpages is this the end? Yes for eBay – time to move on – with blogger blogs you have the option to self-host them (yes blogger does have a self-hosting option same as WordPress) which is probably the quickest option, but if that involves a change of url there is going to be some work involved. Alternatively it will the time to move to self-hosted WordPress.

The other option is to leave the blogger blog where it is and change the monetisation method. Its unlikely that Adsense will work well for an eBay niche but it does sometimes – double check- Amazon is the obvious option but there are literally dozens of others. I have just signed up with Chikita and I quite like what I am seeing with it too.

I expect that Hubpages will come up with something to ease the pain of the transition but obviously the only real option there is either Amazon or a relevant affiliate product.

Once I have my income level up to full-time – my aim is simple – I don’t want any one affiliate to be contributing more than 20% of that income -its just too risky and this is a case example of why!

Where do you stand – how does the eBay change of heart over blogger blogs and HubPages affect your business?

Photo Credit

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!

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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.

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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.