Making Money from Hubpages and Adsense - an Experiment

I have long been a fan of making money on Adsense - I have a network of niche sites that tap into this medium and I am keen to expand my adsense income via other means.

I have also recently been converted by Hubpages. It seems everywhere I turned when doing my keyword research there was a hubpage at least in the top 10, often far higher. It got me thinking that Hubpages must be a powerful tool for creating backlinks and traffic given how many rank.

But I had played with hubpages before and struggled (mostly due to their scoring system and the dofollow backlink rules). But I read a bit about them and realised that not only are hubpages useful for backlinks and traffic you can actually make money on them!

Not in a Squidoo kind of way where you don't understand what is going on, your income is months behind so you lose interest etc - but they actually show your adsense ads on 60% of the impressions.

To add to the good news they even let you install Google Analytics on your pages!

This, I thought, has to be worth something.

Hubpages Challenge

Which is why I have decided on a Hubpages challenge. I actually started it 2 weeks ago (you can catch up on my hubpages challenge here) but thought I would also write about it on DP, to encourage others to use the fantastic power of Hubpages (I hope - of course this could fall flat on it's face!).

So where are we after a fortnight?

* 60 Hubs (about 30 of which are targeting keywords I have selected)
* Roughly 25 Search Engine visits a day (yet to do any real backlinking)
* $5 in income from adsense

Targets


* 200 hubs minimum at the end of 3 months
* Have made $150 by the end of the challenge
* Have achieved a minimum of 1 x $10 day by the end of the challenge

Wish me luck!

I am very excited about this challenge, which I am running for 3 months. I will keep things updated here so you know how I am going. Feel free to join in, or to ask any questions... I will do my best to answer.

 

Hmph.. Interesting..

oh yeah, for about 1 week ago I try to make several hubs about communication. I did the keyword research, pick moderate - low competition on google SERP

Then I send the list of my keyword, and sent it to my content writer..

After she finished her job, I publish all articles to my hubpages..

about several days later, I started to link building for my hubs.. I did social bookmarking, scrapebox, etc..

what about the result? today i checked all my hubs rank for the main keyword..

2 hubs on #2 google for main keyword..

and the others still on the page 3 to 10 on google.com

Btw, can u share your experience / method for keyword research and link building Nick??

 

This sounds like something exciting for me as long as you don't tamper with any rules seems like something promising. So, GL!

 

Angeal,

Sounds like a good start - getting much traffic or income? (have you added your adsense and analytics ids to your hub info? If not do it now! ) Been meanign to give scrape box a try...

For myself I am just starting on this hubpages thing but...

Keyword research - my main aim is to try find low competition keywords. This means targeting keywords that have under 100,000 broad competition (ideally below 30,000), that have poor SEO'd competition (the top 5 competition having poor backlink numbers, onpage SEO etc) and good searches (usually targeting about the 1k - 1.5k mark but I will go lower if I like writing about the subject).

All this is done by using the google Keyword tool. I used to use Market Samurai but tbh it wasn't saving me any real amounts of time. Want to give MNF a try when I have the time.

Unfortunately I have only done that for about half these hubs - need more focus on keyword research!

Backlinking for me is a combination of methods (and have only just started backlinking the current hubs so a bit of this is theoretical)

* Social bookmarking to some of the bigger sites (about 5 - 10)
* Profile links (I outsource to a VA - includes 4 links per profile, about 50 profiles)
* Article submission. I will rewrite the hub and possibly put it into spin context then use ArticleBot to submit to 100 article directories

And then I move on. 600 word hubs take me about 20 minutes to write and 10 minutes to put together. the article, spinning and submission about 30 mins as well. As i outsource teh rest each hub takes me about an hours work.

 

hmph... interesting strategy nick

I do some social bookmarking for my hubs too.. I submit my hubs to mixx, jumptags, etc

would you mind if you share us list of your favorite social bookmarking sites for us??

 

I simply use the Shareaholic Firefox plugin that sends you to the right page to bookmark on various sites

(The ones I use are mostly nofollow i think but i dont let that bother me)

Reddit (often sends a couple of hundred visitors)
Sphinn
Mixx
Tipd
Delicious
Diigo

I also tweet it

 

Try using onlywire, if you haven't already. You don't have to pay for it as long as you make less than 300 submissions a month. You can submit your article/blog posts to a little over 40 social/bookmarking sites automatically. It really is a handy tool. They even have a plugin for WP, oh yeah that's free too.

 

used that a few years ago and it was so-so. Will give it another shot though (and the plugin).

Thanks

 

If you can get your related Hubs to link together, then that would help boost your backlinking. If you're getting that kind of traffic, it probably doesn't hurt to throw in affiliate links where appropriate without sounding too promotional (according to Hubpages rules), and you can capture the traffic best if you start building a list and do email marketing.

 

Agreed. The first target is getting them up, then ranking them. Once I have them working on those regards tweaking them to optimise them for lists and affiliate earnings will be something I shall enjoy playing with

 

Yesterdays stats

+1 hub (now 61 hubs)
$0.00 income (this week $3.95, total $5.04)
27 search engine visitors (64 this week)

Week stats reset every Monday

Only the 1 hub created as was finishing off some projects. Looking at my rankings it is obvious I need to get backlinking (most are in the mid teens and early twenties in rankings for specific keywords). To that end I will be devising a specific backlinking policy today - and have 3 pretty good looking keywords that I will be creating hubs on

 

Sounds like a interesting project to try out, I hope it goes well for you.

 

A quick explanation of my backlinking strategy. This will be in effect for all future hubs and I will slowly work back across my current hubs. I will update you if I make any changes.

The Backlinking Strategy

1) Social bookmark each hub to 5 - 10 top social bookmark sites as soon as it is created
2) Ping the hub on pingler.com
3) Every two hubs rewrite one of the hubs (usually 600 words or so) into a 400 word article and submit to goarticles and squidoo linking back to both hubs. Social bookmark this article and ping it on pingler.com
4) Turn that article into a basic spin syntax article and submit it to 100 directories using articlebot (ill try article marketing robot when i have the cash to spare)
5) Every 4 hubs create 50 profile pages with links to those 4 hubs (done by a VA). Ping each profile page on pingler.com
6) Where suitable interlink my hubs with each other

A fair bit of effort but we know that the real money comes from RANKING for keywords, not just getting the hubs up and online. Fingers crossed this will start getting a few top 3 hubs

As well as article marketing robot I also hope to try scrapebox in a month or so (when I will have some cash to spare)

 

Last night was spent backlinking a number of the hubs following the backlinking plan above so not much movement on the amount of hubs (about to publish one from content done yesterday). I am going to be concentrating on backlinking over the next couple of days as I know the keywords I am targeting are easily rankable so the lack of traffic is bothering me.

Rankings matter for these hubs - most of mine are still in the mid teens and looking at them shouldnt take more than a few backlinks to start bouncing up the rankings.

Not that it will stop me from creating more, just that I need to work on what I have done as well as more hubs.

Anyway yesterdays stats

Hubs: 61 (+0 yesterday)
Income: $0 ($3.95 week, $5.04 total)
Search Engine Traffic: 24 visitors (88 this week)

Weekly stats reset every monday - let me know if there are other stats you want me to measure

 

Good move !

Keep it on dude

Oh yeah, you can use "hubpages related tags with PR" for giving backlink to your hubpages...

Ex: if there`s a hubpage tags "buy shoes" have PR 2, and you insert it on your hubpages.. atomically ur hubs will get baclink from PR 2

just try it

 

I will do - but how does me linking to them get me a backlink?

 

you`re not linkkin them.. but you make them to linking you..

go to the hubpages dashboard, and fill the "PR tags" on the tags field on ur hubs

 

hubpages need unique articles?

 

yes - they don't allow duplicate content

 

sounds goood