Make Money on the Internet

You Can Have Success Making Money at HubPages

2009-11-06T21:13:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted here because I've been trying to find the right balance between "working" online and taking care of my house and family. I've had a couple of my friends ask me recently how I'm actually making money online. I received an email the other day asking the same and I responded by writing a very long email to her, which turned into a new hub. Read it here.

The Keyword Academy - A Blueprint For Low Maintenance Income on The Internet

2009-09-27T09:36:00.001-04:00

Okay, it's been a little while since my last post because I've been busy learning so much more about how to make money online. I had heard of The Keyword Academy a while ago, when I first started writing at HubPages. I wish I had checked out their crash course when I first started; I might have been making a lot more money by now!

Courtney (Court) Tuttle and his partner, Mark Butler, of The Keyword Academy (TKA), are professional internet marketers and educators and let me tell you, they know their "stuff". They are dedicated to teaching others how to follow their principles to make money on the internet. Click on the link above to read more about their Keyword Crash Course Video Series, a ten lesson, six hour course on how to start a group of profitable niche websites from scratch – everything from choosing the topics to setting up the sites to getting people to actually visit what you’ve created. They also have a Crash Course e-book that you can dowload that is full of great information.

What's the catch? Well, it costs $1 for access to it all. Yep, that's it - $1 for 30 days of unlimited access to all the resources TKA offers, including the forums where there's such a huge wealth of knowledge and members abound that are willing to answer all of your questions. If you decide you want to stick around after the first 30 days, you pay $33 a month. If you're serious about making money online and like what you see at TKA (I promise you will - I DO!), you will see that it's well worth it. You can, however, cancel EASILY after the initial 30 days for a buck - no strings whatsoever. Check it out and at least do the 30 days for a dollar - I guarantee you'll learn something that you would not learn elsewhere about how to make money online.

Earn Free Money For Shopping

2009-09-17T16:05:00.001-04:00

Want to make easy money another way? Shop great deals and discounts - I recently found out about Big Crumbs where you can sign up for free and earn commissions every time you or someone you refer makes a purchase - forever. You shop your favorite retailers through Big Crumbs. I joined a couple of days ago - can't beat free money! Check it out at the link above or click on the picture in the column on the right to learn more about how it works. By the way, the person who told me about this site earned around $1200 last year from Big Crumbs!

Great Keyword Tool Tutorial

2009-09-13T21:01:00.001-04:00

This video was created by Ryan Hupfer, founder of HubPages, and it's an excellent tutorial on how to use Google's Keyword Tool to optimize traffic to your articles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJIAh9uCt4c

More about backlinks

2009-09-09T22:18:00.000-04:00

Another way to get backlinks to your hubs or blogs is to write articles for EzineArticles.com. Ezine Articles is a searchable article database where email newsletter publishers are able to select from hundreds of thousands of quality original articles to publish in their next newsletter. Your ORIGINAL articles have the potential of being exposed to millions of people. If your article is selected by a publisher, that publisher is required to print the entire article, including the resource section, which is where you are allowed to place up to two links - this is where you do your backlinking. Some suggest submitting an article to Ezine for every two HubPages that you create (since you can submit two links per Ezine article), but that's easier said than done. I now, after two months with HubPages, have 40 Hubs and have submitted - and had approved - 3 articles with Ezine. The difficult part is that the actually have humans that review your articles to make sure you're delivering what you promise (based on the title) and that it is indeed original content. Technically, you can duplicate your own article from another site and submit it as long as you can prove that the duplicate is in fact YOUR original content.......BUT, you don't want to do that because Google doesn't look favorably on duplicate content. So try and tweak it so it's different enough not to be a "copy" and shorten it if possible - best Ezine article articles are in the 300-700 words (although they accept anything with a minimum 250 words all the way up to 5000 words).

My third article was just accepted and published at Ezine today, the other two 10 and 14 days ago. So far the number of article views is 274 and URL clicks is 31. I will certainly try my hand at more articles every now and then, but for now I'm trying to concentrate on more and more hubs. My current goal is to get to 150 hubs and see how much that brings in.

Keywords

2009-09-08T22:47:00.000-04:00

There are so many important details to remember when you're starting out trying to make money online, but perhaps one of the most important is keyword research. No matter what platform you use to make money from ads and other affiliates, you need traffic to make money. If no one sees your webpages/sites, then no one will see the ads, then you make nothing. So, obviously, the more people you can get to your site the better chance you have that someone will click an ad and increase your revenue.

But how do you get people to your sites? Well, that's a loaded question and I'm still learning the ropes, but, for starters, think about what YOU do when you logon to the internet and are looking for something. Where do you go? Yahoo? Google? I would venture to say, and there are statistict to prove it, most people go to Google. What you want is to get your page showing up on the first, or at least second, page when someone searches for something within your niche.

You have to think about exactly what words people might be typing in. Say you have a webpage on Wide Calf Boots. If someone were to look for this product, they'd type in the search box: wide calf boots, or boots for wide calves, or extended calf boots, or womens wide calf boots, or women's wide calf boots (note, the difference between the last two is simply an appostrophy - this could make a big difference!). That was just a few of the many variations of possible keywords one would use on that page. See the link above for the full list of keywords used for that HubPage.

Google has been nice enough to provide us with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which allows you to enter a word or phrase and get exact matches and information such as what advertisers are willing to pay Google for clicks on their ads, global and monthly search volume for the keywords used, and advertiser competition. The goal is to find keywords with a high cost per click (CFC), moderate competition, and a large number of people searching for it. It takes time to get comfortable with this tool, but it is invaluable if you are writing articles and/or blogs to make money online.

If your pages are geared more toward selling a product, say, from Amazon (assuming you are an associate under their affiliate program) then the CPC may not be so important to you, but the competition and especially the search volume is crucial. No sense in trying to sell something that not a lot of people are looking for.

Backlinking

2009-08-31T11:44:00.000-04:00

What the heck is it and why do you need to know about it? Backlinking is basically networking on the web. When another site links to your web page, blog, or hubpage, it is referred to as a backlink. It is important and necessary to have backlinks, as many as you can, in order to get traffic to your website - that will not only help increase your revenue, but you will also - hopefully - get fans or followers who keep coming back to see what's new. They may even tell others about it and so on and so forth. It took me a while to figure out how to start backlinking to my hubs. You can do simple, quick things like submitting your site's URL to sites such as Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com and SheToldMe.com. These sites are basically places people can go to to find sites on topics they're looking for. If you're lucky, your site will rank up there and come up in someone's search. SheToldMe.com even offers revenue sharing with you if someone looks at your website summary, which you submit to them; also, if someone signs up for SheToldMe's services under your referral code you receive a percentage of that person's revenue for life! Not bad for free.

Another way to get backlinks is by creating a blog or blogs - like HubPages, it's free - just like this blog you are reading was created by me for free! You control the blog and its contents and you appropriately post links back to your Hubs, like this.

One of the most important things to shoot for is to rank high with the most popular search engines - namely, Google. This is where researching keywords comes in - a MUST if you want to earn and be found. Really, how many people read beyond the first page or two of google when they are searching for something specific? Me neither! Use Google's AdWords Keyword Tool. More on that later.

I hope this helps you better understand what backlinks are and why they are so important.

I made the cut!

2009-08-27T22:01:00.001-04:00

I just found out that I've been selected out of 2600+ articles to the top ten list of HubNugget Wannabes on HubPages! What a great week - found out I'm officially cancer-free, made my first Amazon commission, had my ovaries removed and now HubNugget Wannabe contender! Sorry if I'm going over board here, just haven't had a good week like this in over a year and it feels real good. I would appreciate your votes should you peruse my article, Parenting Help - How to Teach Your Child to Say I'm Sorry, and feel it's worthy ... here's the link to vote for my article. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

What does it mean to make the final top 5 HubNugget Wannabes? Increased traffic. Increased readerhood. Increased fan base. My profile, link and winning hub prominently displayed in the weekly newsletter, which is emailed to approximately 50,000 hubbers. My winning hub title posted in the HubNugget forum thread. What does this all mean? Increased traffic = increased ad revenue potential!

This is a MUST READ

2009-08-27T19:31:00.001-04:00

I just came across this great Hub that is a must read if you are interested in making money online. I wish I had come across it when I first started, it has a wealth of information and great links and resources to help you get started making money writing on HubPages . It's a long article, but well worth it - check it out!

Low Maintenance

2009-08-27T14:22:00.001-04:00

The best Hub, besides being original and interesting, is one that has longevity. By that, I mean something that is low maintenance - an article about a place or how to do something or product reviews, something that can stand the test of time and keep traffic coming to it for a long time to come. That way you put a lot of time into it in the beginning when creating it, but it keeps earning you money for months or even years.

Next time I'll discuss what I've learned about backlinking to get more traffic to your hubs...keep learning more as I learn it, too!

Here's a link to my first Hub - it's had a total of 349 views in 5 weeks since created, not too bad. I started 5 weeks ago and I now have 21 hubs and two Blogs. To date, I've earned about $33 from Google - may not sound like much, but it's not bad at all. The more pages you have published, the more you can make over time. You have to give it time...

Getting Started Writing

2009-08-27T14:18:00.000-04:00

Here's where the time committment comes in. In the beginning, you'll probably spend a lot of time creating your hub articles. It is important to remember that a Hub is not a blog. Think of HubPages as your blog and each Hub a separate, independent Post. Make sure your content is original and interesting. Simply copying content from somewhere else on the web is a no-no and can get you booted. You should read the FAQ on HubPages - it has a lot of great information to get you started. Also search for other Hubs and in the Forums for help - there's a ton of it available to you. Give some thought to relevant keywords, learn what SEO means. No idea? Search Engine Optimization - your Hub's title, URL and keywords should contain good paying keywords in order to get a lot of traffic from different sources and high paying ads on your hubs; you want people to type something they are searching for into Google or Yahoo and find a link to your hub on the first page. Sound impossible? It's not. I did it and you can, too.

To help find keywords, use this tool. Be sure to select to show the column titled Estimated Average CPC - this amount tells you how much advertisers are paying Google to place their ads. Obviously, you want to select high paying keywords - I try to find keywords that pay at least $2. You also want to look at the search volume column - if it's high paying but no one is searching for it, then it's not worth it - chose keywords that pay well and have at least 1,000 or more search volume.

Where the Money Comes From:

2009-08-27T13:54:00.001-04:00

This is why I highly recommend starting on HubPages - it's very simple to get started and easy to get everything set up. All you have to do, once you're signed up, is go to the 'my account' section and then click on 'Affiliate Settings' and it will tell you step-by-step what to do to get set up with Google AdSense, as well as Amazon, Ebay and Kontera. The way it works is this:

HubPages splits the impressions with you - Hubbers receive 60% of total impressions. You also can refer new writers to HubPages and if they become Hubbers within 30 days, you receive an additional 10% of their Hubs’ lifetime impressions. What are impressions? Impressions are what drive revenue generation. An impression occurs whenever an ad appears on a Hub. HubPages earns its revenue from these ads, and they split the impressions with their writers. You also get paid for 'clicks' - when someone clicks on one of the ads.

After you’ve joined the affiliate program from Google, ads appear on your Hubs. With Amazon and Ebay, you select the products you want featured on your Hubs and you get paid only when a sale is completed.

WARNING: Don't think that you can make easy money by telling all your friends to check out your pages and start clicking on the ads daily - Google isn't stupid! Their programming and algorithms can tell if something like that is happening and if so, they not only will cancel your affiliate account, they will ban you and your days of earning extra money online wil be over.

What Enticed Me...

2009-08-25T21:54:00.001-04:00

This is what the email said: 'Hello- Learn how I created an extra source of income last month and earned an extra $594.27 using a free website. Anyone can do this and it only takes a little bit of time. Challenge yourself and create a free site like I did and get some extra cash. It does not cost you anything to get started. Have a great day!'

I clicked the link and ultimately landed on HubPages. Seemed interesting - and it was free! - so I followed a few simple directions and signed up! Click here to sign up and start making money with me! In my first 2 weeks I earned around $15 and it keeps on climbing and not a penny has come out of my pocket. The only thing I have invested is time. The more time you invest up front, the less time necessary down the road; however, you can also do this slowly and steadily - you pick your pace. It's a great challenge and I have learned SO much along the way. I had no idea it was so easy to earn "free" money online. I will continue to add posts here to explain what I have learned and I'll try and recount as many details as possible, so keep checking back for updates...

The Beginning

2009-08-25T21:48:00.000-04:00

Five weeks ago I somehow stumbled upon this online money making opportunity. I think I clicked on something somewhere and then I got this series of emails about getting out of debt, which I figured I may as well read, since I do have plenty of debt! Most of it was completely common sense. Some of it was obviously for people in much more grave situations than me. Then the final one talked about making money online, an easy extra source of income. So often - usually - I just ignore this stuff but for some reason I clicked on the link and there began my journey...