السبت، 19 سبتمبر 2009

Making Money Online


ere is much discussion about making money online and the internet is chock-a-block full of “guaranteed returns,” and “amazing opportunities,” to make money easily. I laugh at some of the ridiculous claims made. I am not going to make any such claims – in fact – It is hard work making money online. I have chosen hubpages as one of the income streams I currently enjoy, and as I am unlikely to ever get this page found in the search engines, thanks to the promotional efforts of the numerous spammers, scammers and occasional honest Joes, targeting "making money online," I will stick to discussing making money here on hubpages and talk about how I make the most of the various affiliates offered here, in the hope it will be of some use to the community. I will not discuss Kontera - I personally think it is a scam and a waste of time.

The learning curve was steep, and I was singularly un-successful at first. Partly because I was unable to pick the wheat from the chaff as far as advice goes and partly because I am naturally cynical. I automatically disbelieve most things I am told – especially if they make no sense. I will give you an example:
I was told “Submit your hubs to social bookmarking sites to generate huge traffic, “ and I was told this by every would-be internet marketing guru on the ‘net, so I diligently signed up for every social bookmarking site I could find and began submitting my hubs to them. What an incredible waste of time that turned out to be. It turns out that stumbleupon users are not interested in where to find the best foreign exchange broker. They are more interested in pictures of half-naked Indian chicks, but I don’t do hubs full of stolen photos of half-naked Indian chicks, so I was shit out of luck.

I have since found better ways of promoting my work, but it would be a waste of time to go into specifics, because what works for me is unlikely to work for you unless you know the same people I do and write the same stuff as me। Plus the link exchange programs do not work here, and I have a feeling they will be going the way of the dinosaur once google get on top of them. What I will say is – if you can develop a relationship with any high traffic site, do so, and if you can take the time to create funny, useful content – do that also.

Google Adsense

I saw the recent hubchallenge as an opportunity to increase my adsense income. The community publishing aspect naturally generates more traffic to hubs created in this way. I do not usually go seeking internal hubpages’ traffic because it does not convert very well but hubs that attract outside traffic are usually ranked higher and google is a strange beast.

Google will rank you based on the traffic you have and therefore place you higher up the search engine rankings which will increase your traffic, so the benefit of hubpages internal traffic is to boost your authority with very little work on your part. I suggest taking part in the hubmob and other devices that are run. You will see increased activity and therefore increased rankings with the search engines.

I did not finish the 100 hubs target - I managed 51, but I wrote them all myself in between arguing on the forums and real work। :) I wrote them all to a standard format - 400 words, one photograph; specific high paying keywords targeted with each one, using the keyword I was targeting in the url, the tags, in the content and as the photo description and with no more than one outgoing link, mostly to other hubs using the keyword in that hub I am after. My daily page views have gone up by around 50% since doing the hubchallenge and my adsense has gone up by around 20% - I expect to make at least $500 this month and when the hubchallenge hubs are properly “aged,” I expect that to continue to increase. My goal is $1,000 a month within the next three months.

Ebay

A lot of people seem to have trouble using ebay correctly, as I did for quite a long time. There are several hurdles to over come, but I did finally work out what to do. Some time ago, I wrote a set of hubs around 2008 motorcyles. I wrote them knowing full well that I was unlikely to make much adsense income from them. Although I came in for a lot of flack at the time when I described how little I promoted them and several people kept telling me how useless the titles were as far as making money and attracting traffic, I did not write them for huge volumes of poorly-targeted traffic in the hope of generating a few adsense pennies.

I wrote them with the intention of making money from ebay when the 2008 motorcycles started being offered for sale as used bikes and spare parts। In the year or so since I wrote them, they have had almost 200,000 page views and rank pretty well for exactly the terms I wanted. Do a google search for “2008 gsxr 1000” and you are going to find one of my hubs. The others get found pretty well for similar searches and I am now making about $90 a month from ebay sales. I expect that to continue for at least five years and eventually drop off as they become more spare part sales rather than bike sales.

Amazon

In my not-so-humble opinion, there is only one way to make money from Amazon in any quantity – product reviews. I certainly wasted an awful lot of time adding an Amazon capsule to a lot of my hubs thinking that if some one was looking for a recipe, they might also be needing a skillet or a chef’s knife. And occasionally, they do, but nowhere near enough times to bother with.

So, I targeted specific ranges of products and wrote reviews. Some worked better than others. The two I targeted were iPhone accessories and Digital cameras. They balance each other well, because although people rarely seem to spend $3000 on a camera within Amazon’s short cookie life span, they are quite happy to spend sixty bucks on an iPhone Bluetooth headset so I usually get 7% commission on the few camera sales and occasionally 7.5%. These two groups of hubs earn me between $200-$600 a month and traffic continues to grow. Once again, my target is $1,000 per month and I have no reason to think I will not achieve that within the next three months.