I was really gung-ho about earning money with Hubpages. In fact I was so excited about it, that all of my online efforts for the past 2 months focused only on my hubs. I was writing hubs myself, outsourcing articles, writing articles for ezines or infobarrels in order to back link the hubs. I was busy. And so far with all that effort and money spent on outsourcing, I only see trickles from adsense rolling in. Like really small trickles. I’m talking $1.00 a day if I am lucky.
I think I am over my Hub kick. I posted a comment on one of Ben’s Blog Posts and Ben gave some good advice in which he reminded me of the best way to earn money online is through your own sites/blogs. Yes, Hubpages rank pretty well and so does Infobarrel but at the end of the day you are sharing your potential earnings with these two sites.
So thanks to Ben’s gentle reminder, I am returning to niche blogging. Since I am still working at the dental office part-time, I plan on using that extra income to continue to outsource the articles for my blogs. I have 4 steady writers that I use through oDesk and I will be scoping out 2 more writers so that I can have a total of 60 articles written per week. My plan is to build one niche blog a week and my short term goal is to bust out 14 blogs/sites by January.
I figure that I will shoot for each blog to earn $100 a month either with adsense or with affiliate products. Some may earn more and some may earn less, but it’s worth a shot. I just needed to earn $2k by the end of this year. I may not hit that goal but I am going to try and get as close to it as I can.
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I was wondering how you were doing as I have been reading about Hubpages hitting the skids. Too much hype, I figured this might happen.
Niche blogging is still probably the best bet, but I think the return can take some time. If you get enough content out there eventually you should hit some gold.
Good luck !
Carrie´s last blog ..Oh Where, Oh Where Have My Rankings Gone?
I hate to admit it but Niche blogging is probably the best bet to earn money online. As boring and frustrating as it can be, it seems to be the only method I have had any real success with.
That really is so rubbish about HubPages. If I could do it again I would submit more to InfoBarrel. But the truth is that writing so many Hubs was hard work! I imagine if we leave them a while and go back to them they might pick up a little. But perhaps you can use your Hubs as research for your niche blogs? For example, on some Hub topics I made many sales through Amazon, telling me that niche really is popular. Then, once your blog is set up, go back and edit that Hub, adding in the link back to your newly created blog. Then you’ve already got some promotion done
Web Career Girl´s last blog ..My First Sale With MarketHealth – $80!
About 2 weeks ago I discovered a blog and the guy had started off hubbing but then switched over to Infobarrel and he went from making only $10 his first month with hubs to $70 his first month on Infobarrel. Ben also suggested using infobarrel.
Yea, I plan on using my hubs for exactly as you say, I am going to watch my clicks on my hubs to see which of the niches I chose would be worth it to make niche blogs on and then use my existing hubs to direct traffic to the niche blogs.
I just saw this comment. Did the guy use the same article topics when he switched over to infobarrel? Sounds interesting.
Web Career Girl´s last blog ..HubPages On Hold
I’m not sure. Here’s the link to his blog if you are interested in reading it. 100 Info Barrell Articles Experiment.
There may be one guy making lot of money on Infobarrel, but if you look at compete.com you’ll see the whole site is only drawing 150K visitors a month, and for the kind of articles you see on infobarrel they aren’t going to be high CPC anyhow. It’s only a PR4 site so it’s not going to kill anyone in the search engines.
The beauty of a site like Hubpages is that the internal linking is very good, much better than Squidoo, so if you leverage the internal tools like groups and tags you can get an article to rank without all the voodoo everyone talks about with RSS and backlinks. And you can get some affiliate income with Amazon (and in theory Ebay, although I’ve yet to see it). I usually make more on Amazon than Adsense for my Hubs, and if you look at the really high earners on Hubpages they are doing the same (maybe even adding Clickbank or others to the mix). So if you just want to write and not bother with SEO, Hubpages is not a bad place to be.
The down side is that you give away almost 1/2 the income, and you are limited in how you can present affiliate offers. My own experience even on sites that have horrible Adsense numbers like gardening is that if you find good affiliate offers, the split runs something like Adsense <25%, Amazon around 25%, and the other 50% of income is in the other affiliate offers. That just can't be done on the content sharing sites like Hubpages.
Tools like Popshops make affiliate deeplinking simple, and pay better than Adsense and Amazon combined. Bottom line, there is more money to be made on your own sites, and the real money is not in Adsense, but in affiliate income.
The idea of using Hubs for topic research is a good one, and I've done some of that myself.
P.S. I personally have seen no evidence of Hubpages hitting the skids, my page views are at an all time high, and their numbers still look good at compete.com
Hey Jay,
Thanks for the comment on hubs. You provided some useful information regarding Amazon. I never new how many visitors infobarrel was getting either.
It seems the guy that was posting about infobarrel earning more than hubpages has since turned his focus back on his own sites and not really bothering with either hubs or IB anymore. lol
Bottom line, you are right. The really money is in your own sites.