gainfully unemployed » make money online

Making Money on Hubpages Takes Work

chris — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:13:37 +0000

Today, I was talking to someone who recently started writing at Hubpages and also has written a few posts over at Xomba, another great site to write for, and she mentioned to me that making money with Hubpages seems like a lot of work.

It’s funny, because I hear these sentiments all the time. People seem to think (at least in the very beginning) that making money online or generating interest in your content online is going to happen very fast.

We often confuse the fast nature of the Internet with quick, overnight success.

I asked my friend if she has ever done anything worthwhile that didn’t take a lot of work. She replied, “Well, no.”

Making money on Hubpages–a very cool site not only for the fact that it allows you to write content that gets to the top of search engines and can be used to earn money and promote your work but also because it is just a fun place to be–takes work and of course time.

I recently read something on the Hubpages blog (it could have been written by Ryan Hupfer, I’m not sure) about how Hubbers make more money on their Hubs months and years after they’re written. I can back this up from experience writing at the site.

You will earn money for something you write today for years to come. But it takes work to figure out what works well on the site and what kind of content will get search traffic.

How to Promote Your Blog and Make Money

chris — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:52:14 +0000

I was getting ready to write a new post and for some reason revisited some articles I had written months ago but I hadn’t thought of in some time. There was some good info in some of these posts, so I decided in this post I would bring them to your attention.

Here they are in all they’re glory. Click ‘em, read ‘em, let me know what you think.

Four Ways to Promote Your Blog and gain traffic, subscribers, and maybe some friends.

Looking to start a brand new blog? Why Not Buy One? An established blog will have some age, links, content, and hopefully traffic. These are all good reasons to buy.

Five SEO Tips to Turbocharge Your Website These are some basic and easy things you can do to make your website more visible to search engines and clearer to your possible visitors. Make the user experience better, and you will be rewarded.

Can You Really Make Money with Internet Marketing? Many have tried. Many have failed. Some have succeeded.

Six Online Business Myths the Aren’t True As in any line of work there are misconceptions, misunderstandings, and sure, some lies in internet marketing.

Make Money Writing for Xomba

chris — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:29:39 +0000

Xomba is billed as “A social network geared toward people who like to write” and is a great place to make money online for creating written content. It is an Adsense sharing site, which means that you split Adsense advertising revenue 50/50 with the site. It’s owned by Internet entrepreneur and writer Nick Veneris and run by a very competent and passionate team based in Florida.

It’s a good place to write and earn. Xombytes are posts a minimum of 150 words and can be about, well, anything you want them to be. You can write about music, politics, the new camera you want to buy, or celebrities and movies. Celeb and movie subjects do really well on this site, so if that’s the kind of thing you write about, mount up.

You can also include a link back to your site in your post, so it can be a helpful way to promote yourself and gain exposure for your content while making money in the process.

Xomblurbs are more like a social bookmarking type of thing, in that they have to include a link to a website or article and only have to be 50 words long.

So why Xomba?

Get more exposure for yourself and your writing by writing for an established site that already gets substantial traffic.
Connect with other writers (if you want to)
Earn money from advertisements displayed
Dedicated staff and owner who really care about the site and the writers

Meet Abmox, Xomba’s official mascot. Cute, ain’t he?

How Do You Make Money with Internet Marketing?

chris — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:46:00 +0000

Internet marketing is such a broad term, that it really would take a long post to explain exactly how to make money with internet marketing. It would take a book. Heck, it would take several books to start to crack that subject. I am definitely not an internet marketing expert per se, but I do know a little bit about it.

The reason I decided to write this post is because I spoke to two people today who both asked me this very same question. I thought it was a sign that there are a few people out there who just have no idea how people go about making money online with internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogging, etc. They understand that you can sell advertisements on a blog or earn referral fees for products sold from links on your site, but their understanding stops at how people actually get to your site, how you set up a site, how you decide what to write about, and how to increase the traffic to your site.

This post will tackle a few of the basics of how people make money internet marketing.

Getting Traffic to Your Site is Key.

The real thing that helps people earn money online is website traffic. There are basically three way to get traffic to your website. The first is organic search, which is when web surfers find a page of your website or blog from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or the brand new MSN search engine Bing. If your site is relevant to a search query, there is a chance that it may pop up and will earn a new visitor who is looking for information or has a problem that needs solving or is looking for a service.

If you’ve done your job, then you may get a new visitor to your site.

The second way people bring people to their site is from links. If you get links to your site, then that is another chance for people to find your site from another site. It’s crowded out there on the WWW, so the more links you get back to your site, the better. Search engines may also start to give your site some more relevance if you get links from related and relevant sites, which means your pages may appear higher in search engine results pages. Obviously, link building is something that people who are trying to make money online through internet marketing pay a lot of attention to. Getting relevant, high quality links is one of the keys to internet marketing. Look at it as your website or blog receiving a vote from another site that pushes it higher and makes it more popular.

The third way to create traffic to your website is by purchasing advertising. A typical way people do this is with the Adwords PPC program. PPC stands for pay per click, which is exactly what you do. You agree to pay a certain amount every time an internet surfer clicks a text ad that appears on websites (through the Adsense advertising program) or in the search engine results. The blue text ads you see at the top of the major search engines are PPC links. If you can pay a low per click rate, and can sell advertising at a higher rate, you can make some money off of a transaction of this kind.

Now that You Have People Visiting Your Website, How Do You Make Money?

To make money with internet marketing, you need to have traffic to your site and you need some way to monetize that traffic. People monetize their sites in many various ways. Some webmasters and bloggers simply broker their own deals with people who pay a certain amount for a link or a banner on their site.

Others use affiliate product links on their sites and earn when a visitor makes a purchase through their site. CJ.com, Clickbank, and Amazon all provide ways for you to earn money from the traffic to your website.

Perhaps the most popular way people make money online–especially in the beginning–is with the Google Adsense program. This is a fairly simple ad network to implement on your site, but it’s not necessarily easy to make money online with this program. As I mentioned above, you can earn money with internet marketing schemes that involve paying for traffic and then converting that traffic into a sale or a higher priced click on an advertisement.

The amount of money you earn online also depends on the niche that your site falls into. If you run a blog about cars, you may earn more money than if you run a blog about movies. If your online business makes and sells antenna balls, you may earn less than if you sell real estate classes. The reason is that the products associated with cars and real estate are more expensive than the products associated with movies and antenna balls. A muffler can cost a hundred bucks, while a DVD costs $19.99. Logically, the money you can earn from a more expensive product will be greater because the person selling that product has a larger margin (usually!).

Making money with internet marketing also takes diligent work and a lot of trial and error, just like in any other kind of job. If you have money to invest in your online business internet marketing efforts, you will be able to get up and running a little bit more quickly than if you have no money to put into your business.

People earn a living in many different ways online. You can find all kinds of businesses and services on the internet, as you most likely know. The internet marketing angle really comes in after you know how you want to make money online. If you have a service to offer–for example, you are a lawyer who represents people who have been in accidents due to drinking (or whatever it is you may do)–then you can start to try to target keywords in your PPC campaigns. Say you live in the city of Austin. If you could get visitors to your site who are looking for a term like “Austin DUI Lawyer” then that is highly targeted traffic that may convert into a sale or a consult. The person who searches for this term in Google and gets to your site may have their cell phone in hand ready to dial a number.

So make sure you have your office phone in big lettering on the front page. The internet marketing is what you do after you know what you want to sell or what service you have to offer. Some marketers are more like “information entrepreneurs” and set up blogs that are built around specific keywords and have strong SEO qualities to them. The goal is to create traffic and then convert into ad clicks and make money online that way.

As you may be able to tell, there are many ways you can get started in your quest to make money internet marketing. Some people go the content site route and monetize with affiliate links and ppc ads. Others go directly to pay per click campaigns and “push” affiliate programs.

Email Marketing

One thing that is unanimous in the internet marketing business is that use of email lists and email campaigns is effective if you do it right.

For your own information (as at this point you may not be ready for this kind of software), there are several choices when you decide to start email collection and email marketing. One company is Aweber (read an Aweber review) and another is GetResponse. Many people look at highly targeted email lists as the holy grail of internet marketing. Maybe it will help you in your business!

How to Make Money Online with Hubpages

chris — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:30:32 +0000

Hubpages is a website where you can write about whatever you want and earn money for your efforts. This is the one line explanation of the site, but there is quite a bit more to it.

You earn money when you gain traffic to your site and that traffic clicks on advertisements that display on the page. For this reason, traffic is one of the most important elements that will help you make money online with Hubpages. Making money online is really no easy feat, but there are quite a few ways to do it.

You can obviously provide a service or sell a product. You can also do online copywriting or freelance writing. I have been watching the site for a while, and I think that if you can learn how to use Hubpages to make money, ie, you learn how to create “hubs” that gain traffic, convert traffic to ad clicks or affiliate sales, and rise to the top of the search engine rankings, then you will know a great deal about internet marketing. And this experience will help you out a lot in whatever kind of business you get into online.

In the online environment, it’s all about words. Words are where search engines can really dig in and find relevant information for web surfers. Because of this, online marketing or making money online is often dependant on writing.

People write a lot about writing for humans versus writing for search engines. I think it’s important to do both, meaning that you do have a focus on certain keywords, but you don’t want to write in such a way that the content is unreadable for a human being. You always want to write for people first, and for search engine bots second. There is a lot of value in enticing people not only to read your content, but to come back and read it again.

However, that being said, there is also a lot of value in enticing viewers to your work in order to encourage a click through on Adsense. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but if you write really hacky articles that are filled only with keywords and nothing else your work will be weeded out by Google and send to search oblivion. If people can’t find your work, then you won’t make any money.

Hubpages is a good place to write because you immediately get a boost in rank when you publish a piece because the site is well respected by Google as a network that produces informative and helpful user-generated content. Hubpages does a good job of policing itself in terms of eliminating crap content and making sure their advertising networks run smoothly and there’s no fraudulent activity going on. As a result, your content will be indexed by search engines a lot quickly than if you started your own blog and wrote something. It could take you months to get a few readers to an article on your own site, whereas it may take hours or a day or two to get readers to your hub.

How to Make Money with Hubpages.

First, you have to sign up. If you haven’t yet, sign up here. Then come back here and read the rest of this two part article–I promise it will help you.

The way you earn money on hubpages is through the Google Adsense program and affiliate links through eBay and Amazon. You can also earn with an advertising network called Kontera, but don’t worry about it for now because it really doesn’t pay that well. If you are a savvy internet marketer, you can also make money on Hubpages with your own affiliate links to third party websites.

You split revenue with Hubpages 60/40 in your favor. The way this works is 6 times out of 10 your ID is used in the advertisements, which means you will earn on a click or sale made during this time. The other 4 times Hubpages has the potential to earn money for an action taken. People sometimes think that the total revenue is just split 60/40, but that’s not the case. Your ID is used randomly 6 times out of 10. It is a generous pay structure and there are quite a few people making good money at Hubpages.

Hubpages is a great place to start writing online, and even making money online. I mentioned earlier that you want to use keywords in your articles in order to be competitive and gain traffic to your work—because that’s what you need to do if you want to make any money. The way you do this is imagine what someone would type into a search engine in order to find the information you are providing.

If you were going to write about “making money online by writing,” then that phrase could be the keyword phrase you would want to use in your article. The next thing you want to consider is how competitive a term is. You can do this by using the Google Keyword Tool at this URL – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool will show you how many times your keyword has been searched in the past month and will give you a monthly average. It will also give you ideas of related terms that may be better options for you to use because they’re less competitive. It may sound a little confusing at the beginning, but you will get the hang of it after you do keyword research a few times. You also want to look at the price paid per click, which will give you a good idea on how much money ads that will display will be worth. The figure shown is not the total that you will earn because Google keeps some of the money, but you can easily see which terms are “worth” more and which ones are worth less.

My next article will go into more depth about choosing keywords for your internet writing. But for now, write down or copy and paste two or three sets of terms and how often they are searched and what they are worth. Now, you can type the keyword phrase into Google to see how many pages pop up. This is not an exact science but it will give an idea of how much content on the internet uses the term you are searching. If 100,000,000 pages come up, there are a lot of pages about what you are planning to write about, so it may be a lot more difficult to compete and get to the top of the search engines with your page. However, if only 250,000 pages come up, you have found a niche in which you can compete and may possibly be able to “own” by getting your page to the top. This is how you make good money in internet marketing with content and Google Adsense.

If you have a specialized skillset (and we all have at least one) I highly recommend you start creating content based on it on the internet. I notice that I sometimes get a few visitors to this site who are looking for ways to make money while unemployed. Hubpages is one such way. Start writing content about your expertise. I don’t care if it’s plumbing, roofing, gardening, or investing. If you can create content that is useful to people and valuable in some way, you will be able to make money.

Once you sign up, let me know if you need some help figuring out what to write about. I’ll do my best to help you out by giving a push in the right direction in terms of keywords and ideas.

Read my 2nd post about Hubpages called Make Money with Hubpages Part 2: Backlinks.

PS. How has your experience been on Hubpages?

6 Way to Make More Money with Your Website

chris — Sat, 02 May 2009 02:23:11 +0000

Make Money with Your Website

I’ve made a commitment to write at least a couple of posts a week over here at Gainfully Unemployed, your Online Business Inspiration blog. How about that for a tagline?

Anyways, I realize that it is Friday and I have yet to achieve my two post a week quota.

Earlier today, I read a great article at Dosh Dosh, a fantastic internet marketing blog. Maki goes into 6 highly detailed steps you can use to make more money online.

The focus is on using your pageview and search data to find the most popular pages on your site. From there, the next step is to optimize these pages in order to achieve the goal you are looking to achieve.

Do you want the viewer to sign up for a subscription to your feed or to your newsletter? Do you want a qualified lead for an affiliate program? Or are you simply looking for a quick ad click-through?

I found this to be a very helpful and useful article about how to make more money with your website. If you are getting some good sustained traffic at your site, the steps Maki explains may help you. If you aren’t there yet, read step 6 about increasing your search engine ranking. Good luck. ?

Read another article about how to make money online. ?I got a bunch of ‘em. ?This one is a general one. ?Another piece you may be interested in is one about how to make money with Hubpages.

Make Money Online Writing at Hubpages

chris — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:28:46 +0000

Are you a writer? Are you interested in starting a blog? But maybe you’ve held off because you don’t know how to get started.

This could easily be the case. The truth is that starting your own website doesn’t have to be that hard. Maybe you want to take the leap and get started writing online or creating your own online business, but you aren’t sure where you want to host your site or if you want to make if for free at one of the free content management platforms available online.

Maybe you just want to test out some keyword or niche ideas first before dedicating yourself to a long term project. If you are in this situation, then Hubpages might be a good place for you to start. Hubpages is a website where you can write articles on whatever topic of your choice and make money online from Adsense. All you have to do is have an account from Google’s advertising program and you can start writing and earning. See my other article about how to make money with Hubpages.

People write about all kinds of things. Some just write about things they are interested in or are specialists in, while others do it to promote their website or online business, or just to earn extra money.

The site is a good place to test out your ideas and see what you are interested in writing. You earn 60% of the revenue that your pages, or “hubs,” earn from advertising. Your pages earn money when visitors click on advertisements.

One of the benefits to writing at Hubpages is that you can flex your online writing muscles and see what works. You will see what articles attract readers and which ones don’t, which keywords attract readers and which ones go unnoticed by search engines. There is also built-in traffic since the site itself is ranked very high by search engines and other people who write for the site will be exposed to your work.

The How to Make Money Online Myth

chris — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:17:22 +0000

Every time you read about making money online, there is generally something written to the effect that “content is king.” People say you need to write really good content in a specific niche and that will attract readers.

The truth is good content is not enough. If you’re just trying to write something that will be pleasing to the human eye, then you probably won’t be able to make that much money online (I’m writing this post with Adsense in mind as the way to make money online from your website). You need to write with search engines and Adsense in mind.

When you put ads on your page, you want the advertisements to be relevant to your content. You want them to be so close to what you are writing about that people will be interested in them and may be so interested in them that they actually click them. You want them to be so interested in these ads that they not only click them, they actually turn into a qualified lead or make a purchase from the advertiser who paid for the ad.

The more relevant your ads, and the more qualified traffic you “sell,” the better you will do with contextual advertisements like the ones Adsense dsplays.

When creating a website that you plan to monetize in this way, make sure to keep in mind that your post titles, the body text, and links going in and out of your site all inform how well you do with PPC ads on your site. The better optimized your site is, the more money you will make online.