Why Should You Listen to Me About Making Money with Hubpages?

While I’ve not been a member here for a long time I’ve been involved in earning money online since November of 2007. I was lucky and experienced a fair level of success right out of the gat and made over $2,200 that Christmas season. How did I do it?

I read an e-book that showed how to work a particular hack on Xbox 360 so that you could get wi-fi access through your laptop. I then took that concept and made a step-by-step video which showed people through a visual medium how to do the same thing. I also increased the value of the information by creating additional videos which helped people overcome the most common problems that cropped up when attempting to use the method.

People were buying a lot of Xbox 360 systems at that time of year and kids were obviously upset when they found out that they couldn’t get hooked up to Xbox Live without a $100 adapter. Mom and dad were clueless about this when they bought it, the stores were closed, and they were searching for answers.

Originally, I sold this product on ebay with digital delivery. Things were great for a while but then the honeymoon was over. Soon other people were selling the same thing and a price war ensued which drove the price down to $10.00. When the price leveled out it seemed that people were just buying whoever’s add showed up at the top, so you had to buy a lot of ads in order for yours to constantly be ending every 10 minutes or so throughout the day. Then ebay changed to the “best match” system which made getting your ads to rank at the top a different game altogether. The final blow came when ebay completely banned the same of digital products unless you packed it on a CD and mailed it out. I wasn’t willing to do that and the product was appealing because parents could skip out on the $100 cost of the Microsoft adapter AND get junior onto Xbox Live within 10 minutes. The ebay gig was up.

I then decided that if people were searching for the product on ebay, then they might be looking for it on Google too. So I figured out how to setup a website with xSitePro and wrote a long-form sales letter Dan Kennedy style to promote it. I hooked up a paypal payment button to a separate digital delivery site I rigged up just to provided membership-level access to this Wireless Adapter video. They keyword was low-competition so I was soon ranked #1 just because the keyword was all over the page and people stuck around to read the sales letter and watch the YouTube intro video and would click through to the various FAQ pages before making a decision to buy or not. This pattern of behavior gave the site a large “stickability” factor and low bounce rate.

Unfortunately, even with a top spot in Google, the site never made as much money as it did on ebay. This was because I just had happened to stumble upon a seasonal product that had a very narrow window of opportunity for high traffic during the Christmas holiday. Income was slowing to a trickle and I became a bit discouraged…but not for long.

I had experienced a small taste of success over 3 months and I was hooked. I was convinced there was a viable way to make money online that would be more long-lasting. I soon bought a course called “Niche Blueprint” which outlined a program to sell physical goods via drop-shippers. While I never was able to get a true ecommerce business up and running, I DID learn rudimentary approaches to keyword research and how to setup and optimize a websites. I also learned the basic tenants of backlinking.

Armed with this knowledge I soon built my first ebay affiliate site selling novelty knives. I constructed it with Wordpress and used the phpBay plugin to make the site look like an online store. People clicked particular items imported from ebay, found themselves on ebay, and instantly had their fear of buying from an online source erased because of ebays brand image. I still have that first site and it still earns me between $50 and $100 p/month.

Since that time I’ve built and subsequently sold a site on Flippa. I’ve built informational sites which show how to use a particular service (Aweber) and then cashed in when people watched the training and signed up under my affiliate link. I’ve tried at least a dozen “fast-cash” methods which were very short-lived and could not be considered a viable income source. I’ve earned money online from many different affiliate programs and experienced varying levels of success, I’ve tried some and failed to make money (CPA), and I’ve even worked for a friend of mine who owns a local fence company to get his site ranked for all the “LocalCity Fence Company” keywords.

One method, however, has proven to be the most profitable and consistent income stream that I’ve come across. That would be Google Adsense. The simplest method to achieve success in earning an online income is simply doing good keyword research and building online content related to that keyword and then using hard-hitting SEO tactics to get your content to rank in the top spots on Google. People come to your page and some of them click on your ad. It’s that simple. Isn't it convenient that this is the model that Hubpages is built around?

I’ve seen a lot of people express frustration with the fact that they take a lot of time writing a lot of content on Hubpages and then don’t see the kind of results they were hoping for where income is concerned. I’m going to write a few hubs on this subject and see if I can bring my experience to bear in helping others get better results.