Steps To Blogging Profitably

I like an interesting challenge and the experiment being conducted by Court at The Keyword Academy at the moment that has him building 100 Hubpages hubs in 30 days has also piqued my interest.

I’ve been a Hubber for just over a year now but have seriously underused what is an extremely valuable resource. In the first 10 months I only created 3 Hubs, doing so as a means of link-building. As is so often the case I have since been sidetracked by other ideas and projects and have left my Hubs to languish. The niches that my Hubs belonged to are good eBay niches that pay quite nicely, but as far as Adsense is concerned, are quite low paying when looking at the CPC.

Low-paying they might be, but looking back through my records I can see that my unsuitable Hubs have managed to scrape in some earnings in 10 of the last 11 months.

So the question I ask myself is, if a few measly little Hubs that are unsuitable to Adsense and that aren’t promoted can consistently make money, how much can I make with more Hubs that are targeted at high paying keywords that have low competition?

I have at my disposal the means to build 100s of links to any Hub that I create, so pushing them up the rankings should not only be possible, it should be a given. It all comes down to whether I can get myself organised enough to build the Hubs and then do the necessary promotion. By posting about it here, I am in effect forcing my own hand.

So what I want to try to do is create a new Hub every 2 or 3 days, continuing at that pace at least until I have created 100 Hubs. I get the feeling the hardest part of doing this is deciding on the micro niches to target. I think that picking groups of related micro niches will benefit the process because I will be able to link between the Hubs making them strong little networks.

As of today I have managed to add a further 6 Hubs to my existing 3 and have identified a further 16 that show enough promise to be created. Selection is being made based on the CPC of the keyword (must be over $3.00) and the competitiveness of the niche (under 30,000 is preferred).

I can already see one positive aspect in going through this little experiment. The micro niches that can prove to be fairly lucrative are often too narrow to warrant the creation of an entire website. Using the resources of a robust platform such as Hubpages and the authority it already carries gives you a head start in getting a decent ranking position to start off with.

As with all online marketing projects, the key to success is putting the head down and simply concentrating on getting the work done. I’ll be aiming the Hubs primarily on being optimized for Adsense ads, so the goal will be to target search traffic looking to have a question answered. The Hubs will contain at least 800 words.

Even if the Hubs don’t rake in the earnings I am hoping for, this is one of those win-win situations for me because I will be able to use all of these Hubs for sending links to my actual full-sized money sites.

My thinking is that 2 poorly targeted Hubs have been able to bring in an average of $0.50 per month for 11 months so at the very worst if I can create 100 Hubs I am looking at $25 - $30 per month. Naturally, I’m going to be expecting a helluva lot more than that thanks to the off-site SEO that I will be doing on each Hub.

The Starting Scorecard

So here are the bare facts at the start of this Personal Hub Challenge.

No of Hubs = 3

Page Impressions = 73 per month

Average Revenue = $0.50 per month