The realisation of the progress that I’ve made with my niche marketing business only recently hit home to me when I was going over my earnings in my head while out for my daily run. Running is a great opportunity to clear the mind, consider how things are progressing and come up with plans for future opportunities.

Anyway, what occurred to me was that it wasn’t all that long ago that a disappointing Adsense earnings day for me was around $2.00 for the day while the average over an entire month was around $4 - $5. Nowadays, a disappointing day is when I only earn around $7.00 with Adsense and my average earnings sits at around the $14 - $15 mark. The exciting thing for me is that I didn’t even notice the progression. My feeling is that, over the time it has taken to triple my daily earnings I’ve felt as though I haven’t really been working as hard on my sites as I could. Actually, I should correct that to say I haven’t really been working as effectively as I could.

Over the past couple of months I feel as though I have picked up some very valuable resources that will allow me to work more effectively. This involves keyword targeting, building solid links and focusing on goals to build on the momentum I have already created.

Momentum Is a Powerful Force

The statement that momentum is a powerful force is hardly earth shatteringly original but it is appropriate when it comes to niche marketing. Once you have done the hard yards of establishing your web-site(s) and they have taken a precarious perch somewhere in the search engine rankings things start to get a little easier. Suddenly you find that you no longer have to work your butt off just to rank in the first 100 pages.

The idea of massive action is part of the force of momentum. Creating content is the bane of a lot of internet marketers’ existence but it is also the unguarded secret of success. Those who can squeeze out 10 articles per day every day are the ones who are going to progress at breathtaking speed. It’s only after you have seen the results of taking massive action that the drive to repeat it will bite.

Finding a long-tail keyword in the stats is now the catalyst for a new mini project to improve the site’s ranking for it. A flurry of posts related to the long-tail can cement yourself up towards the top of the rankings so that you dominate that keyword. Momentum will make the job of producing that content so much easier.

The Money Is In the Long Tail

One of the mistakes many beginners to internet marketing make is to assume that the way to successfully ranking for their keyword is to concentrate solely on that one keyword. For the vast majority of us, this keyword is by far the most difficult to attain the number 1 ranking for. Yet it’s the one those with the least experience will target.

Doing it this way is the arse-about way of attempting to make money on the internet. It may seem to be most logical to try to rank for the word or words that have the greatest potential, but those keywords are chock-a-block with competitors also trying to rank for it…and they’ve probably got a lot more experience and a lot more resources at their disposal.

So what’s the clever way to attack it if you’re just beginning? Quite simply, start at the bottom and target the search terms that nobody else wants. These are the long tails and the fact is, this is where the real money is at. But nobody knows it. Nobody has woken up to the fact that the easy way to make big money online is to chase the seemingly worthless keywords.

This isn’t to say you won’t be targeting a high value keyword – you most certainly should and that keyword should appear somewhere in the domain name of your site. It should also appear in the site title, the post titles, page titles, tags and what not. But when it comes to specifically targeting a keyword go for the long tail that, according to the Adwords Keyword Tool, is only worth 0.05 per click and only has 140 searches per month. Even more important is that the number of competing sites is low. A thorough and well-researched post about this under-appreciated, unwanted keyword should put you somewhere towards the top of the rankings. 5 or 6 links could be all it takes to get to #1.

What this actually means is that you’re on the board. You’re ranked and you will get traffic. The numbers that you get are going to be miniscule to start with but they will start to trickle in. When the trickle starts you can check your stats to find out what search terms were used to find your site. This will give you a bunch of new long tails to target. Either add the exact long tail to your existing post or create a new post expanding on the long tail. A few more links and you may have just expanded your site’s net to a few more visitors per month. You should be able to see how this is going to go from here.

The fact is that if you keep adding content to your site based on the traffic that you have already received you are effectively making your site more authoritative. Your knowledge of the subject is bound to grow, the range of long tail keywords that you rank for expands and your traffic improves from a trickle to a flow…and you haven’t directly attacked your main keyword.

But in reality, you have attacked your main keyword and you’ve made tremendous strides towards ranking highly for it.

The Role of Massive Action

The key to finding success with this method of building your site is massive action. It is a simple concept in theory but incredibly difficult to put into practice, particularly if you are new to the game and have absolutely no proof that what you are doing is going to result in earnings. What has been left out of the long-tail process outlined above is the length of time you can expect all of the steps to take. The truth is, it varies but generally it takes months for your hard work to take effect.

In the meantime the true hard work has to take place. That’s the massive action that has to be taken using a leap of faith that all of that action will bear fruit.

The usual path goes something like: a flurry of action writing 5 or 6 posts that get published on your brand new website. You then write 5 or 6 more articles and use them to send links back to your site, maybe from an article directory such as EzineArticles.com or a similar site. By now you’re a couple of weeks down the track and there still seems to be no visitors to speak of. As a result you have ceased creating content because the wind has been knocked out of your sails. All of that work has been done and you’ve got nothing to show for it.

What you should have been doing after writing the first 5 posts and the first 5 articles is build another 5 articles the next day, then another 5 articles the next day and another 5 articles the next day. One of those articles would be posted on your site, the rest would be posted on other blogs, article directories or the many other free content sources that are available that will take your content and give you a link in return. “Massive” is a relative term and will mean different things to different people. As long as you take action every day you can be sure your online portfolio will progress.

It all comes down to the following simple equation:

E * (content + links) + time = success, where E = every day.

My Goals Going Forward

The most important part of the process of building up a niche empire is to set a bunch of goals, write them down and then work like buggery to tick them off one at a time. Without a clear set of goals I have found myself drifting along, unsure what to do next. I have also made the mistake in the past of setting specific short-term monetary goals, which is a variable that is largely out of my hands.

These days I set myself goals that I have complete control over. Specifically, I have been setting myself a daily goal of a certain number of articles that I want to complete. The number of articles I make sure I publish is at least 8. Of those 8 articles I try to write at least 6 of them for linking purposes and the rest for adding new content to my sites.

It’s all about momentum. By ensuring I complete this content creation each day, I am comfortable in the fact that my sites are growing in authority.

On top of these short-term daily goals I have still have my overall monetary goal drawing me on. It is a long-term goal that continues to focus the mind. It is also a target that is starting to look just that little bit more realistic.

With every article I write and every link I build I can sense that I am making real progress.

My stated personal challenge was to build those 100 Hubs and report on the success or otherwise of my attempt. The truth is, I have only managed to get halfway through my goal of creating 100 Hubs. In fact, I now have 51 Hubs published largely due to the fact that I have been unbelievably busy building content and links to the sites that I own (and that I am getting to keep all of the revenue I make).

I have been reading reports from other people who have taken part in the 100 Hubpages Challenge saying that their revenue and their Hubpage traffic has dropped off considerably. They go on to admit that apart from some very basic link building they have done nothing to promote their Hubs. Consequently the revenue they have made has dropped dramatically. Personally, I think that comes down to one of two factors. Either poor keyword choice or neglect.

So after…let’s call it 6 months, the scorecard for the Hubs that I have built is as follows.

No of Hubs = 51

Average Page Impressions = 1370 per month

Average Revenue = $43.95 per month

So I’m getting a return of almost $1 for every Hub I published per month. Unlike other people, I haven’t experienced any drop off if revenue over the last couple of months. In fact, the visitor numbers are just starting to kick higher again which prompted me to write the last 3 Hubs in the last week or so.

Using Hubpages to test for promising looking niches is still a solid way to use the tool and it is providing an income stream that is very reliable. Far from being the bust that some people are claiming it to be, I can still see a lot of merit in using Hubpages to make some money. At the very least the $40+ I’m making can be reinvested into buying some articles for my other niches or another 5 or 6 Hubs.

Hubpages is not going to make you rich (unless of course you right a crazy number of Hubs) but it still has the potential to pull in good revenue figures. As for talks of penalties and other such nonsense, well, once again it’s proof that it’s a good idea to steer clear of forums in which IMers lounge around and spread their conspiracy theories to one another, passing their paranoia off as fact.

So, as far as I’m concerned my personal Hubpages challenge is still not over, not by a long shot. I am still planning to make it to 100 Hubs although I am not placing any priority on writing the content for each Hub. My number one priority remains the niche sites I own, after all, they’re the ones that are making me the money.

The progress of my personal Hubpage challenge has been as follows:

My Personal Hubpage Challenge Introduction
My Personal Hubpage Challenge After 1 Week
My Personal Hubpage Challenge After 1 Month

This kind of bullshit tactic from large companies is the kind of thing that can get a lot of people pissed off very quickly. It’s a poorly thought out action by a bunch of corporate executives who obviously have their heads so far up there own arses that they have no idea about their own market.

Fortunately, there has been a big enough outcry about this case that a few people with more than your average online experience have picked it up to make sure that everyone will know just what sort of company the Hansen Beverage company is. At Blogger Illustrated Allyn has pointed out his outrage in his damning post about Monster Energy Drink in no uncertain terms.

To pick on a small company who obviously isn’t in the same market completely stinks and deserves the bad rap that is going to fall upon it. Already people have decided to boycott Monster Energy Drink over this. I hope Rock Art Brewery decides to fight this and, if there is any justice in this world, that Hansen Beverages takes a big hit in the only place they’ll notice, their bottom line.

If you want to show your support for Rock Art in their fight you can buy a t-shirt by visiting the Rock Art Brewery website. Fight the good fight and a big F-you to Monster.

I recently heard a story typifying the exact reason why it is strongly advisable to keep your Hosting and your Domain Registrar separate. This story involves a Hosting company called Dreamhost that did the dirty on one of their customers and have turned his IM life upside down. He has posted his own scathing Dreamhost review which is well worth the read to give you an idea about the dangers that are out there in the online world and the unscrupulous bastards who think they can walk all over the little guys.

Essentially what Dreamhost did was suddenly pull the Hosting out from under the guy citing the use of a Wordpress plug-in on his blogs as the reason for the termination of service. The problem was that there was nothing in the company’s TOS stating that the plug-in was not allowed and, when asked why no warning was given before cutting him off, all he received was a terse reply indicating that their decision was final.

The only domain he could not get back was the one he had registered with Dreamhost. When he tried to transfer the domain to a new host he was unable to verify the domain because it was locked into Dreamhost’s name servers. And he couldn’t access the name servers because they had locked him out with no warning.

Don’t wait until you suddenly have problems with your hosting service. It happens and probably more often than you think it might. You don’t want to lose the site that you have poured hours of hard work into just because some unfeeling nobody decides they don’t like the look of it.

You just don’t want the hassle of having to chase this type of thing up. IM is hard enough without having to take precious time out to deal with imbeciles.

Get even more advice about keeping your Hosting and Domain Names separate.

Anyway, I’m muddling through my own personal Hubpages challenge at my own pace. I don’t need anyone else to tell me how quickly I have to get it done. After all, they don’t know how many other sites I am also working that pay me a lot more money from a lot less work right at the moment. It gives me faint amusement when I read about forum regulars pleading for clarification of the “rules” of challenge. I swear I wonder how some people manage to take a dump without crapping their own pants.

I think my keyword selection has been reasonably sound in terms of bringing in reasonable Adsense revenue. Someone else has already mentioned that from their experience you shouldn’t really expect to get a clear idea of how much money you’re going to make from your Hubs until you’ve published at least 70 of them. That gives me some time to wait before I have to concern myself over what’s actually coming in to repay me for my effort.

My Current Backlink Plans

My Hubpages challenge is progressing differently to a lot of other people’s in ways apart from the speed in which posting is taking place. As well as posting Hubs on a regular basis I’m also making sure on getting my links organised early on in the process.
When I write a hub I also try to write an accompanying EzineArticle of 250 to 300 words plus three or four Keyword Academy articles of 125 to 150 words long. I’m also trying to add four or five InfoBarrel articles that will link back to my Hubs. Finally, I am throwing in a few of my own blog posts with two or three linking back to my hubs. All up, I reckon I’m able to get around 10 or so back links for each hub that I’m submitting. That’s 10 links spread over five or six days without a lot of work or effort.

Reporting My Hubpages Progress

My original plan was to report my progress during my hub pages challenge but I’ve heard plenty of horror stories when people start revealing their successes. Suffice it to say I’ve made some money through my hubpages challenge already, possibly more than I was expecting, definitely enough to motivate me to write plenty more.

So 100 Hubs is now merely the minimum number of hubs that I’m aiming for. The Adsense placement on hubpages’s is very good and converts quite well, well enough to be consistently bringing in revenue for me at a click through rate of over 7%. I’ll take that any day.

It should be highlighted that the majority of work going into my hubs is keyword research as well as the part that I dislike the most actually typing it all out. But as of today I may have solved by typing problem because I have taken possession of a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. As a matter of fact the last half of this post so far has been written using Dragon, I’m still very much in the training stages but so far so good producing content and I don’t have to type to do it.

I expect that over the next few weeks my proficiency with the product will improve dramatically and so will the rate at which I produced new articles and hubs. And it will largely come down to how quickly I can research a niche and transform it into a coherent piece of work based around the keywords I’ve chosen.

This is a software script that has been brought out by the man behind Blogger Unleashed himself Vic Franqui and it promises to give you the capability of throwing up niche stores similar to the old BANS sites. Similar but much, much better because there will be no footprint for Google to get hold of, plus as well as eBay you’ll be able to front Amazon and Chitika as well.

The sites can be created in a phenomenally short amount of time and they will be quickly indexed and be safely drawing visitors in next to no time. It all sounds, well, too good to be true.

To add more pressure to IM’ers out there, Grizz has emerged from hibernation at his Make Money Online For Beginners site and has given Niche Devil a resounding thumbs up. Never mind that this type of product flies directly in the face of all that Grizz has been teaching over the last few years. It also flies in the face of what Court and Mark are teaching at The Keyword Academy.

Now, I told a lie at the start of this post when I suggested that the emergence of Niche Devil presented me with a challenge. In fact there is no challenge at all. I simply won’t be buying Niche Devil.

I won’t be buying Niche Devil because I’ve followed Grizz’s methods and they work, I’ve been following the course at The Keyword Academy (which are basically Grizz’s methods with a few extremely valuable extras thrown in) and again, it works. Actually it works very, very well for anyone willing to put in some hard work. I’ve been making solid money online and the amount I’m earning has been growing each month at a phenomenal rate.

I’ve seen the BANS bust, I’ve felt the sting of products that promise far more than you can possibly imagine. Throwing up a multitude of sites without having to think about it screams unreliable to me. But then, I may be more cautious than most.

Go ahead and buy Niche Devil if it sounds like a solid product to you. Me? I’m going to build a few more solid backlinks.

After 1 month of intermittant Hub building I have increased my total Hubs to 29 which I feel pretty good about. During that time I also created 3 new niche sites and so the work has been shared around across a number of tasks. Link building for each of the Hubs…well, let’s just say I’ve done some link building for some of my Hubs.

In terms of earnings, things are looking very promising. In my previous most lucrative month before June I earned $1.02 through Hubpage Adsense revenue. In June, with very little link building, my earnings amounted to $10.44. I’d call that a success. As each Hub ages I would expect it to rank a little better and as I get around to building up the links to them, they should draw in even more traffic.

It took me a few Hubs to work things out but keyword analysis plays quite an important part in seeing early results with your Hubs. Finding a niche that can be dominated easily and using the age and authority of a site like Hubpages is a perfect union. By picking out a good keyword and tying it in with a few of its keyword cousins I can quickly put together a strong, meaningful and useful Hub that is strong in a variety of keywords.

The bottom line with this little challenge I’ve set myself is that it is going to form an integral part of my online portfolio. Because it is always safer to diversify I’m not going to forsake all of my other revenue building methods. It will merely form a part of the whole, one that will continue to grow as and when I find the time to trial new niches.

That reminds me, these Hubs that I’m building are proving to be very bloody handy when it comes to testing the waters for a new niche. I find a keyword that looks to be a likely winner, so I write a 600 - 800 word Hub about it. It gets indexed with the help of 3 or 4 links and then I can sit back and check the search engine traffic it gets plus the conversion rate it picks up. All very convenient, and at no cost to me apart from time.

Now for the update on my progress after 1 week:

Hubs Added : 15

Hubpage Views : 125 page views

No of Adsense Clicks : 5

Earnings For the Week : $1.00

The bulk of my “Hub Time” has been devoted to picking out viable keywords and setting up the new Hubs, so I have only been promoting 1 of my Hubs with a solid link building campaign. Not surprisingly the traffic to that Hub has been steady while the other new Hubs have not yet made their marks. Plenty of time for that though.

I suspect most of the clicks that I’ve received over the last week have come from the first Hubs I built months ago. As the new Hubs begin to rank I expect they will kick in with more lucrative CPCs.

As far as earning is concerned, I wasn’t really expecting anything for this first week while I was still getting things in place. The laser targeting that will come with higher rankings for specific keywords should result in higher paying clicks.

My rate of adding new Hubs is going to be a variable factor in this challenge. I have many other money sites that need my attention so this challenge will have to fit in. As a means of testing potential new niches, there is no better vehicle than Hubpages. Quick indexing and the authority of the site means that it doesn’t take very long to get a feel for the profitability prospects the niche has.

My goal for this coming week is to add another 15 Hubs to what I’ve done so far. I also want to be well under way with link building for another 3 or 4 Hubs with links from my personal portfolio, use of Connect Content plus a spun article distributed to article directories.

The site I will be promoting is now 6 months old and is ranking well for a few long tails but is only ranked at around the #210 mark for the main keyword. It’s getting a consistent 30 – 40 unique visitors per day and is consistently making money. I want it ranked higher so I’m going to turn to the article directories for help.

I have written and spun an article so that it is more than 40% unique, not that it particularly matters but it raises the chances of being accepted at more directories if it is unique. I have also rotated the link anchor text so that I won’t be bombing the same links hundreds of times.

I have a list of over 400 article directory sites at my disposal and I will be spreading out the submissions to around 6 – 10 per day, manually submitted each day for a month.

One of the reasons I want to try this exercise out is because I want to have some kind of confirmation in my mind that this type of article marketing is going to be worth the effort. I know that it takes some time for Google to recognise links and I know that not all article directories publish the submitted articles. So there will be a good proportion of my submissions that will yield no fruit. But I also want to know whether I will see a noticeable change.

The niche is already profitable with just over 1,000 monthly visitors, pushing it higher up the SERPs will potentially increase the traffic to over 5,000 visitors per month.

I will return to this particular exercise at the end of July, 2009 to determine whether there has been any perceivable improvement in the site’s performance.

Starting Point

May Unique Visitors : 1,094
May Earnings : $32.35

To gauge the rankings positions I will be tracking 5 different keywords that are some of the ones I will be using as link anchor text in the Author Bio boxes. Here is a rundown of where they are ranking before the experiment begins.

Keyword 1 : pos #210 (main keyword)
Keyword 2 : pos #35
Keyword 3 : pos #9
Keyword 4 : pos #7
Keyword 5 : pos #91

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