I realised today when I posted my latest Hub that I am now 1/3 of the way to reaching the 100 Hubs that has been so arbitrarily arrived at as the ideal goal to reach. I’ve latched onto that number too, only because it was conveniently arrived at by someone else (and people are going to use it when they do a search, heh).

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.

Every now and then as Internet Marketers we are tossed new challenges in terms of whether or not to buy new products, particularly those that promise to make it even easier to make more money through very little extra effort. Over the last couple of days one such challenge has emerged in the form of a product called Niche Devil.

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.

It has been a month since I began my personal Hubpage challenge. The inspiration from others around me who have resolved to create as many Hubs as they could effectively rubbed off on me and prompted me to get busy with my own Hubmaking.

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.

Before I get down to the details of my progress after the first week of my Personal Hub Challenge I want to direct your attention to Ben’s Make Money Online With SEO site where he is in the process of completing his 200 Hubs In 30 Days challenge. Apart from being inspired by his enthusiasm and commitment, he is also reporting some very valuable insights into what he has learned through the process. Hints on how to put together a Hub that will pick up Adsense clicks is extremely valuable and his first hand experience is proving to be very interesting and informative reading.

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 start of a new month gives me a good starting point to conduct a new experiment on one of my blogs. There’s nothing more instructive than focusing on a specific method of SEO to get a good feel for how effective the work you put in actually is – much better than simply believing something that somebody else tells you, anyway. This time I’m going to find out for myself what the effects of a consistent article marketing campaign will have on a site and just how positive it will be for the site’s rankings.

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