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

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