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

I have been working hard on building up an extensive portfolio of websites that have begun earning me a regular, although far from lucrative, income. I’ve been making money via a number of methods but the income stream that hasn’t missed a day in many months has been Adsense. The earnings have been nothing to write home about, but they are increasing every month as my sites have been aging and their rankings have been improving. Basically I was starting to make money with adSense on a regular basis.

Sometimes you become so involved in what you’re doing that you fail to notice things that are painfully obvious once you take the time to analyze them. In this case, there was a definite pattern forming with one of my sites, in fact, my most successful in terms of how much Adsense income it was generating.

This particular website started out as a kind of special interest project for me. The subject was topical and there were many news stories available to draw content from every day. I went to work building the site and found that I could easily add a post every day. Some days I added more. The nature of the topic meant that there was always something else to post about. In short it was high maintenance requiring dedication.

I thought I had made a terrible mistake starting the site because it was chewing up all of my time. The thing was, it didn’t take long for the traffic to start arriving in droves and close behind came the Adsense clicks . What was happening while I wasn’t paying attention was that all of my dedicated posting was bringing the Google bot visiting with great regularity.

Suddenly I was ranking quickly and well for all kinds of long tails. Singly, these long tails weren’t bringing in huge traffic, but combined with hundreds of other long tails I was getting more traffic with this site than with any other site in which I was practicing solid SEO tactics.

Did I learn from this lesson? No, not really. I have been focusing more on building backlinks from intermediate sites and backlinks to intermediate sites. I’ve been writing articles and posting them to article directories and focusing on this keyword and that keyword. This particular method has been extremely slow going. It works, mind you, but it works after putting in a helluva lot of hours.

So I was looking at a couple of websites of mine that I started with the idea of dragging in a steady income using Adsense. Neither of them have set the world on fire. Here are the figures to give you an idea of just how mediocre their performance has been:

Since 1 January 2009
Site A – 80 unique visitors per month for total earnings of $5.00
Site B – 90 unique visitors per month for total earnings of $7.40

** Site B has only had Adsense on it for the last month and a half.

Admittedly, the traffic has been pitiful, but my posting has been almost non-existent for site A and not much better for site B.

I can actually track back and match up the spikes of visitor traffic for site A with the times that I rolled up my sleeves and put together a few days of posting for the site.

So I am setting myself a challenge by way of an experiment with these two sites. I am going to increase the rate in which I will be posting to both sites and confirm the rate of increase in visitor activity that it generates. I will be posting the progress here at Blogaration to keep “score” on the two sites.

The success of this little experiment will be measured on two fronts: unique visitors and Adsense revenue.

Site A is over a year old, so it has age on its side. It is in a competitive niche, but the niche is also one that gets a lot of traffic on a daily basis. I expect to pick up traffic through the long tails. I plan to organize a series of posts for the site using recent news reports as the inspiration for the content. I will build up the articles but will hold back posting until there are around 60 posts. Over a 20 – 24 day period I will then post the stored articles at the rate of around 3 per day.

Site B is only a few months old and so it hasn’t got the benefit of site age behind it. It is in a niche that is responsible for high paying clicks but I expect the number of visitors to be fewer overall. For this site I plan to post at least 1 article of 300 words or more to the site per day until I have reached 50 posts. After 50 posts I’ll stop and reassess the effect that the regular posting has had on the traffic for the site.

There is an Internet Marketers package sold under the name Site Build It is out there as the ultimate package for newbie IMers to make money with an online business. It will make you some money, that is not in dispute, if you do the right thing and follow the prescribed directions, money can be made with the product.

The bottom line, though, it’s a horrendous waste of money. All of the parts of SBI that you get for an outrageous $300 PER WEBSITE!! can be found for free on the Internet with the exception of buying a domain and getting webhosting.

Recently a brave blogger by the name of Lissie posted a review of Site Build It titled Site Build It Scam Review and basically told it like it is. Opening the eyes of those who may have unwittingly shelled out the $300, unknowingly parting with money they truly wouldn’t need to.

The reaction was curious to say the least. All of those SBI faithful who should have been busy building their “businesses” were flaming Lissie’s site with mega-long comments, stridently tearing strips off her for daring to speak out against their product.

This post is simply to reinforce Lissie’s message of warning about paying outrageous amounts for products you really don’t need. Check out her site as well as Griz’s as he warns Site Build It - Don’t Buy It and Blogger Unleashed where it is simply dismissed with a casual Site Build It or SBI or Whatever.

I guess you could say that one of the steps towards blogging profitably is to steer clear of grossly overpriced products such as Site Build It and learn about the game before throwing your money around.

Other Related Posts

When ‘Site Build It’ Zombies Attack
Site Build It is Unlikely to Make you Much Money
Fake Site Build It Affiliate Reviews
Is Site Build It a Scam?
Review of Site Build It - The Bashing

The 5th day of my latest niche site build and I have added more links to my niche site today, getting contextual links from other blogs using variations of the main keyword. The slow but steady collection of these links will be vital to ranking for all of the keywords I want to target.

During the day I have continued to write more content and have added a couple more articles that have been saved on EzineArticles plus a longer article which I have set up as a Squidoo lens. Getting links from as many different sources as possible is key here. After creating the Squidoo lens I have also linked to it from a couple of my Blogger blogs to try to boost its ranking a little.

That brings the total number of articles that are lined up ready to be sent in for publishing at EzineArticles to 5. This should ensure a solid foundation for the new niche to be based on.

When building backlinks it’s important to mix up the anchor text you use to link to your niche site. Natural linking happens using all sorts of anchor combinations and, if you’re lucky, your exact keywords are used every now and again. If every link to your site comes in with the exact same anchor text it won’t look right. One of your goals should be to fade into the background, particularly when it comes to staying on the right side of Google, and remain one of the crowd.

As predicted back on the first day of this exercise, my site has disappeared from Google’s index. Once again, I should stress that this is a normal part of the Google dance and you can expect it to take around a week before the site gets added properly. In the meantime I’ve simply got to act like a normal blogger and continue writing posts, building links and use the time to get some articles written.

Article writing is really not that difficult, particularly if you have done some basic research into the topic first. For some, article writing is even simpler if you choose the option of outsourcing the task and hiring someone to write the articles for you. Digital Point is a great place to get quality writers at a reasonable rate.

For the most part I choose to do the writing myself. I make a list of all of the keywords I want to rank for and devise an article around each one. To write an EzineArticles article you only need 250 words and if you write a decent first and last paragraph that contains your keyword introducing what you are going to talk about and then summarizing what you just said in the last paragraph then you only have to stick 2 or 3 paragraphs in between. Take this post, for instance, it has already reached 231 words.

According to the EzineArticles.com Editorial Guidelines

“We do not knowingly allow any URLs in any of our articles that are banned by Google”

But EzineArticles have taken the lazy-bastard option when it comes to policing this particular rule and simply take the attitude that if your site is not in the Google SERPs your site must be banned. EzineArticles will reject your article until it the site that you link to has been indexed. At this point I’ve got 3 articles saved at EzineArticles just waiting until the site is indexed again.

Links are the order of the day now and for the next few weeks social bookmarking, Qassia, ConnectContent, blog commenting, forum signatures, link directories, article directories, blog directories, RSS directories, Squidoo, Hubpages, Yahoo Answers and, the most important contextual links from other blogs using my keywords as anchor text must be gathered. As you can see, links can be picked up from all over the web, you’ve just got to put the effort in to go out and get them.