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HubPages Author Score – Phase 1 Complete

Sep 9th, 2009
by Dollars.
2 comments

HubPages-HubRank-Author-Score-Hub-Llama-graphic

Couldn’t really sleep very well, so I got up early this morning and noticed that my HubRank over at HubPages is now over 75. It was showing at 79 when I checked. The reason this is so important is that HubPages nofollows all links from Hubs published by authors with an author score under 75. By hitting that magical number, my links should now be un-nofollowed and therefore building up additional authority for the various pages I have linked out to.

The next step is to build a few more hubs to ensure that my HubRank stays above 75. The HubPages Guide says that there is a "random" element to the scoring, whatever that is supposed to mean. Apparently, HubPages prefers the "fun" of moving scores to the accuracy of legitimate scores, but hey, its their ball.

Monitoring Incoming Links Google Webmaster Tools

Now that my HubScores are high enough and my author ranking is high enough, it is time to start monitoring incoming links to see if and when they show up. There are a ton of tools out there that will count and measure you incoming links. Some of them are free and others costs quite a lot of money. But, in the end, there is only one place that matters when it comes to link building, and that is Google.

If your incoming links are not counted by Google, then they don’t exist.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that every link on the Internet counts toward your PageRank and authority when it comes to Google’s index. Their spider does not index every page of every website every time it visits. One look at your site’s Crawl Stats inside Google’s Webmaster Tools will show you that.

The deeper a backlink is inside of a site, the more likely it is to not be indexed. This is why a lot of automated linkbuilding services don’t work. Sure, they post your links on a site, but they also post 100 other links on that site. As long as your link is on the first page, you are getting full credit. But, when it is buried deep inside of a site that the Google indexing algorithm doesn’t think is worthy of a full crawl, that is a different story.

That’s why I always monitor my website’s incoming links straight from the SERP source. Google’s Webmaster Tools are free and don’t require you to install any code like its Analytics Tools do. (You have to verify that you own a site either by including a meta tag or uploading a file, but that isn’t the same as adding a hunk of JavaScript to your website.)

If you want to check your incoming links at Google without messing around with webmaster tools, you can also just use some of the advanced search operators. Searching on link:www.yoursite.com will list the sites in the index that link to that domain. The drawback to this method is that you have to manually type in every page you want to check – link:www.yoursite.com/page1.htm , link:www.yoursite.com/page2.htm , and so on – versus being able to select multiple pages from a list. As an added benefit, Webmaster Tools lists your pages in order by how many incoming links they have, so if there is a surprise bump in links to a page you might not be manually tracking, you will still see it.

You can check out Google Webmaster Tools here.

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Posted in: Building Links.
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HubPages HubRank Minimum to Avoid NoFollowed Links

Sep 8th, 2009
by Dollars.
No comments yet

I’ve started up a bit of an experiment regarding the all comers content publishing site called HubPages.

Recently, there was a bit of a hub bub (Hah!) when a well known Internet marketing website personality suggested that writing 30 Hubs in 30 Days could lead to improved search engine rankings for a website.

At the time, I was too busy to look into it, and frankly, I’m not really the type to jump in and do something because everyone else is doing it. However, at the conclusion of the experiment, not only were they able to get their search engine rankings to improve, but they were also actually making money off of the published Hubs.

I put it in the back of mind as something to check into at a later date. That later date, is now.

HubPage Nofollow Rules

There is a catch. As some sort of method to weed out spammers and other unsavory publishers, HubPages automatically nofollows the links of all Hubs from starting authors, or Hub Builders.

Each Hubber, as HubPages authors are called, is given a HubRank. Your HubRank is essentially an automated ranking of you as an author. Everyone starts out low. (I don’t remember the exact number, I’ll have to look it up.) By publishing Hubs, and by "participating" on HubPages your score rises. Until your score reaches at least 75, all of your outbound links, like those being bragged about during the 30 hubs in 30 days posts, are nofollowed.

Each individual Hub is also ranked. This individual Hub rank is called a HubScore. Rankings seem to start at 50 and then work their way higher based on things like how much traffic they get, how many people vote them up, and so on. So long as the HubSocre is above 40, the links will not be nofollowed and the power of writing for HubPages is now within your hands.

According to my profile, I joined 5 weeks ago, but I only wrote my first hub 4 days ago. So far, I have published 5 Hubs and commented on a dozen or so posts. My HubRank has risen to 71, so I’m 4 away from the promised land of 75 and all of my links having their nofollow tags removed.

HubPage AdSense Challenge

While reading various hubs, I came across one where the author noted how many highly ranked (several #1 results) pages he had in Google search results and yet how little money he made from his AdSense ads.

It didn’t take long to see a couple of common misconceptions in how online advertising programs like Google AdSense work. I wrote up a Hub (nach) describing the misunderstandings many people have about working with AdSense, and as challenged by the original Hub poster, I also laid out step by step instructions for how to make some AdSense income based on his hubs.

Basically, it is finding a better paying keyword with low competition and the leveraging those high ranking website’s authority to drive higher and better paying traffic to a new Hub with a better keyword. Hopefully it works for him and help make money with AdSense.

Drop by and check out my profile: Hub Llama

If you have a HubPages account, do me a favor and add me as a favorite so it doesn’t say no one has added Hub Llama as a favorite on every page. I don’t need to be favorited by thousands, but the "no one" think isn’t very fun :)

Posted in: Building Links.
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Writers Making Money With Affiliate Programs

Sep 4th, 2009
by Dollars.
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There are hundreds of ways for a writer to make money online with their writing. The most commonly used is advertising. The most commonly used advertising network is Google Ads, called AdSense. AdSense is the easiest ad program to use.

Google advertising is sold through the Google AdWords program. The ads sold there are then published on Google’s websites (like search results) and also on other websites. Getting those ads on your website is easy. Just sign up for the Google AdSense program. (Notice the similar, but different names to avoid being confused.)

Google does the rest for you. You don’t have to pick which ads to show on your web pages, Google selects ads based upon the content of the page. Theoretically, this makes it more likely that people will click on the ads, which in turn means that you will make more money from the advertisements displayed on your websites.

Google Ads, both AdWords and AdSense are some of the most talked about and studied ad programs on the planet. Take that plus the fact that Google is a big, well regarded company, that makes a ton of money already, and it is a pretty good bet that they won’t be screwing you over by not counting your clicks, or not paying you, or whatever.

The downside is that as the most studied and examined advertising program online, there are many people out there, both website owners and advertisers, who have the whole Google Ads thing down to a science. That does not mean that you won’t make money with Google Ads, but it does mean that it isn’t quite as simple as it seems. Just plugging the Google AdSense code into your HTML code isn’t good enough. You need to keep studying, reading, and analyzing to ensure maximum profit.

Grab the Make Money Writing Online RSS Feed and we’ll keep you constantly up to date on all the latest REAL, CONFIRMED, Google AdSense tips, tricks, and advice.

While Google AdSense may be the easiest advertising program for webmasters to use, there are few people who thing it is the most profitable. That makes sense. Generally, earning more money requires more skill or more effort.

Affiliate programs are the second tier of website income that you can build by writing online articles and content for your own website publishing empire. The most well-known of these is Amazon Associates.

Much like Google, Amazon is a large, well-respected online behemoth, that makes plenty of money without having to cheat a tiny little website owner like you. Again, this provides a measure of comfort and confidence with using the Amazon affiliates program.

Each month, the guys over at Amazon push a specific product or category of products by offering a higher than normal payout, and sometimes improved tools to make putting affiliate ads for those products on your sites that you make money by writing online with.

This month, the category is "Digital" for whatever that means. One of the featured tools is a MP3 Widget which provides an active, updating ad for your site. I built one by selecting "Alternative Music" to get a feel for what they look like and how they perform. You saw it earlier in this article.

If you are planning on buying some music, or anything else, from Amazon, click on that ad and go buy your stuff. It won’t cost you any more, and it will help generate some extra data for our research which means that our reports will be even more helpful and accurate. You get to help yourself, and make some money for us at the same time :) We’re also running some experiments on our sites to see if things like putting a big fat widget like this in the middle of your post messes up your search engine rankings for that article.

Stick around, or grab that RSS Feed.

Posted in: Earn Money Online.
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Keep Making Money Online By Writing Ahead

Sep 1st, 2009
by Dollars.
No comments yet

writing-ahead-graphicIf you target the right keywords and focus your writing just so, you might be able to rank highly for a specific phrase or set of key words without updating your site regularly. But, doing so is really more the realm of those make money fast types who want to convince you that you can make big money on the Internet by doing virtually nothing. All you have to do is throw up a couple of websites that you can build in minutes. Of course, you will never figure it out on your own, so you’ll have to cough up $49 for an eBook, or subscription, or something.

But, since this site is about helping writers make money online by doing what they do best, that is writing, I’m not going to go there right now. Instead, I will tell you that the three-word phrase you see on everyone’s how to make money posts, Content Is King, is 100% true.

I am currently in the midst of an ongoing project to build a big money making empire of websites. I could use all those SEO tips and webmaster tricks out there to try and make crappy sites rank high, or I could just do what I do best, write quality articles and posts for these sites and let Google do what it does best, separate crappy MFA sites from good ones.

That being said, it would take very fast typing fingers to write daily content for even a dozen websites, let alone several dozen. Trying to do that while running a small freelance writing business would require the aid of some form of time stopping ability.

What is a budding writing web entrepreneur to do?

Write ahead.

Every day, you will be writing. After all, you are a writer, and that is what writers do.

However, some days you will fill like writing about certain topics and not about others. Save the forcing-it writing for paying clients with deadlines and use your want-to writing to write for your sites. You’ll write faster and better.

Don’t just write one post or article and move on. Write three. Write a dozen. Heck, write 20. Then take advantage of WordPress’s scheduling ability to meter those posts out in nice search-engine friendly increments. Personally, I like to publish every other day, not including weekends. That makes a Tuesday-Thursday publishing schedule fairly attractive.

Sticking to this schedule gives you two major benefits. First, your content is always new and fresh, which Google loves.

Second, since you know that your “automatic posts” go out every Tuesday and Thursday, when you need publish something a little more timely, or you just don’t want to put what you just wrote at the end of the queue, you can set it to post on any of the other days of the week and know that you won’t be overlapping without having to go into your control panel and look it up.

Do this for each site as you set them up and have maximum enthusiasm for the topic. You should easily be able to crank out 5 posts. With the 2 a week schedule, they’ll last 2 1/2 weeks before you have to come back.

Chances are, you’ll have plenty of good ideas before then.  Keep going and pretty soon you’ll have enough posts queued up to take a vacation and not miss a beat.

Posted in: Make Money Writing.
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