Make Money Online Experiments

I have only recently been turned on to the benefits of using Hubpages to earn some extra money online.  I am not really convinced that it is that great of a way to do it, but I have heard enough people talk about how it is a solid way to get backlinks to a money site that I might as well try and figure out if they can make money on their own.

There are four things that you need when setting up a good MMO experiment:

1. A niche
2. A monetization plan
3. A link building plan
4. A way to measure results

For this experiment I am going to build a hubpage and try to get it to rank in the top 10 for a search term using nothing but article marketing.

The Niche

I have gone out and done some keyword research and found a relatively non-competitive niche.  The keyword that I am targeting only gets around 8000 searches a month according to the big G and has 17,800 results using and “allintitle: keyword” search parameter.  There are certainly less competitive niches out there, but I think that this one will do for my little experiment.

I have written a 1405 word hubpage that includes several photos and a few videos.  According to my keyword analyzers I have used my main keyword in 1.08% of the article.  I did not spend any time adjusting this - I just wrote what I felt like needed to be said about the keyword I was targeting and wrote naturally.

Monetization

My gut tells me that this is a niche that actaully has a product to sell.  I am expecting people who are searching for this word to want to buy the keyword that they are searching for giving the niche a built in monetization method - Amazon.  I could have chosen another type of niche that would get clicks, but I don’t want my Adsense account to get smart priced from my Hubpages and Amazon offers decent payouts on high priced items (even though electronics are pegged at 4%).

I have had a few problems with gut feelings before, so this could be a big waste of time in terms of money making - but at least once it is done I will have another resource for the farm.

Linking Strategy

This is going to be one of the more advanced experiments because I am going to be using some article submission software. I have subscribed the help of a fellow blogger who runs make money online case studies and gotten access to Unique Article Wizard (UAW) and Article Marketing Automation (AMA) accounts.

If you are unfamiliar with these services, they are a way to do article marketing that claims to submit a “unique” article across the web.  You put some elbow grease into setting up an article that can be spun and each time the service submits the article for you it generates a new spun article.   How unique the article is depends entirely on how much effort you put into it.

There are some theoretical benefits to doing it this that I am wanted to test using this service:

• Duplicate content, it is claimed, gets discounted by Google in determining the “juice” a link inside that duplicate content gives.  By creating more “unique” content you are going to give Google exactly what it wants - fresh, interest, keyword relevant content.
• Variation in the anchors pointing to a URL looks more natural.  With these services you can change the link anchors which should prevent your sites from getting flagged for SERP manipulation.  This is key if you actually want to make some money off of something.

Will this provide better or faster results than straight article submission?  I haven’t the foggiest idea but it is worth seeing if this type of article marketing will give me any movement.

The plan is to write one spinnable article and submit it once through AMA and UAW and wait and see what happens.  UAW lets you space out your submissions over time, so the goal will be to get a bunch of links early through AMA and then get a trickle of links through the UAW submission.  The linking should resemble this:

Link Building Long Tail

Measuring Results

There are some obvious ways for me to measure results that I wanted to make explicit here:

• Is the page indexed? A page that is not indexed will not be present on any search result pages.
• What are my rankings for a series of related keywords? There will be a total of 9 keyword that I will be tracking for this hub - 1 is the keyword itself and the other 8 are long tails.
• How many links do I have? I’ll be using Google and Yahoo to keep track of my links.  Yahoo will definitely report more of them than Google, so I will be most interested in what they have to say.  I have also set up an alert through Google to let me know when people link to my hub.
• Am I getting any traffic? Hubpages will keep track of this for me.  It won’t be as useful as Google Analytics, Site Meter, or some of the other free analytics software, but it will have to do.
• How much money have I made? I don’t know if I will make a single cent on this experiment because I don’t know if I will have the rankings in the SERPs to get the traffic that I need.  If I do earn some money it will be easy to track in my Amazon account.

… make money online …

I plan on tracking the results of this experiment for 4 weeks regularly, and then I’ll keep an eye on it for a while but won’t post any updates unless something spectacular happens.

It is time to experiment and see if Hubpages make money online.