Monday 31 August 2009

Given up on Adbrite

Part of my experiments with money making was to try to diversify the advertisers I used.

So I put Adbrite on this blog and also on another niche blog, and left it there for three months.

My conclusion: Adbrite is rubbish. The ads served up are so inappropriate, no-one would ever click on them. eg they were putting hideous weight loss picture ads on this blog which is about making money. So I've removed them.

For now this blog will be ad free till I think of what to try next!

Wednesday 19 August 2009

Assessing whether a niche is viable

One thing I'm doing that is different this time is putting Amazon modules onto my hubs.

So far I've made one Amazon sale from a hub from the first challenge, and none from any of the hubs in this challenge. I was about to throw my hands up and say that Amazon is a waste of time when I read a post by Ed Dale which says that you should make no decisions about a niche, website or affiliate product till you have got 200 visitors to it. Given that Hubpages shares the page impressions 60/40, this means getting 333 hits to it. And that is hits excluding reads from other hubbers, who don't really buy anything nor click on anything and only serve to inflate the stats.

By that criteria it's way too early to judge what is successful and what is not. I really need to stepup the backlinking to make sure that I do get sufficient traffic to assess whether I'm in the correct niches.

Friday 7 August 2009

One week into the second hub challenge

Well it's just over a week into the second hubpage challenge. No earnings yet for the new hubs, but we are on day 8 and last time earnings didn't come till day 9.

The hub building is going faster this time. Have made ten hubs so far, most commercial, but I couldn't resist doing a self-indulgent list hub for the tenth one called List of the best SEO blogs, just cause I felt like sharing. Will make no money from that one, but hey!

One thing that is different to the last challenge is that I've spent more time building hubs and not as much time building backlinks. But as I am slightly ahead of schedule, I might stop for a day and do just that.

Will report back in a week's time on how it has all gone.

Saturday 1 August 2009

New Hubpage Challenge

I am taking part in the second hubpage challenge. This one is more flexible - you start when you want, and you complete 30 hubs in 30 days.

I started yesterday and have built four hubs so far - see my hub on Making money with the Hubpages Challenge, for progress on this challenge.

It will be interesting to see how I progress as I know so much more than when I did the last challenge. Last time it took me 80 days to make 30 hubs, and 78 days to break earnings of $50 from these 30 hubs.

Am looking to both complete the challenge much sooner and to earn much more. We'll see. It's all good fun!

Am also trying to be more organised this time - am keeping a spreadsheet on OpenOffice to track when I've made hubs, when backlinks are added, what position they are in the SERPs, when I update the hubs (to check if keeping content fresh makes a difference). I figure you can only learn what works through trial and error and analysing your own work (and mistakes).