The Definitive Guide to Making Money on Hubpages

Hub pages is a great way to learn about making money online. If you want to do that you need to know what you're doing. This article will tell you everything that you need to know about how to make money on hub pages. It will talk you through choosing subjects to write about, which I'll refer to later as keyword research. It will tell you how to write articles and optimise them so that search engines like Google will help people find them. That way you'll get readers. And it will tell you how to monetise your articles using Google’s Adsense and Amazon.com. Placing these ads on your articles is how you can make money once you have readers.

But before we get started on all of that, I want you sign up as a new member of HubPages if you haven't done so already. You can sign up by clicking this link:

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Signed up already? Good. Now we can get started with keyword research.

The starting point is to making any kind of money online is having the right subjects or keywords. In a nutshell:

1. You want to write articles about subjects that people are interested in.
2. You want to be answering questions that people are asking online. If you're able to do that you can be guaranteed of getting tens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of readers every single day to come to your Hub.

But it's not enough just to have readers or to write about subjects that everybody else is writing about. You need to make sure that the articles you writing are targeting subjects or keywords that meet the following three conditions.

1. The first condition is that your keywords must be popular. You want to know that thousands of people interested in the subject and are asking Google or other search engines to help you find in every single month. I'll tell you how to check that in just a minute.
2. The second condition to having good subjects or keywords is having ones that aren't the about same things that everybody out there is also writing about. There's no point you writing yet another article on something like “how to lose weight” or “the benefits of green tea” if you know that there are thousands and thousands of articles that have been written on the same subject. Even if your article is better than the thousands and thousands of articles that are there already, it may take months and even years for enough people to find your article and link to it. Just having the best content is no guarantee that it will rise up through the search engines. So you want articles about subjects are a little bit less popular, and about keywords that are not too competitive.
3. The third criteria is that you want to keywords that advertisers are willing to pay money for. In other words you want something that has some commercial potential. The first sort of commercial potential may be that advertisers who sell the product or service that you are writing about pulpit against one another to get their adverts placed in Google ads on your article. I'll also tell you how you can check the value of those adverts. The second way to make money is to write articles about products that people might want to buy, especially products that people might want to buy through Amazon.com. This is because Amazon is a trusted source and many people will happily click through from your article on to Amazon's website to get the product that they may have read about on your article.So if you are keen on cooking, say, then you might know a lot about frying pans. If you want a world expert on frying pans, then that's what you should write about. You can then link from your article about frying pans to the very frying pans you talking about on Amazon.com telling people which are the best ones to buy and which ones to avoid.

So just to recap: You are looking for keywords where the subjects meet three criteria. The will have a lot of people have to be searching for them, there shouldn't be too much competition from other articles and third, they need to have commercial potential. In other words advertisers are willing to pay to have their adverts on your article, or you can find a product that people might be willing to buy if they click from your article onto Amazon.com's website.

The best way to find keywords that meet these criteria is by using Google itself. Google has a great tool that you can find by clicking here. The Google Keyword Tool contains tons of information that Google gathers every day by analysing the billions of searches that get typed into it every day. It provides amazing information about exactly the sorts of searches and questions that people are typing in whenever they are using Google to look for something. They may be looking for a product, or they may be looking for information about subjects such as how to make soap bubble mixture or find a surgeon. Whichever it is, Google will know how many people have looked at that term or keyword every month. It can tell you if the trend is going up or down. It can tell you where the people who are searching for the term are. And it can tell you how much advertisers are willing to pay to have their adverts appearing on pages that contain these keywords. Best of all it's free.

Now before I get into too much detail about how to use the Google Keywords tool - and don't worry I'll tell you how to do it in just a minute - I would tell you a little bit about where I learned to keyword research. The place I learnt many of the techniques that I'm going to tell you about is the Keyword Academy. The Keyword Academy is the best place to learn about keyword research and making money online bar none. It not only teaches you everything you need to know it shows you how to make money online with simple step-by-step guides and tutorials and videos. It also gives you all of the tools that you need to do so.
It gives you tools to automate the process of keyword research. It also gives you the ability to get high-quality, legitimate backlinks that will strengthen your own articles and your sites and make your articles or Hubs more trusted in the eyes of Google. It is also free for the first month so there is nothing to lose by trying it out. You can sign up for a month learn everything there is that they've got to teach use their tools to find keywords and pulled back links and if at the end of the month all of us haven't convinced you to stay a member of the life they just cancel and it cost you nothing is take a look at the keyword Academy and you can do that by clicking this link.

Okay now that I've given you a plug for The Keyword Academy, let me share with you some of what they taught me about keyword research.

To use the Google keyword tool there are just click on this link here and open it in a new window. What you'll see on your screen is a little catchpa box. That is to stop automated tools from just downloading all the. Type in the letters you see on the screen and press submit. Done? Good!

Now type a potential keyword or key phrase into the search box up on the top left. You will also need to make sure that you set the settings under advanced options to English (if your phrase is English) and the location to the whole world (unless you are targeting a keyword that only exists in a particular place). Normally this setting will be customised to where you are. And if you're in Britain, you don't want to just restrict yourself to finding keywords that are searched for in Britain. You want to find keywords that are appealing to as many people as possible around the world.

What you'll now see is a set of columns with various keywords and key phrases on the one side and the number of monthly searches that get thrown up both globally and locally wherever you are.These numbers are useful but they're not great because the results that Google is throwing up for you are from a set of broad searches that may only be related to your keyword. What you want to know is how many people are typing in exactly the same phrase that you just typed in. So you need to change the settings on the keyword tool to give you that information and that information only.
Look down on the left-hand side and you'll see a tick box that says “broad match” and “exact match”. Now untick the box that says broad, and tick the one that says “exact”. If you now look at the columns you'll see exactly how many people have typed in that word or that phrase into Google every month in the world and wherever you are. That gives you a lot of information.

You can see for instance whether the phrase or keyword you want is a popular one. If it gets thousands of searches every month or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, then it's probably a good starting point. But that doesn't give you enough information to know whether the word has high competition and whether it can be profitable.
To find out whether a keyword is potentially profitable or not you need to go to the option titled columns. Open up and ask it to show a column entitled estimated CPC. The estimated average CPC, or cost per click, is the amount of money that advertisers are willing to pay on average to have their adverts appear next to web pages that have the words you've just searched for.
Ideally, you want to be looking for words that have a large number of searches and have a high cost per click.

I'm not going to share all the secrets of The Keyword Academy because they have a method of calculating the monthly potential of a particular keyword or key phrase. That method allows you to calculate what you might turn if you got a keyword and key phrase to the very top of Google. But I won't steal the keyword Academy's thunder, and you can learn all about the exact method of calculating this is wireless access tools to automate the process for you, if you just go through to The Keyword Academy. And you can do it for free for a month.

The third factor you want to check is the competition that keyword. Now there are two main ways of figuring out if the keyword is particularly competitive. Many Internet marketers will tell you to look at the number of results that come up in Google when you search for that keyword or key phrase. It is a popular method but I still think that the one that makes more sense is the one taught at the keyword Academy voters that doesn't matter if not thousands of pages the only ones you care about are the top four. They teach a method of looking at the page rank which is a Google measure of how important pages, of the top four results for a particular word or phrase. It had to fill the pages all week, and by that they usually mean page rank of three or below, then you can be pretty sure that good article with some good back links and some good authority in good information for your readers stand a very good chance of beating those top before getting into the top place. Under this method you don't care if there are 10,000 other pages that also have your keyword or key phrase on them in Google. You only care about getting the top couple and if your article is better and stronger than the ones that occupy the top four places then there's no reason why you shouldn't be in the number one spot yourself.

There are also automated tools that you can use that really speed things up. One of the most popular is Market Samurai. It is a tool I use all the time because it is an amazing time saver. You can read my Market Samurai Review by following this link. This is not a tool that you need to buy as you can do just about everything that it does by using the Google Keyword tool. But Market Samurai lets you do it about ten times faster. They also offer a free trial so you have nothing to lose by trying it out for a month and doing a lot of keyword research in that time.

Now that you've found some keywords that are popular, potentially profitable, and don't have too much competition, you can get down to the business of starting to write your content. Now there are many people who will say that this is the game where volume is more important than quality. I don't really believe that. I think that you need to provide articles that are informative and useful because over the longer run that is the best way to be sure they will rank highly on Google’s search results.

Aim to write articles that are at least 600 or 700 words long. With articles of that length you stand a better chance of comprehensively covering subjects in such a way that you provide real value to your readers. Longer articles are also more trusted by Google. They also often contain “long tail keywords”. These are relatively long phrases (usually 3 words or more) that are relatively easy to rank for because they will match exactly what people are typing into Google when searching. Let me give you an example. If you were writing about frying pans and cooking, you might say something like "the best stainless steel frying pan for frying fish is…"
Now a long phrase like that might be something that you would write entirely naturally in the course of writing about cooking and frying pans. But is also something that people might use as a question when typing a search in Google. If I wanted to know what frying pan I should buy for frying fish, I might type into the Google search box “best frying pan for frying fish". Now that particular phrase is probably not something that hundreds or thousands of people would search for every month, but is also something that is unlikely to appear in many other documents on the Internet. Because it is unique it should be easy to rank for.
Related keywords
When writing your hub you also want to include as many related words to your keyword as possible. Now don't go overboard and just try to do this naturally. Just be sensible, and let them appear as they will. So if I was writing about frying pans, I might try to include stainless steel frying pans, as well as aluminium frying pans and Teflon-coated frying pans. All of these are words that are related to your main search term. In writing your article you want to be sure to include your main search term at least once in the title of your hub. You also wanted it to appear naturally a few times throughout the article. Once again, don't go overboard and overdo it. But just make appear a few times and if possible once in one of the sub-headings that you can put on top of your text boxes in Hubpages.

The next thing you want to do is try to make some of these related keywords (stainless steel frying pans, for instance) appear in the subheadings on top of some of your text boxes. You also want to take as many of these keywords as you can and put them into the tags on the side of your article. I sound like I'm repeating myself, but once again don't overdo it. Google hates keyword stuffing and if you put too many words stuffed into the tags of your article or too many words repeated in your main article to the extent that looks unnatural then Google will penalised the article.

Finish writing the article? Good. Because in the next instalment of the definitive guide to making money on Hubpages I’ll talk about how to monetise your Hubs.

If you haven't signed up yet you can do so with this link:

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