keyword research

So you want to make money with Hubpages

There have been a lot of articles written on hubpages about how to make money with hubpages, so this article is in response to Jimmythejock and his recent resource article. This article is not an all inclusive guide on how to make money with hubpages, it only covers the one aspect that most people either leave out completely or feel takes too much effort to bother with. Keyword research is the most important thing that you can possibly do before sitting down to write an article. It really only takes a few minutes and will pay off in spades if you take the time to do it right. But before I get into how to do keyword research I want to take just a moment to explain why it is so important, and why it will pay off in the end. But I also want you to know that this is a comprehensive step by step guide that you won’t find elsewhere, other people will tell you about the website to use and leave it to you to figure out how to do the research. Which really isn’t very helpful at all for a beginner, or an old pro who has never bothered.

Starting with the end in mind is what you always do first. Let’s say for instance that you would like to eventually have a website that is all about photography, then you will want your website to rank in the top ten at google.com for the word photography. What you might think you need to do is set up a website with photography in the name like brendasgaragephotographyclass.com, having photography in the name does help but isn’t always necessary. If you can afford a shorter name then go for the shortest generic name you can afford, if you can’t afford a good generic then get something with photography in the name. Now you might also think that in order to rank well for the keyword photography then you should go out and get thousands of links to you site with photography as the anchor text. Well that is one way or you can find 25 good keyphrases that are related to photography and build your own quality links using the power of hubpages.

Before I go any further, you may be wondering what does any of this have to do with making money with hubpages? Well even if you don’t want to have your own website (you should) then keyword research will help you find phrases that will rank well on the search engines and get you more traffic to your hubs. More traffic from search engines means mo money in your pocket. It is the traffic from search engines that will actually click on your ads not the traffic from your fans at hubpages. Although that does not include me. I click on ads that interest me for a couple of reasons, first to see what they are selling because I love to spend money, but also because I know that it helps out other struggling writers and webmaster. I have read about many people here at hubpages that don’t click on ads on purpose, I really don’t understand the logic behind it because that is exactly what they want other people to do for them. Going out of your way to not click on ads really defeats the entire purpose of people advertising anyway. Believe me when I tell you that the advertisers want you to click on their ads, I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads and would much rather have someone click on an ad then to find the URL and type it into the address bar. When you click an ad the traffic is traceable and you can tell where your efforts are paying off, when it is a random type in then the visitor is dumped from the statistics and they can’t trace the money back to a source. I digress again. So now on with the keyword research that is going to help you make money with hubpages.

Then first thing I am going to tell you about is the finest free keyword tool that has been made to date. It is a part of wordtracker.com that very few people know about and if I were charging for this information, this tool would be worth the price of admission by itself. The address is http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/ and the tool, while amazing is still very inaccurate but I will tell you how to compensate for the inaccuracies. The reason that the tool is inaccurate is that it makes an assumption about a specific keyword and the amount of traffic that it generates, so putting in data that wasn’t accurate to start with throws the tool off. But the relation of the data to the amount of competition is the main thing that we will be looking at. Check out the video below that I did about looking up photography using the keyword tool and it will explain how and why it is important.

Like I said in the video it is also important to look at the sites that rank on the first page of the search engines to see how good or bad your competition is. One of the big advantages you have is that you are using a trusted site in hubpages that gets great “traction” in google.com so you don’t need to worry about your competition as much as usual. Hubpages is a strong brand that will help you rank well for any keywords you choose.

Now that you have picked out your keywords and written a great article, you also need to build some links to your article to boost its authority. I highly recommend using squidoo.com and peoplefuel.com to do that. That means that you get to write 2 more articles just like the one you just wrote, DON’T use the same article, and put them up at both places linking back to your hubpages article. I know it sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it. I never said it was going to be easy did I? The good thing is that you will make money at both of those places just like hubpages, but you will make more at hubpages, because of a number of things that are hard to explain so I will just say click through percentage and ad placement. If that is too much work for you there are a couple of other tricks you can use to boost the rankings of your hubs.

First, you should be an active participant of hubpages. There are a few reasons to avoid the forums which I won’t get into, but there are other ways to participate that will help your rankings and build PR for your profile and subsequently your hubs. Find articles that other people have written that interest you, read them and comment on them. That will build internal links to your profile where you can link to your hubs and build their PR. It sounds complicated but it just means being a part of a community with some really fun and interesting people. Secondly use social book marking places like stumbleupon.com and dig.com to bookmark your hubs, which takes very little effort and will pay off in traffic and ranking. I have to caution you not to use those sites solely for that purpose or you run the risk of being banned. If you use them then be an active participant of those sites also.

And just a few final words on the subject. As I said before, start with an end in mind or you run the risk of spending a lot of time writing articles just for practice, while it may be fun for some it is more fun to actually make money off of the hard work that you do every day. Without proper linking technique you will also be wasting your time in choosing and writing specific keyword rich articles. It is pretty basic stuff but most people forget or just don’t know how to link correctly. Take a look at this html linking article if you have any questions about proper linking. At lastly if you are interested in starting your own blog or website then check out create a blog for great 100% free information about how to start your own blog the right way. You have to register at create a blog to see the content but with the information there you should be able to get started toward your goals.

Special thanks go out to Jimmy for motivating me to actually write this hub that so may people have been asking me for. Make sure you check out his hub and join his fan club, the poor lonely guy could use more than the 3 fans he has now.