The other day I wrote my first hub over at hubpages. A few hours later I checked to see if it was indexed and sure enough, it was. The next day I posted another hub, and to actually see how long it took to get indexed, I checked Google every minute or so until it popped up. This took a total of 16 minutes; check it out.

The second result – Intro to Ebay Arbitrage – is my hub, and you can see that I wrote it and posted it 16 minutes before that search.  That doesn’t do much for me right now, but it would if I qualified for dofollow links on Hubpages.

Dofollow on Hubpages

In order to combat spam, Hubpages has instated some thresholds that you, as an author, and your post must meet before your links become dofollow.  You hub (or individual article) has something called a Hub Score.  It is determined by things such as traffic, votes, length and quality of unique content.  This score must be above 50 in order for your Hubpage links to be dofollow.  As an author you have Hubber Score (you are a hubber), this score is calculated using community participation, frequency of hub posting, and quality of hubs.  This must be over 75 for the links on any of your hubs to be dofollow.  I just joined, but my hubber score is already above 60 because I guess Hubpages has decided I’m a swell guy.  The Ebay article has a hub score of 73.  As I delve deeper into the site, my Hubpage links will eventually qualify for dofollow status.  Since posts start out at a rating of 50, if you have the required Hubber Score, the speedy crawling of your hub will result in a crawling of your site, old or new.  This is useful for those of us with very few websites to link from when we’re initially trying to get indexed by Google.  You can simply write a relevant and related Hub, link it up, and let Google do the rest.  Side note: Hubpages only allows 2 links per article to any 1 domain, so keep that in mind.

So, to clarify; For your hubpage links to be dofollow you have to have an author Hubber Score of at least 75 AND the article itself must have a score of 50 or higher.  When that happens you’ll get all kinds of link love.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Well, this isn’t only about the Shoemoney System, but I’m now on a quest to try to outrank affiliate marketers and floggers for Shoemoney System and related terms like Shoemoney System Review and Is the Shoemoney System a Scam, etc.  Good luck, right?  They have experience and a head start.  I guess we’ll see how that pans out…

Anyway, the Shoemoney System has really taken a turn for the best.  My biggest complaint was that it was slow.  It was slow because they had included really basic stuff like account set-up and entire videos dedicated to definitions like “What is Affiliate Marketing?” within the course on the 3-day posting schedule.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t require 3 days to absorb the intricacies of setting up a Facebook account.  Well, as of Sunday, they took all that sort of supplementary material, released it all at once, and put it in its own section called “Getting Started.”  There’s 30 new videos in there, and now the core content will be all the real money making content that people have been hoping for.  They also sped up the releases last week, giving us 4 new core videos dealing with making money on eBay with arbitrage.  Ebay arbitrage is nothing new, and is something I vaguely knew about but never bothered to pursue information on it.  All in all it seems pretty interesting, and I spent a few hours this weekend trying to find arbitrage opportunities (with little luck, mind you).  I am hoping the Shoemoney System gets into a little more detail on how to find these opportunities.  That’s really all I have about the Shoemoney System right now, so if that’s what you came for you might want to leave.  Now onto my little side projects…

In my last post I mentioned that I was giving Project Payday a try, and that I would give it it’s own post.  Well, much like the program itself, I can’t be bovvered to write an entire post about it.  I did indeed make 50 bucks from it (less several dollars for shipping the of a couple items), and it took me about 1.5 hours of work up front and maybe half an hour of follow up.  I thought about posting a screen shot for a larf because it’s only $50, but $25 an hour is not a terrible wage.  The problem is that this program is actual work.  I knew that going in, but man is it tedious as hell.  I have a day job, so what precious time I have outside of work I am using to pursue more long-term ways of producing passive income online.  If I didn’t have a job though I would definitely give this a deeper consideration.  I can see how more time and effort would bring in more money, and it’s real money deposited into your Paypal account, no B.S.  It’s really just too much of a pain in the ass, and time consuming for me to bother right now.  I guess this is where I toss you an affiliate link?  I’m even too lazy to do that.  Just type it into your url box if you want to check it out.  It’s free after you complete an offer which is probably also free or very cheap.

How are my efforts in newbie SEO going?  Remember that old blog that I was going to SEO rape? (Dear G, please rank me for SEO rape.  Thanks.)  Well I went through and tweaked urls, tags, meta info, and keywords within posts (without overdoing things).  After that I set about creating a new post related to that term I was ranked #10 for in Google.  Then I wrote another post on the same subject and spread it throughout the internets, making sure I included a backlink to my site.  After my small amount of effort, as of this morning, I am number 1 for that term.  I’ll have to add some backlinks to really solidify my place there, but the scrapers have been doing a pretty decent job of that themselves.  That’s how I know I’ve made it.  I have scrapers.  What is rather vexing though, is that I thought I’d set up double-indexing properly.  What’s better than being in spot #1?  Being in 1 AND 2.  But I’m only holding spot 1 at the moment.  The odd thing is, the new post actually uses the plural, and a plural search finds that post at position 13 and it actually IS double indexed with the original (spot 1) post, so I’m 13 and 14 there.  Weird.  I imagine Google will sort that out eventually, we’ll see.

I only want to briefly touch on that keyword I was super excited about before.  After acquiring a better understanding of keyword analysis, I have found that it is indeed a great candidate for a niche site.  The competition is harder than I had imagine at first, but it’s doable.  I don’t have much to say about it right now though because it has yet to be indexed by G.  I’m going to write some more articles, and get some more backlinks and go back at G and say “Howyalikemenow!”  Google will probably continue to hate.

The Shoemoney System is slow, as I mentioned previously, and as a result I went in search of some real money making information.  I came across Grizzly’s blog (http://makemoneyonlineforbeginners.blogspot.com – he doesn’t need me linking to him in every post) and began really learning what it takes to make money online.  I then took some very basic SEO information I learned from reading his site and applied it to some dusty old blog I have that I haven’t touched in many months. It’s a PR 2 in a fairly competitive/high paying niche.

That blog gets several random Googlers a day.  Every once in a while I check to see where they’re coming from and it’s almost always this one keyword phrase.  The key phrase wasn’t something I targeted, but I do have two posts about this phrase and it seems to be searched for fairly frequently.  Using the advice provided in Grizzly’s blog, I shuffled some words around, and sprinkled the keyword a little more liberally through the post, and then I linked the two posts.  Low-and-behold the post jumped one spot in the SERPS.  Big deal, one spot, right?  Well that one spot was from 11 to 10.  This key phrase has had me planted solidly in spot 11 for months on end and with a little SEO tweaking I was on the front page of Google for a major key phrase in my niche.  I’ve already noticed a little upswing in the traffic.  In addition, I received a couple long-tails related to this key phrase.  I always check my long tails, and I’ve never been higher than position 5 or so.  Then yesterday I see a pretty generic long-tail search for [key phrase] [different niche key phrase] landed me in position #1 on Google.  I’ve never been in position 1 for anything but my blog title.  It’s pretty damned exciting to me that such a small change could have a significant impact.  Imagine what would happen if I really went at it with this site… I haven’t slept since I discovered this, by the way.  This really sparked my thirst for more knowledge on the subject.  I’m on hyper-focus overdrive.  When I get into this mode I tend to ignore general animalistic needs (ie eating, showing, sleep, various bodily functions) until I arrive at some sort of conclusion, plateau, or just pass out.  It’s quite unhealthy, really.

Anyway, back to the SEO rape of my old blog.  Luckily my small readership has long since abandoned that blog much like I had.  There will be no one to offend when I strip it of its pretty theme, change all the goofball reader-attracting titles, and bury the pictures deep into the posts, below the fold, if not remove them entirely.  The bounce rate on my search traffic is a low 60% and I need to change that.

Now that I have some idea of what I’m doing I’m aiming for the biggest keyword in my niche; a keyword that I am certain will take at least a year to even get near page 1.  But first things first.  I need to rank that related key phrase at position 1 in Google.  I’m going to pull it up from position 10 by getting backlinks.  I’ll start by writing a new post that is perfectly optimized for this keyword and then I’ll modify the article a bit and submit it to GoArticles.com and link that back to my new article.  I won’t have to do much to get this word into position 1.  If that doesn’t do it, then I will work on getting links from Squido, Hubpages, etc.  I’ll add new links sporadically for a week or two.  That should do the trick.  I don’t really know though, since this is my first time trying this.  Once I get that keyword phrase to position 1, I will start tackling long-tails related to my main keyword.  I don’t plan on putting much effort into that blog, but I do want to build it up as an authority for the profitable Adsense traffic.

What I really want to pour a bit of effort into is building new niche sites for adsense and affiliate sales.  I actually had a real “Eureka” moment while in the shower this morning (I begrudgingly pulled myself away from my studies to do this).  I had narrowed my ideas for a first attempt at niche blogging to a fairly broad niche. In the shower I got to thinking about whether or not I should start with the broad keyword, or go for specific products.  Say, for example, golf.  You could write a niche blog about golf, or golf gear, or better still (I think) golf balls, golf clubs, etc.  I was listing the different possible type of products I could use and one hit me like lightning.  I walked right out of the shower, mid-wash, dried my hands, and went to the laptop to do some research.  I am pretty excited by what I found.  I found that the keyword (product) I wanted to key in on had 100k searches a month according to Google.  The plural, another 15k and a side keyword + main keyword, another few thousand.  I checked Blogspot.  Keyword, taken; plural keyword, taken; keyword + side keyword is available.  Awesome.  The side keyword also happens to start with “s” so you grab the plural in there too.

Upon searching the keyword in Google I get less than 300k websites.  For 100k searches…  Things are looking good. I take a look at my competition; wikipedia, a myspace band page that happens to use this product as their band name… and random joe-shmoe sites that happen to mention it in passing.  No real backlinking anywhere to be seen.  Good lord, this is looking too good to be true.  I check the CPC, and it’s showing an average of about $.75 – not bad.  I’m both excited and worried at this point.  Why hasn’t anyone else noticed this?  Am I reading the data wrong here?  It looks like a huge imbalance to me and one I can easily capitalize on.  It’s a pretty obscure product and the people who would know about it probably aren’t into SEO, but people are definitely searching for it.  And people are willing to pay to find those searchers.  I guess this is where I come in.  We’ll see how it goes.

One a final note, Grizzly promotes a product on his site called Project Payday.  It’s free to join and involves filling out incentivized freebie offers (people pay you to fill out free trial offers and what not so they can get cash or a prize).  Not only is it free, they garauntee that if you follow their steps and don’t make $50 they will pay you $100.  I’ll be getting my first $50 tomorrow, but I’ll talk more about that in another post.

Shoemoney talked about speeding up the system and it looks like he is – 4 videos coming out this week.  Oddly enough, todays video actually talked about arbitrage and how incentivized freebie offers are a form of arbitrage.  Weird timing again for a Shoemoney System video.

But for those keeping score at home:  Shoemoney System – $1 ; Project Payday – $50.