Making Money Online

Making money online is quite easy really. You can post articles on HubPages, Squidoo or your blog and generate advertising revenue. You can become an affiliate marketer  for companies like Amazon, Go Daddy, Host Gator or Zazzle.com. You can design products and sell them to customers through zazzle.com and Cafepress. Or you can sell your items through Amazon , eBay and Bonanza or Etsy.

All these places allow you to sell words or goods. Making money online is pretty easy if you can turn a few ideas into cash. Sell old unwanted clothes and write a line or two of good coherent text. Money will come wandering to your door.

Wandering to your door? Well yes for a while cash does just seem to wander to your door. It comes a penny or a dollar at a time. For weeks, for months and often for years.

I have been online now for several years. I began on mailing lists back in the late 1990's. I began to create work as a hobby. This continued for several years, I only began to make real efforts in 2009 to make any real money. It wasn't until late in 2012 that my income at least matched that of my day job.

That online income has been up and down this year. The early months were tough. My online income fell drastically, the pennies wandered up to my door but the dollars walked right on by. As Zazzle income fell, Amazon and Yahoo! voices stepped up. Now Zazzle income is rising again and it looks like June 2013 could see online income could come to levels to match my day job income again.

Online income at this stage is far too fragile to risk giving up a day job, but so I double my monthly income some months. That;s a nice bonus.

Making some money online is so easy. I'd defy you not to be able to begin generating cash today if you use the right services. Generating consistant cash income is the hard part. I have not quite mastered that just yet. But I will. I will and I will share my findings with you.

California State and Cities Mug by Bretsuki
Create a unique personalize coffee mug from zazzle.com.

Should You Consider a Blog?

In the Questions and Answers section on HubPages and also on several forums, the questions of creating your own blog is an evergreen topic.

For my two pennies worth there are a few good reasons to have a blog as opposed to writing for HubPages.

1. You have full Editorial Control: If you are writing on your own blog you are not tied to the limitations of HubPages. You can post what you want, within reasonable boundaries, most hosting services have rules on what canbe posted on sites but they are very unlikely to pull your content because you have been idle for a few weeks.

2. Hosted Blogs are very inexpensive these days. A blog on Go Daddy or Host Gator can be had for about $6 per month.

3. You can monetize your own blog and NOT share your income with HubPages. When you publish on HubPages all ad revenue and revenue created by people viewing your work is shared with HubPages. Also items sold on your Amazon and eBay links are shared with HubPages. Fine you are happy sharing your revenue for free hosting, but revenue sharing is not really free, and if you are not a member of Google AdSense scheme you are giving your revenue to HubPages for free.

Having your own blog may not give you access to Google AdSense, but there are other cash per click options out there who might be more suitable fir your content.

4. You are responsible for your own reputation. As HubPages becomes seen as a place for poor content and marketers and spam your reputation becomes tarnished. With your own blog, you are the controller of your own public persona. You can keep your own reputation squeeky clean, and wholesome.

Ask yourself if you may reach a wider audience and make more money, being your own independent blogger.

It does take some time, two or three years to start to build a strong blog, so its not for everyone, with perseverance though blogging can be much more satisfying, publishing for yourself rather than for another organization like HubPages.

Has HubPages Begun to look Tired?

For a few weeks now I have been going to HubPages just that little less often.

There was a time when I would spend several hours on HubPages, writing hubs, answering questions and working hard.

Recently however it seems that HubPages has lost a little of its glitter.

They are scrapping capsules that I have used for years.

They are putting links on my hubs to articles that are poorly written and have no real link to my subject.

It seems that  HubPages has somehow lost its way.

Questions now just revolve around one subject.  I just logged in and found 18 questions on the hot questions page posted by one person. The questions also involved requests for peoples opinions on certain occupations in Seattle.  Of course these may be genuine questions, I am tempted to think that someone is spamming the questions and answers board with hot keywords so as to grab advertising revenue from Google.

Come on people, this is an abuse of the system. It is dragging down the value of HubPages and we all suffer.

Of late I have seen a little recovery of my view rates on HubPages, but the views on my blogs are through the roof.

OK I accept that we are also at the end of football season here in the U.S. and I do expect a drop in views on big game days, but to have view counters move at a snails pace on HubPages on non game days as my view counters click as regularly as my old grandads clock on non game day blog pages. Well something is rotten in the state of HubPages.

We'll See a Fall in views on Sunday January 20 and February 3, 2013

I will now predict a fall in views for most Hubbers on Sunday January 20 and February 3, 2013.

Most of you who live in the U.S. will know and expect the same. These are the dates of the NFL Conference Championships and Superbowl Sunday.

For those of you who live outside the US, you will possibly not know the gravity of these two solemn occassions.

This coming Sunday January 20, sees the two Football Conferences seasons  come to an end.

The AFC Championship will be between San Francisco 49ers at  Atlanta Falcons and the NFC Conference Championship will be Baltimore Ravens at New England Patriots.

Each of the games could last up to four hours on television, each game only lasts 60 minutes itself but fifteen minuts of "game time" may be twenty or thirty minutes of real time, add in all the advertisements and commentary. The games are not played simultaneously, so Americans can see both games in full, basically taking up to eight hours of Sunday out of many peoples computer time.

For this reason the United States can be said to close down for the duration of the games.

The winners of this next Sundays two games will then go on to the Superbowl in New Orleans on February 3, 2013.

The Superbowl is the World Championship of American Football, and Superbowl Sunday is a very big deal which almost every American sees as a right to party.

So for those of you beyond the shores of the US mark these dates well. The fall of views on these two days is not due to Google changing an algorithm, HubPages are not skimming off viewers just to take your count down, the sky is not falling and no end of the world scenario is being played out.

Americans are just partying and enjoying a great game of football.

We'll be back at our computers on Monday as usual.

Broaden Your Horizons

The world of internet publishing is a fickle friend. What with search engine tweaks and constantly rising and falling viewing figures.

The world of community pages such as HubPages is always a dangerous one. At any moment the owners of the community site can throw a spanner into the works and blow all your hard work away.

One tweak of their algorhytm and you are history in search engine parlance.

So for this reason I would say keep as many irons in the fire as you possibly can.  Don't throw away HubPages but spread out to other sites. Blog for yourself, maybe move into online retailing opening up affilate links to sites such as zazzle.com, cafepress.com and godaddy.com.

Affilliate sites pay some good referal bonuses and with sites like zazzle and cafepress you don't even need to produce designs yourself these days you link to a certain keyword product list and bang you can start earning cash without having to make anything.

If you need to write, try squidoo.com too or List my 5.com they are both different from HubPages but they offer you an outlet and a chance of marketing your work if any one of the sites you use botches their search engine standing.

HubPages to End RSS Feed Capsule

At the begining of February, 2013, HubPages will be retiring the RSS feed capsule in our hubs.

Personally I will be upset to see this. Much of my traffic here on Blogger comes from those RSS feeds through my hubs.

Since I don't get much traffic flow from HubPages where I have not included RSS feeds then I can see a future drop off in traffic to my blogs.

I guess it had to come. We all have to move with the times and things do change. It will be sad to see the RSS feed go though, they did carry information for several posts and it meant the spread of other blogs and past posts was available to a wider audience.

Anyway there are about eight weeks to prepare and I am looking at possible reductions of my blogging and focusing on other things in the coming year anyway.

More Promotional Hubs?

Is it just me finding them or are there a growing number of product promotional Hubs appearing?

This last week I have found hubs appearing that have been mere promotional tools for various products. By this I don't mean product reviews. I mean here is a link to this medication or this body product.

I am fearful that if HubPages is seen by marketers as a place to merely post product ads, then this will seriously affect HubPages reputation as a online arena for serious writing.

I would advocate that serious users of HubPages flag this sort of content and move to oust these marketers before they destroy our community.

Hubpages Tee Shirts

For the latest design in Hubpages shirts for Hubbers go to

Hubpages Tee Shirts

Google Searches or Links? Which bring You MORE Views?

We have all heard the cry "How do I get top ranking on Google searches?" Maybe you have even asked that very question yourself?

Well I know I used to ask that very question. I bought the books advising on Search Engine Optimization and How to promote your sites.

They were useful in that they talked about building links and creating an RSS Feed etc. But over the last year I have come to realise that Google search engine page location is not all it is made up to be.

I regulary look up my stats on my blog, they show some very interesting figures. Of all views only 3% come from Google searches.

1% come drom other search engines but a massive 96% come from posting links to places such as HubPages and Yahoo! Voices, The largest source at 70% of all traffic comes from HubPages and my RSS feeds there.

So that tells me that people who have read my content on HubPages are clicking through my RSS feed to come here.

OK So I don't get any revenue because I don't advertise on my blog. I don't mind that, this blog is to share information with you.

But in that there is opportunity for you. If you have a monetized blog, link it to your hubpage hubs on related subjects and you will gain traffic from people who already enjoy your style of writing.

Also link back to other hubs to drive traffic back there so you can benefit from your HubPages CPM revenue.

Remember. Google ranking is not the only way to gain traffic. But once you have your reader keep them reading your pages by linking to your own work when you can.

Be patient though. building a network takes time. You won't see a difference overnight, it has taken me one year so far, unless you hit a hot topic. The idea is to plan for the  long term. Then over time you will see a marked improvement in traffic.