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EVER HEARD OF HUBPAGES?

If you haven’t, you are missing out on a website that offers you the chance to make some serious money – if you know how to use it properly.

HubPages was often compared to Squidoo (now engulfed by HubPages), but while the two do have similarities, they are also very different in many ways. And if you know and understand what those differences are, you can look forward to making the most of HubPages.

That’s exactly what we’ll be doing in this report. We’ll be taking a look at the various ways you can use HubPages to make money and also how to use it to earn more from whatever business you may already have.

So let’s get started!

FIRST OF ALL, WHAT EXACTLY IS HUBPAGES?

HubPages is a website that contains lots of different pages – or hubs – that have been created by ‘hubbers.’ That’s the name given to the members of the site, which you can join completely free of charge. That means it is a great place to get some free advertising, since you never have to pay for anything here, and hubs can pick up some good traffic if you put some work into them.

And the good news is that you can write about virtually anything you like. What that means is that there are lots of ways that you can make money from HubPages, as we’ll soon see.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD HUB?

If you know the answer to this, you will find it much easier to create great hubs that are enjoyed by lots of other people. And the answer isn’t a huge secret either!
The basis of each and every hub is information. Some hubs are created purely for enjoyment by their creators, but for our purposes, we want to know how to create a good hub that will also make us money.

Now the most common mistake that a lot of people make is to start trying to sell the minute they create a hub. It sounds like reverse psychology I know, but if you go in and start promoting something right from the start, you will turn people off. You might also get booted off the site for abusing it, so make sure you don’t just jump in and get started selling your products or services right away. Understand what you can and can’t do first.

Your number one aim should always be to help people. In fact, don’t think of your intended audience as potential customers at all! Figure out what they want to know about and make sure you give it to them. THEN, and only then, should you get your link in and make your sales pitch.

Good hubs are also well written and well organized. If you start browsing around the site, you will see that a good number of hubs have sub-headings in them. This helps to guide the eye down the page and makes the content easier and more pleasant to read. The same goes for bullet points and other ways of breaking up your content.

You might wonder why all this is necessary. Well, the easier you make it for people to read and digest your content, the more likely they are to stick with it until the end. And that means there is a greater chance that they will buy something or click through to your website as a result.

You should think of a hub as being an article. Many people actually do write their hubs offline as an article in Notepad and then transfer it to HubPages to publish it. Don’t write less than 500 words if you want to write something that is worth reading. Many hubs are a lot longer.

THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING A FAN BASE

If you take a look at any hub on HubPages, you will notice that the author has an info box on the right hand side. This will tell you what their score is (i.e. how popular they are), how many hubs they have made, and most importantly, how many fans they have.

You need to do just one thing to start building a fan base of your own and that’s to build great hubs on a regular basis. The more you can build, the better, but even one or two a week will start to get your name known around the site.

What’s more, once someone becomes your fan, they can receive an email notification every time you publish a new hub. That means more instant traffic for you and an even better chance of making money.

HubPages also has a forum that you can become a part of. Participating here is another great way of becoming better known on the site. People will see your name popping up and they will be curious to see what hubs you have written. And of course, the more experience you get, the better known and the better regarded you will be.

In short, the more you interact with the website, the better your chances are of becoming a recognizable and well-respected force on HubPages.

MAKING MONEY WITH HUBPAGES –THE EASY WAY

Okay, so let’s start to explore how you can make money with this website. There are two ways to do it; the way I am about to show you is the most basic way that you can get started with straightaway. This applies even if you don’t have your own business or you aren’t involved with any affiliate programs.

When you have an account with HubPages and you have signed in, you will see a number of options along the top of the page. Click on ‘My Account’ and wait for the next page to load.

When it does, you’ll see a gray box on the right-hand side. There is an option in there under the ‘Your Account’ heading called “Affiliate Settings.” This will reveal that there are four built-in ways to earn money directly from your hubs.

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DIFFERENT PATHS TO MAKE MONEY WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

When people talk about making money with affiliate marketing, they think about signing up as a publisher and trying to get people to pay them for advertising on their sites. That's definitely one way to make money with affiliate marketing, but it's not the only way! You can make money with affiliate marketing as a publisher, an advertiser, or as an owner of an affiliate marketing network. You don't even have to limit the paths you take. You can try all three!

MAKING MONEY AS A PUBLISHER

This path is the most downtrodden, but very few people explore all the potential to make money, even here. That's because most people are creatures of habit. They find one way to do something, and they never venture from that path, even when they find that the income isn't what they had hoped it would be. The fact is that if you limit yourself to just one advertiser, like Google, you won't be able to really explore the potential for affiliate marketing models that might work better with your niche audience.

So, while we are going to tell you that you can make money using Google Adsense, it's not the only advertising network out there. You can spend a lot of time trying to publish content that gets search engines to serve up high-prized ads on your site, and researching keywords to make campaigns that target high-paying ones. Or you can explore a few other places like Adbrite.com or independent affiliates at different affiliate banks who might give you a bigger return on your investment of time.

The key is not to join the biggest network out there, it's to understand your niche and your audience. To make money as a publisher of other people's affiliate offerings, your job is to match up your audiences wants and needs to the offerings that best meet them. So, you don't necessarily have to know a thing about keywords to get started being a publisher of affiliate offerings, but you do have to know what your audience will buy.

So, let's assume you have a website about winter sports. You can sign up for different affiliate programs that offer everything from winter sports equipment to exciting vacations at mountain resorts. All you have to do is locate those offers and publish them on your site and collect a commission. For that, you'll have to
probably join an affiliate bank so that you can find offers within your category and get started fairly quickly. We'll go over those a little later in this report.

MAKING MONEY AS AN ADVERTISER

Okay, now why would advertisers pay you to publish, if there wasn't money in it for themselves? Obviously, the returns can be a whole lot higher for the advertiser than the publisher, but most people don't figure that out when they think about making money with affiliate advertising. They think that affiliate advertising means they are the publishing affiliate partner, not the advertising partner.

Well, it can pay very well to be an affiliate advertiser who has created an affiliate program for their products and services. For one, you aren't paying a team of sales people to market your products without getting some results, whether it is more online exposure, a lead, or a sale. The best ways right now to make money for advertisers is to use a “cost-per-action” affiliate program that only pays publishers if a lead or a sale is completed. That way, you can measure the return on your investment in a quantifiable way.

For that, you will have to have enough credibility to be accepted into a CPA network and also enough upfront cash to pay for any fees associated with the program. While the returns for setting up an affiliate program as an advertiser are more than as a publisher, it also takes more money to start. So, that's why many people don't realize that there is money in advertising, otherwise, people wouldn't be doing it, but it does cost more to get off the ground.

MAKING MONEY AS A NETWORK OWNER

Let's say you are very technically savvy, have quite a bit of money to invest, and want to make some good money? Why not develop your own affiliate network. You will have to get a site up and running, and hire people to maintain it and do customer service, but you will also get to charge advertisers a 20 to 30% transaction fee in some cases. Or, you can use a model that has them pay a setup and transaction fee. As long as you have the pull to bring in both advertisers and publishers, you can set up your own profitable network and just enroll people into your program. Set up tools to track the affiliates and reports to help optimize programs. Hire affiliate managers who can manage the accounts too. As long as your advertisers are making money, you'll make money from their enrollments too.

WHAT YOU NEED TO GETTO MAKE MONEY ON THE THREE PATHS

There are really only three things that are important, whether you are a publisher, an advertiser, or a network owner. The issue is how to successfully market some product or service online and for that you need to get the three following things to happen:

• High Level Of Traffic As a publisher, you will want high levels of traffic coming to your offerings and doing the action necessary to collect a commission. As an advertiser, you want high levels of traffic too, so that you can make leads and sales. As a network owner, the more traffic your members get, the better odds that they will succeed and you can keep charging enrollment fees.

• Hot Niches It doesn't matter how much traffic you get, if what you are selling isn't interesting to a large number of people. You want to exploit the hot niches that interest a wide number of people and are profitable for you. It makes no difference whether you are an advertiser, a publisher, or a network owner. You have to start with a large amount of demand in the market to make it worthwhile to invest the time and effort to advertise products and services in that niche.

• Matching Demographics So, now you know, you can't make money without traffic or a market demand. What if you have great traffic, a hot niche of products and services, and the people aren't buying? It's because the demographics of the traffic have to match the niche. Once you have a match, the formula of traffic plus demand plus interested buyer yields you a nice profit.

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If you want to sell anything online, it’s actually not all that hard. I know that this is kind of a surprise to a lot of people. Some affiliate marketers who have been struggling would swear up and down that making sales online is nearly impossible.

Well, with the right traffic and the right sales materials, you are bound to generate sales from time to time. Closing a sale is not the problem. Generating consistent, high-value sales, that's the issue. Don't confuse the two.

Sadly, even if you are able to master the art of online sales, you may still continue to struggle. I understand that this is better than not generating any sales at all, but if you put in a lot of time, effort, and energy into generating online sales only to settle for a low middling mount, you're wasting your time. That’s the bottom line. As the old saying goes, “Either you go big or you go home.”

The name of the game when it comes to online sales success is return on effort. You heard that right. You’ve probably heard of the phrase “return on investment” millions of times before. Return on effort works on the same principle, but there is a slight difference.

With return on investment, you are trying to invest as little money as possible while getting as much return as you can. Pretty straightforward, very simple concept.

Similarly, if you're going to invest your time, attention, and focus in something, shouldn't you expect maximum rewards as well? This is the whole concept behind return on effort.

If you work for yourself, it's very easy to work around the clock for chump change. Believe me, I’ve done it. It's not pretty. Sure, you’re passionate about what you do. Oftentimes, it doesn't even feel like you're working. However, let me tell you, if you're going to invest your time, effort, and precious energy into something, don't you deserve to get the biggest reward out of all that investment?

Thankfully, there is a way out. You don't have to stick to the grind. You don't have to put in all these hours away from your loved ones just so you can put food on the table.

Using the high ticket sales secrets that I’m going to share with you in this book, you will learn how to maximize the return that you get for all your efforts. It is not rocket science. It all boils down to being at the right place, talking about the right things at the right time with the right people.

If you're able to line all those up, then you will get all the best results. At first, it may seem like this is very hard to set up. You only need to look at how high ticket sales people do it. When they started off, they were no better than you. In fact, in many cases, they knew less than you. Now, here they are, generating seven or even eightfigure annual sales. How do they do it? It all boils down to high ticket sales.

Make Sure You're in the Right Niche

Any discussion of high-ticket sales marketing must first begin with niche selection. Get this wrong and you are going to waste your time, effort and money.

This is non-negotiable. If you make a mistake with the niche that you pick to build your business on, you're going to fail. The truth is, not all niches pay the same.

Niches are essentially subject matter categories involving your target audience’s problems, needs, or interests. These are different subjects and they attract different audiences. Some audiences are willing to pay a lot of money. Other audiences are not as willing.

Even within the high paying audiences, there is a question of timing. There are certain products and service categories that compel people to spend a lot of money right away.

Unfortunately, these are relatively few. These are comparatively few when you line them up with all the other niches out there.

Ideally, this is where you should be. You should look for niches that pay really well, and people need to order merchandise or services almost immediately.

The Reality: Most Niches Pay Poorly

There, I said it. Most niches don't pay all that well.

Well, this might rub you the wrong way. You might tell me that when you check Google's Keyword Planner tool, you notice that a lot of niches that you're interested in actually command fairly high PPC (Pay Per Click) figures.

My answer is, "Look closer."

If you pay attention to those figures, it turns out that, in many cases, for people to click on an ad that pays that much, they must be really, really interested already. In other words, they have been prequalified and they are ready to buy.

That's usually not the case. Usually, people are interested in a wide range of topics, but they're not ready to buy.

They're ready to do a lot of research, they don't have a problem with comparing different sources of information, but when it comes to buying, they're not quite there.

This is why I can say, with utmost confidence, that most niches pay poorly when you look at immediacy.

It's not enough that people may pay good money for a particular range of merchandise or a particular type of service. That's not the issue.

The issue is how willing they are to pay.

Don't Build Your House on Sand

To make matters worse, the best niches (high pay, high demand) tend to get saturated very quickly. It's easy to see why.

You need to build your business on a solid foundation.

This means that your target niche must be lucrative enough and must have a high sense of buyer urgency. Otherwise, you are building your house on sand. You can build tons of these and end up making very little money.

Unless you want to play the volume game, where you are cranking out hundreds of websites, and each of these websites make, at best, a couple of dollars a day, you're going to have to be more careful about niche selection.

You have to be systematic and methodical regarding the type of business you build and the platform you choose to convert your traffic. You also have to be systematic about getting the right kind of traffic and qualifying it so it is more likely to convert. All of this boils down to selecting the right niche.

You Must Target the Right Client

In any kind of market, there will always be audience segmentation.

It's easy to think that just because you are targeting insurance as a niche, you can automatically assume you will make a lot of money.

On the surface, this seems very reasonable. After all, when you go to Google Keyword Planner tool and load up all sorts of insurance-related keywords, you get really high figures.

It's not uncommon for an insurance-related term to pay $30 or more per click. What's not to love? But here's the problem. That market has many segments.

Not everybody who looks for insurance online is ready to buy. Not everybody who is interested in buying an insurance policy is willing to pay top dollar.

In fact, in many cases, a lot of people looking for insurance would rather pay the least amount of money or take out the cheapest type of policy possible. Welcome to the world of market segmentation.

Audiences, in what seem like lucrative niches, have different needs. They tend to segment themselves.

There are people who are willing to pay top dollar immediately. There are people who are willing to pay top dollar later on. There are people who are not willing to pay market rates and are always looking for a bargain, but they are willing to buy now. Finally, there are people who are very cheap and are willing to wait.

Which of these audience members would it make sense for you to chase? This is not rocket science. It should be quite obvious.

Always Be Aware of the Differences Between Your Target Customers

Just because people are interested in the high value niche you are targeting, it doesn't mean that all your visitors will convert. If this is your assumption, I would not be surprised if you continue to struggle.

You're setting yourself up for a disappointment. You have to be aware of the differences between your audience members.