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Every business is now realizing the important role of Pinterest marketing which will get high-quality traffic as well as more exposure for the products very quickly. There is enough skepticism whether Pinterest will manage to generate the buzz or just fall in the category of the social networking sites that puff up and then fizz out.

It’s quite safe to conclude that Pinterest can play a very influential role for the business than what Twitter or Facebook may have. Pinterest must not be an alternative promoting strategy but must be a mandatory one. So, how can you get high quality traffic by using Pinterest marketing?

You just start figuring out what you have to promote. It’s essential to understand the difference between Pinterest and other social networking websites in order to craft this idea. Twitter has some restrictions on the content that you post. Though there are text links and the extenders that inculcate a tweet, the basic concept of marketing the posts will work well on the platform for updates. You can tweet your update for the product and the related news.

Get Good Traffic to Your Business

With Pinterest, the marketing strategy needs to be highly diverse. It can be customer centric, product centric and many other types. Pinterest offers more than what you can enjoy on Facebook. For instance, you can create a Facebook page which will be available for people to ‘like’ and to comment as well as to provide some other feedback, but you cannot reach further than that.

Pinterest marketing will give you the opportunity to take the pin boards and the pins across the people that you want to target. In this way, you can get the targeted audience, and also the high-quality traffic which generates sales. If you want to market your fashion brand it will definitely reap more benefits if the followers of the pins and boards are concerned about fashion, and not just ‘like’ the page randomly.

Pinterest marketing must be juxtaposed with Facebook and Twitter marketing strategies. The platforms are very different. Pinterest has a specific approach. Just don’t create a page for the business. Instead,focus on a specific product. For instance, a mobile manufacturer may want to create a board for the specific mobile phone model. So,he can put some of the interesting pins for the viewers in order to share the interest. This way he can get high-quality traffic in the easiest and fastest way.

Increase Brand Awareness

You do not have to create the content which you pin on Pinterest. In order to help position yourself as the authority in the field, you can use combination of sources to ensure the boards contain useful and accurate information. You can pin relevant and helpful resources. Your followers will think of the account for reliable information about the subject. You have to continue to build trust that will increase customer loyalty from the brand advocates.

This post covers affiliate marketing, including an introduction to this monetization technique, a review of the most popular implementations of affiliate marketing, and highlights of the top affiliate ad networks.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing has become a massive online industry over the past several years, emerging as both an effective way for marketers to sell their products and services and for publishers to monetize their audiences. Despite the popularity of affiliate marketing, many publishers still aren’t aware of exactly what affiliate marketing is or how it works. In some cases, these publishers are gatekeepers to an audience that could be very effectively monetized through affiliate marketing, meaning that they’re passing up an attractive revenue stream.

What It Is (And What It Isn’t)

At its heart, affiliate marketing is an online version of a sales structure that has been happening offline for decades. In its simplest form, it involves three primary components:

• A merchant, or someone with a product or service to sell


• An affiliate, or individual with the willingness and ability to sell that product to a particular audience


• A product or service

For each product the affiliate sells, they receive a portion of the proceeds from the merchant. It’s effectively an outsourced sales team. At its core, affiliate marketing is just that simple.

Offline Example

When I was a child, my school would have fundraisers that involved us going door-to-door to sell magazine subscriptions (magazines were glossy, soft-cover publications that would be mailed to a subscriber’s house on a weekly or monthly basis). I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was right in the middle of an affiliate marketing scheme. The magazine companies had products they wanted to sell. Schools had the ability to sell these products. And for every subscription sold, the magazine companies gave a slice of the proceeds to the school. (In this example, there’s actually a secondary later of affiliate marketing; the schools effectively outsource the actual selling to the students, in exchange for prizes that come with meeting certain sales figures.)

Online, affiliate marketing works generally the same way–except that the door-to-door sales approach is replaced by strategies more suited to a digital marketplace. In most instances, the affiliate marketing process works as follows:

1. Visitor to a publisher’s website clicks an “affiliate link” that takes them to a third party landing page


2. Visitor makes a purchase


3. Affiliate (publisher) gets a commission based on the value of the products and services purchased at the partner’s site

In other words, affiliate marketing is a kind of cost-per-action (CPA) advertising. The publisher makes nothing for highlighting a partner’s product on their site, and they make nothing for getting a visitor to click through to that site. The commission is only earned when a sale is completed.

Affiliate marketing is facilitated by “affiliate links” that allow merchants to track where their customers originate. In other words, it’s possible (and actually very simple) to know which revenue came from a specific affiliate and to compensate that affiliate accordingly.

Affiliate Marketing Economics

For publishers, the affiliate marketing revenue equation looks something like this (we’ve bolded the factors that are most within your control in optimization efforts):

Visitors x Click Rate (on Affiliate Links) = Referred Visitors

Referred Visitors x Conversion Rate x Average Purchase Price = Referral Revenue

Referral Revenue x Commission % = Affiliate Marketing Revenue

The success of an affiliate marketing strategy depends on how many referrals you’re able to send to merchant sites and how well these referrals convert (hence the bolding of these factors above). The more relevant and appealing the offers you highlight on your site, the higher both your click and conversion rates will likely be. If you’re running a travel blog, you probably don’t want to be featuring affiliate offers for baby products; replacing them with affiliate links to cruise packages would probably result in a higher referral rate.

For more, see the next section on Three Factors That Determine Affiliate Marketing Success.

Appeal of Affiliate Marketing (to Advertisers)

Advertisers love affiliate marketing because it involves minimal risk. If a sufficient margin is built in as compensation for the affiliate, it becomes impossible to lose money. That’s because affiliates are generally only paid when a sale is completed (i.e., a lead is converted). Advertisers (or “merchants”) pay nothing for leads that don’t convert.

Compare this to a CPM-based advertising campaign, where an advertiser pays a fixed amount to get a fixed number of ad impressions. (E.g., they may pay $10,000 to have 1 million ads shown on a publisher site, or a $10 CPM.) That campaign may be unsuccessful however if the ad impressions don’t convert into clicks and/or eventual sales.

Under most affiliate marketing arrangements, advertisers only pay for converted leads. There is basically no way they can lose money or get a negative ROI with this marketing method. Each new sale generated may have a thin margin after the affiliate payment is made, but it’s possible to structure in such a way that eliminates the possibility of a loss.

Some merchants will pay for actions that do not involve the transfer of money (i.e., something besides a sale of a product or service). For example, many merchants pay affiliates for referred visitors that ultimately sign up for a newsletter or other free product.

Appeal of Affiliate Marketing (to Publishers)

Affiliate marketing is very appealing to some publishers as well, because it can allow them to make considerably more money than they would under an alternative monetization strategy. Though the specifics of payout arrangements can vary a bit, in general affiliate payments will be significantly larger than the revenue generated from a click under a CPC pricing arrangement (or the effective CPC under a CPM arrangement). For high margin products such as e-books, for which there are no material costs, affiliate margins can be as 50% of the total purchase price. So it’s not unheard of for affiliates to generate $100 or much more from each referral.

To explain this a bit further, let’s consider a real life example. Below is a screenshot from AffiliateTip.com, a popular blog run by affiliate marketing guru Shawn Collins. In his right sidebar, he has a number of affiliate links for products such as HootSuite, Dropbox, and Bluehost:



Alternatively, there could be a traditional 160×600 display ad unit here. From a network, that ad unit might earn the published an effective CPM of $3 or $4. If the optimal affiliate marketing links are used instead, the payout can be much higher.

Let’s assume that the aggregate click rate on this affiliate link section is 1%, that 20% of referred visitors convert, and that the average commission is $10. For every 1,000 visitors:

• 10 click through to an affiliate link


• 2 end up purchasing something from a merchant


• $20 in revenue for the publisher is generated

The end result in this hypothetical is $20 in revenue–significantly more than the $3 or $4 that could be earned from traditional display advertising.

Of course, the revenue per visitor is highly dependent on the click and conversion rates. But the hypothetical above should illustrate that if you’re able to find quality, relevant affiliate offers, affiliate marketing can be a very attractive monetization opportunity.

Affiliate Marketing In Action

Affiliate marketers can use a number of strategies to sell to their audience, with different approaches making the most sense for different niches and product lineups. These strategies include:

• Coupons


• Product Reviews


• Product Rankings


• Product Aggregation / Price Comparison

For more on each of these approaches, as well as examples of them in action, check out our feature on Five Proven Affiliate Marketing Strategies.

Below are some real life examples of affiliate marketing strategies in action:

• Review: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Note the affiliate links to the landing page where this e-book can be purchased. For every referred purchased, this publisher makes 40% of the total purchase price.


• TV Review Site. This site compiles prices for products at various Web retailers, including an affiliate link to all of them. If a visitor to this site ultimately clicks through and makes a purchase, a commission is earned.


• Only Cookware. This is one of several sites run by Amazon “super affiliates” Paula and Wanda. Their reviews feature affiliate links for visitors to purchase the products on Amazon, which nets them a commission in the neighborhood of 8.5%.

Many publishers would be surprised at the depth of the affiliate marketing industry; it’s a lot more than e-books and amazon affiliates. Commission Junction, one of the largest affiliate networks, has an impressive list of advertiser verticals:

Bottom Line

Affiliate marketing is a fairly simple concept that can be implemented in a countless number of ways online. Though it’s not as familiar or easy to set up as display advertising strategies that dominate many publisher monetization strategies, there is the potential for a big payoff if a bit of work is done upfront.

• • • 

 

Your domain name is important. It can hurt or help your business, just by being the passive name everyone comes to use to reference you. How often do you hear about sites like eBay, Amazon, Yahoo or Craigslist? Those are all memorable, branded domain names. On the other hand, how often do your hear about sites like bestsurvivalbackpacks.com or invisiblepinkelephants.com?

The difference here is one of mechanics, between branded domains and exact match domains. In the past, exact match domains have been incredibly powerful, for the same reasons that keywords are powerful. Where’s the best place to put a keyword? In the domain!

Of course, keywords have declined in power with the rise of semantic search. At the same time, Google has been slowly punishing exact match domains, particularly those of low quality.

The Argument for Exact Match Domains

There is a valid argument for the existence of an unpenalized exact match domain. The idea is this; an exact match domain is essentially a billboard advertising that the website in question is dedicated to one subject and one subject only. You don’t go to bestsurvivalbackpacks.com looking for coffee mugs, t-shirts or video games. You go there looking for survival backpacks.

The reasoning is that, when a user is looking for a specific item, a site dedicated to that item would be valuable to have. A user who wants to find survival backpacks would love a page dedicated to those backpacks and nothing else.

The problem, as Google saw it and as webmasters created, was that the ideal was never the reality. The owner of bestsurvivalbackpacks.com – if you go check it right now, it’s a real site – is not in it to be the leading resource of survival backpack information. There’s no list of great products. There’s no comparison amongst brands. There’s nothing but a small blog. Heck, the blog has only been updated once in the last year. The site has affiliate disclosures for links that don’t actually exist, but that’s clearly the intent for the site.

This was the problem with EMDs across the Internet. Rather than becoming valuable resources, they became thin affiliate hogs. Google doesn’t like thin sites with nothing but affiliate links and a few blog posts, and it recognized that the issue was webmasters capitalizing on the keyword domain trend.

Expansion

The problem with EMDs is that they limit your potential for expansion in the future. If the owner of bestsurvivalbackpacks wanted to expand into survival knifes or civilian backpacks, their domain is no longer suitable for the entirety of their business. There are three solutions to this problem.

1. Expand anyway and ignore the unsuitable keyword domain.


2. Expand and buy up other related URLs, redirecting them to your main site.


3. Create more affiliate blogs with EMDs and limited content.

Most affiliate marketers go for number three. The best solution, however, is #4: to make a brand rather than a keyword the central focus of your business. If you’re selling the best survival backpacks and you want to expand into other survival equipment, why not choose a domain you can brand, like survivalguru.com? (That domain is currently parked; you’re welcome.)

Finding the Money Domains

So what does a domain name need in order to make you money? It’s surprisingly hard to find a domain that can accelerate your growth, rather than hurt it over time.

• Avoid keyword-focused domains. They just don’t have the ability to brand later.


• Avoid domain names with too many characters. Pretty much everything catchy is going to be under 12 characters in length. The longer a domain name, the easier it is to typo, and the less memorable it is.


• Look for something catchy. It has to tie in to your business and your brand name. Ideally, it should be as unique as possible as well; you’re not going to get away with www.goooogle.com as a brand.


• Use a .com extension. If the brand name you want is taken in .com, you’re either negotiating to buy it or you’re out of luck. You could have a thriving business named biz net, on biz.net, and people will still type in biznet.com to try to find it.

Is the domain name you want currently taken? Don’t give up just yet. Sometimes, domains are registered or parked by people who aren’t really using them. These people may be willing to sell the domain to you. They also might be about to let the domain lapse, and will allow you to pick it up once it expires.

Buying Expired Money Domains

The Internet is getting older. It has a long history of websites that have died and no longer exist. Some of these websites even had built up followings and may have been making money before they died. One valid technique to make money online is to buy expired domains and run your own website.

In order to do this, you need to make sure the domain you buy isn’t long dead. The longer a domain is dead, the less of its audience is retained. You want to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak, and pick up domains before the majority of the audience even realizes it died.

Since you need to act quickly, you need to have a suite of resources available to estimate or measure the traffic of a domain as it expires or even before. There are three ways you can do this.

The first method is using direct trackers. Sometimes, you can ask the people who own the site about their traffic numbers. This isn’t always the best idea, as the owner may exaggerate or outright lie, in order to get a better price. Unfortunately, there are no direct methods to find traffic on a domain you don’t own. The exception is parked domains, where the domain parker posts statistics in order to make the site more enticing to buy.

The second method is indirect, through traffic analyzers and predictors. You can make estimates based on competitive analysis tools, like SEMRush or SpyFu. You can also check on things like backlink profiles to estimate how often and how recently the site has been linked.

The third method is by reverse-engineering their SEO. What rank do they hold for what keywords? What search volume do those keywords maintain? These can give you an idea of how much traffic a site gets.

Of course, whether or not you make money once you have the domain is an entirely different matter!

 

Hashtags were more or less invented in 2007, when Chris Messina, a Google Designer, thought about creating them as a way to indicate groups and topics for discussion. If you wanted to talk about a particular event, you might use #EventName and your message in a tweet. Back then, Twitter didn’t create links out of tags. Many people criticized the idea, mostly due to not knowing how it would work. After all, there was no functionality for it.

Today, of course, hashtags are everywhere. They’re a staple of Twitter along with retweets and @mentions, and they’re virtually required for success on Instagram. Using them properly is the key to success on social media today. History was made when Summize, a search engine acquired by Twitter, linked tags. The rest fell into place from there.

Tip #1: Use Branded Hashtags

Hashtags come in two flavors; branded and unbranded. Unbranded hashtags tend to be insanely popular, when they’re common terms. Just imagine how many people are throwing their pictures into the #cute tag or the #selfies tag or the #cats tag. You can’t really use these for marketing, because the people who use them for conversation and communication view it as an intrusion. It’s much like if you saw two people on the side of the street having a private conversation, and you approached them to talk about their views on Jesus.

Branded hashtags, meanwhile, are tags that are relevant only to your company and to your marketing. You’re much more freely able to use them for advertising, because that’s basically their entire purpose. If your company is named Example, and you’re having a contest, you could do all the marketing you want in the #ExampleContest tag and no one would bat an eye.

Branded hashtags are also great for user communication. If you have that #ExampleContest going, and your users have some comments about it, you might see “Hey @Example, here are my thoughts about #ExampleContest!” You’ll see people posting links to blog posts where they mention your tag, and so forth.

Make sure you look at your tags from every perspective before you put them to use. For one thing, you need to make sure you’re not accidentally stepping on another brand’s toes or co-opting a branded tag from a while ago. You also need to make sure you don’t have any awkward word joins. Pen Island might want to rephrase their name before using #penisland, for example.

Tip #2: Contribute to Popular Hashtags

Branded tags are great, but they aren’t where everyone hangs out. They’re like a little room off the side hall that’s dedicated to you. It’s cool to be able to speak freely about your company and your marketing there, but it’s going to have a much smaller audience than what you get in the unbranded tags.

The key to using unbranded tags is to keep your content as generic as possible. Don’t go in trying to market; go in trying to help. Be a provider of information. Be a resource. Don’t be a shill.

It’s easiest for some brands to make use of the graphical hashtags when promoting themselves casually. For example, a brand focusing on hiking gear can post pictures of people hiking or scenic destinations for hiking, which may include their products. There’s no branded message, there’s no call to action, there’s just a cool shot that shows the brand is in touch with their users.

Tip #3: Select the Right Platform

Hashtags work on a lot of sites, and they don’t work on others. For example, the hashtags I’ve made up on this blog don’t filter you to a search for other posts using them. On some sites, they will.

Obviously, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook all implement hashtags. Twitter was the progenitor. Instagram uses them as tags for images and does very, very well with them. On Facebook, however, the use of hashtags will actually hurt your reach.

What other sites use hashtags?

• Gawker media’s blog network uses hashtags, but unless you’re using them for commenting, you won’t be getting much benefit here beyond maybe research purposes.


• Google+ uses hashtags, so if you’re active on that platform, they can be very useful.


• Tumblr uses hashtags, though they aren’t part of the post itself, they’re in a tags section beneath. Some people specifically use them for categories, while others just use them as additional sub-dialogue in comments. Often both are true.


• Pinterest is much like Instagram and puts hashtags to use in a similar way.

Facebook is the big warning, here. Other sites, use tags or don’t, and test how they work if you do. Facebook stay away from them. Twitter, Instagram and the like, definitely use them.

Bonus Tip: Don’t Abuse Hashtags

Hashtag abuse comes in many forms and can be detrimental to both your marketing efforts and to the patience and attention of your users. Avoid these sorts of mistakes:

• Not using hashtags on a tag-centric platform like Twitter is a cardinal sin.


• Using too many hashtags is annoying and adds nothing. Two tags is fine. Three even works. Track Maven performed a study and found that 5 was the ideal number for fortune 500 brands, though they have to be used carefully so as not to overrun the main message. Again, it comes down to platform. 5 is ideal on Instagram; 2 is probably pushing it on Twitter, where space is limited.


• Don’t abuse hashtags to gain followers. The #LikeForLike and #FollowForFollow tags are artificial growth methods and can hurt your reputation in the long run.


• Don’t abuse current events hashtags. DiGiorno tried to add their marketing messageto a tag called #WhyIStayed. Their tweet was simple and well-intention; I stayed because there was pizza! Sounds great, right? Too bad for them, the #WhyIStayed tag was primarily used for abuse victims to explain why they didn’t leave their abusers. The marketing intrusion was an obscene faux pas and hurt the brand significantly.

Finally, always give your hashtags a test. Make sure they aren’t being used in a way that doesn’t sync with your prospective use. Make sure you aren’t stepping on any toes. Make sure they work, and make sure people can find them.

 

SEO has existed nearly as long as the Internet itself, and certainly as long as search engines have been important. In that time, it has been a constant struggle between the people who will do anything to get ahead, and the search engines trying to keep the playing field level. Honest webmasters are caught in between, struggling to keep up with the fallout of the way they barely see.

Due to the nature of the Internet, and SEO in general, once something is published, it stays published. With the power of SEO behind it, it tends to stay highly ranked. This means you can find highly ranked, perfectly legitimate-looking articles on SEO techniques that no longer work. Unless you know what’s up, you might start implementing a strategy that will just hurt your site. To help you in this task, here’s a list of techniques that either aren’t beneficial, are actively harmful, or are tricky to pull off properly without backlash.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is one of those “tricky to do properly” techniques. By itself, guest blogging isn’t a bad technique. It gets your presence out there as an authority on sites with potentially much more traffic and readership than yours. It’s only when you start spamming every blog you can find with requests to guest blog, with the insistence they include a link, that you find the line for spam.

Keyword Anchor Text

Also known as Rich Anchors, using your SEO keywords in link anchors, particularly in off-site links, can be harmful. It’s okay for some keywords to show up sometimes, but when every link pointing at your site uses a keyword in anchor text, it doesn’t look natural. It looks like you paid for those links, which in turn is bad for your site.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing in general is detrimental. When you’re focusing on keyword density, or you’re cramming as many keywords in to your content as you can, you’re going to have a bad time. This includes putting excessive keywords in content, keywords in titles, in meta descriptions, and most of all the meta keywords section, which is completely unusable in modern SEO.

Hidden Text

Hidden text is one of those techniques that is legitimate when used for, for example, jQuery drop-downs and FAQs. When you’re using it to hide text, specifically to rank using that text even if your users don’t see it, you run into problems. Be very careful when you use hidden text. When in doubt, avoid it completely.

Directories and Syndication

Submitting your content to article directories doesn’t work primarily because Google knows about the strategy and it knows all of the article directories you might submit your content to. Because directory submission is just a way to get links from other domains, Google views it as a black hat link building strategy. At best, your articles will do nothing for you; at worst, they will be actively harmful.

Syndication is similar, but causes issues such as:

Duplicate Content

Duplicating content from another location on the web, even if you control that other location, is frowned upon by Google. Just look up anything on the Panda update series to see how much of a shakeup it was when Google made this change. Duplicate content means anything from copying too much of a product description from a manufacturer’s website, to copying entire articles from another source, to even publishing the same content on two or more different sites.

Link Exchanges

Link exchanges just by their very name should sound like a black hat technique, because they are. As a general rule of thumb; anything that involves building links in a way that isn’t “because they liked my content and thus linked to it” is an artificial link building issue and can be cause for penalties. Avoid any sort of link building beyond having good enough content people want to link to it. Only once you’ve learned the ins and outs of SEO can you know how to build links effectively without skirting the line or getting burned.

Thin Content

Imagine if I created a hub page that included each subtitle of this article as a link, and each linked page included the lone paragraph beneath. I would have a lot of pages, and it hurts usability for anyone wanting to read the full guide. If I then slapped pay-per-view ads on the content, it would be a thin method of monetizing content that’s not very valuable. Google dislikes thin content; condense whenever possible.

Link Cloaking

If I tell you a link is going to www.example.com but when you click on it, it actually goes through a redirect and puts you on www.mymonetizedsite.com, that’s a cloaked link. It brings you to a place you didn’t expect or want to visit, and consequently disrupts the user experience and causes a loss of trust. In general, avoid cloaked links and be clear and upfront about your redirects.

Link Pyramids

The concept of a link pyramid is that a lot of bad sites can link to a lot of mediocre sites to make them increase in PageRank. Then those sites can link to a lot of better sites, making them even better. Then the better sites all link to you, and the links look legitimate. The problem is, the passing of PageRank that allows this to work, well, doesn’t work. Link building in this manner will get you penalized if you’re caught out.

Irrelevant Links

Another form of bad link building is to identify authority sites and get links on those sites, regardless of their content. Your site about bike repair doesn’t need links from a site about commercial fishing; those links add nothing to the users of the fishing site and those users don’t want to see your bike content. Google realizes that the link has no value and consequently assigns it no benefit.

Spun Content

Examine these two sentences:

• Spinning content is when you take one sentence and make another with the same meaning.


• Spinning content is what happens when a person adjusts the wording of a sentence to create another with similar meaning.

Both of those sentences mean the same thing, but they look different. Spinning content is the idea of taking full blog posts and giving them that treatment, then using the new version for other purposes. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t just parse content based on wording; they parse meaning and semantics, so those two sentences look identical to the machine.

 

 

Driving traffic to a CPA offer is more or less identical to driving traffic to any website. You can still get traffic from all of the usual black and white hat sources, and the conversion rate you get depends on the quality of that traffic.

There’s just one catch with CPA; often offers will specify one particular type of traffic. If an offer you take specifies banner ad traffic, and you use the offer link in a text ad, none of the referrals you make will count for payment. You’re breaking the terms of the offer, and thus forfeiting any earnings.

CPA Specific Terms

Some CPA offers are not limited. Others will specify types of traffic, such as banner traffic, traffic from emails, or organic traffic only. Keep this in mind as you read on about types of traffic and various traffic sources; you will need to either focus solely on one type of traffic, or use a variety of offers to capture each type of traffic.

One thing you might want to watch for is Incent offers. This keyword, when present in an offer, means you’re allowed to incentivize the traffic in any way you desire. You can, for example, tell users that if they fill out the form, they get a free copy of your ebook or a 10% off coupon for a product.

You might even tell them they can sign up for an exclusive deals mailing list which you use for other offers. Giveaways work as well; record the people who sign up and award a gift card to a few lucky winners each month. If you’re getting enough conversions and your offer pays enough, it’s a small chunk of your available profits.

Finding Offers

Part of driving traffic to your offers is finding the right offers in the first place. You want to develop a website – or multiple websites – in a niche. Each niche has limits, and you need to have discipline to keep your offers focused. If you find good offers in a different niche, don’t slap them on to your site, save them for a new site in a different niche.

You can find offers using sites like OfferVault or oDigger. Put in keywords relating to your niche and look for offers. By registering for these sites, you can use advanced search criteria, which are extremely helpful for weeding out the offers that don’t apply to your site. You’ll want to specify offers in the right country, for example. An offer in French doesn’t apply to your US-only site, does it?

When you find applicable offers, you will need to review them for any specifications that make them difficult to monetize. Such specifications include limits on the type of traffic, incentives you’re allowed to offer, and the action required to count as a successful conversion.

With a selection of offers in hand, you will need to apply to the networks that host the offer. If you don’t get accepted into the network, you can’t run the offer, so you might have to search for replacements. If you’re already a member of the applicable network, you’re good to go.

Types of CPA Sites

The first choice you need to make is do you opt for a volume-based approach or a quality-based approach.

A volume-based approach has you spending the absolute minimum amount of time and money on your site. You slap up some content, you use a template site, you throw in a few offers, and you run a few ads. That’s it. You do this tens or hundreds of times, creating a lot of minor sites with a lot of offers, trying to hit all the bases. At some point, you reach critical mass and make more money than it takes to set it all up.

A quality-based approach is much more stable for the long term. You create a custom niche site and put your all into it. A custom site design, nicely integrated offers and a constant update schedule keep the site running and hopefully flourishing. You can leverage this site into other monetization methods later, such as affiliate marketing, direct sales of ad space, and even selling your own products.

I recommend the quality-based approach for a few reasons. For one thing, a quality site has more long-term growth potential. For another, a horde of thin sites can earn you a spammer label and cause your sites to be removed from Google rankings, which can hurt quite a bit.

Driving Traffic

Once you have a site set up with some offers, it’s time to drive some traffic to it. You can do this in a number of different ways.

• Organic search. This is the best method for long term growth, but it’s not as good for the quantity-based approach. With organic search, you’re working with SEO to build a brand presence and a trusted reputation, so you need to carefully cherry-pick your offers to avoid scamming your readers.


• Search ads. Using Bing PPC, Google AdWords or other search ads allow you access to a huge amount of targeted traffic. The caveat, of course, is that you have to pay for ads and you’re not guaranteed conversions. If your targeting is off or you’re paying too much for ads, you’ll see very few people actually filling out your CPA offer form, so you won’t be earning back the money you spent, let alone making a profit.


• Mobile ads. Using mobile ad exchanges like Buzzcity opens your site up to a whole wide world of mobile users. Just make sure that your offers are targeted at mobile users, and that your site works perfectly on all mobile devices. This might require shelling out for a responsive design.


• Social media. Organic social media works with the quality-based approach, because you’re building a brand as much as you are an affiliate site. You can curate content, share blog posts and interact with industry veterans through Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, all with the goal of driving traffic to your site and your offers.


• Social ads. Much the same as search ads, Twitter, Facebook and other social outlets offer their own PPC ads. Use these to drive traffic to your sites. You can even use targeting information from your audience to run offers you haven’t implemented yet, to give them a trial run.


• Mailing lists. Building your own mailing list is great, but you can also buy space in other site newsletters or in newsletters designed to share affiliate sites with interested consumers.

Using a mixture of these traffic sources is ideal, so you’re not relying too much on any one traffic source. Experiment, find where your best conversions come from, and push for growth.

 

Talking about niches in CPA and affiliate marketing is tricky, because there are a lot of people out there who will follow any advice given. If I gave you step by step instructions on how to succeed in a given niche, they wouldn’t be very good instructions a year from now, because a ton of people just follow them and all get into the same niche. Savvy marketers take the method but not the queries, and find their own niches.

That said, I can still give some general niche advice. I won’t be telling you what specific subset of a given topic in a given industry has proven to be valuable, because that’s a lot of research to do to just give away the information.

Before you go hog-wild with a niche, you should always do some research. Do some Google searches for your niche and see where you might be able to fit in. Run some keyword searches on OfferVault and see what sort of offers are available.

It’s also important to investigate the CPA network before you invest too heavily in a site or a niche. An offer may look attractive, but if it’s coming from a network that has a known history of never paying their publishers, it will do you no good to apply and invest in a site to funnel traffic to that offer. You can check out network reviews on oDigger, or run some Google searches fro them as well.

Now, on to the niches.

1. Gaming

Gaming, in this case, refers primarily to video games with a side of mobile gaming. Gaming is interesting, because it’s both very saturated and somewhat low paying, but it has a place on this list because it rewards agile brand builders. Gaming offers work great for 3-6 months, maybe up to a year, but fade quickly compared to other niches. On the other hand, discounting mobile games, thousands of video games come out every year. With mobile included, that number could creep to hundreds of thousands, if not higher. Of course, a lot of them are terrible shovelware no one plays for more than a few seconds, but no one said the games you put on offer had to be good.

2. Gambling

A lot of times, when you plug “gaming” into a search engine, you’ll end up with a lot of gambling results. This is just as true for CPA offers. Gambling has a lot of flexibility in topic, from online casinos to individual games, though it can also be quite saturated. The one notable downside to the gambling niche is the general bad reputation it gets with users and search engines.

3. College

With the rising costs of education, entire generations of students are graduating high school and looking for cheap alternatives. Trade schools, tech schools, community colleges and low cost educational options are all valid niches to pursue. Just beware of trying to compete with some of the ridiculous industry giants also using those CPA offers.

4. Mobile Apps

Mobile is growing at an astonishing pace, having taken over as the dominant means of browsing many social networks. Catering to mobile is still a niche many marketers find hard, so you can actually dig into already-saturated niches and supplant the incumbent giants by catering to mobile when they don’t.

5. Vitamins and Supplements

If there’s one thing that never changes, it’s snake oil. Ten years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, and probably ten thousand years ago, people were peddling ways to be healthier. Sure, it’s an industry dominated by a few big companies, but these big companies need to be careful about what they hawk, lest they open themselves up to lawsuits. As a smaller, more agile marketer, you can adjust your product recommendations on the fly to follow the lucrative offers.

6. Loans

Loans and other personal finance options are another timeless source of high-paying CPA offers. Much like gambling, however, you have to be aware of the seedy underbelly of loan marketing. Either embrace the dark side, or beware of the dangerous payday loanmarketing.

7. Dating

Dating is a niche that has two roles; one on the legitimate side of SFW ads, and one as ads attached to pornographic sites. As frowned upon as the pornography industry is among many circles, it’s perfectly legitimate as a way to make money for thousands of marketers. Dating also has the benefit of a huge variety of niche sites to pick through. Heck, the old standby of Adult Friend Finder has CPA offers in the $120 range.

8. Insurance

Health insurance in the United States has been an ongoing controversy for the last several years, and plenty of people have been searching for alternatives they can find to the state-run marketplaces and subsidies. Other forms of insurance haven’t changed much, though.

9. Weight Loss/Fitness

Fad diets, exercise equipment, weight loss pills, fitness regimens, they’re all potentially lucrative niches. You just need a compelling way to sell whatever it is you’re selling, andyou’re good to go. As a bonus, this is a great one to roll in with other affiliate marketing strategies.

10. Jewelry

You might not think of jewelry as a high-profile niche, but it’s out there. You’ve got everything from wedding rings to diamond candles as options when you dig into this particular niche.

11. Technology

Tech is an incredibly broad niche, admittedly, which means you can find something in there that hasn’t been covered yet, even if it’s a slightly older piece of tech that people just haven’t heard much about. You can also strive to be on the cutting edge, following offers for tech that’s only just been announced or just released.

12. Fitness

Fitness specifically is what got people like Doctor Oz where they are today, and it’s really not hard to replicate their success. It helps that there’s a high turnover in the industry, with rebrandings and public backlash coming in waves that wipes out the top players occasionally.

13. Forex and Binary Options

Who doesn’t want to make money fast on seemingly easy investments? There’s a huge market available for investments and trading moneymaking schemes, ranging from legitimate to beginner’s ebooks to scams. Find the right offers, strike the right tone in your site and you’re golden. You’ll probably make more money than most of the people getting into trading.

14. Business Investments

A surprising number of businesses looking for capital and investments put up offers with high values through various CPA networks. It’s a tough niche to get into, because it requires contacting a very specific type of person with a very specific type of marketing, but if you can get venture capitalists on the hook, you can make a mint.

15. Pets

Time and again, otherwise reasonable people will spend insane amounts of money on stuff for their pets, be it medicine, toys, grooming, food or gimmicks. Use this to your advantage.

 

Running a blog is hard work. It’s incredibly time consuming, coming up with a constant flow of topics and a constant stream of quality writing. Add to that the editing, formatting, imagery and scheduling, and you’re spending entire days just running a blog. If you have several blogs for different sites, it’s even worse. This is why many businesses and entrepreneurs turn to freelance writers for help.

There’s a lot to consider when you’re talking about the price of blog content. I’ll try to cover every angle, so you can make an adequate decision.

Writer Credits

The first thing you have to decide is whether or not you’re going to credit your writer. You have three options. The first is to hire the writer on as an employee, giving them CMS access and a salary to write a certain number of posts on a given range of topics per week. This is going to be as expensive as you might expect an employee to be.

The second option is to hire a writer and give them a byline, but don’t give them CMS access or a salary. They will remain freelancers, paid by the post. Their byline allows you to keep a stable of writers who contribute occasionally, to vary the writing styles and perspectives on your blog.

The third option is to hire a ghostwriter. As far as anyone but you and the writer knows, all of the content on your blog is written by you. In reality, the ghostwriter creates the content, you pay for it, and post it under your name. This is the cheapest of the three options, though it varies wildly in costs depending on the writer, contract, topic, length of the posts, frequency, and more.

Expected Responsibilities

Just like there are different tiers of credit, there are different tiers of responsibility.

• You have an idea and you have knowledge. You talk to the writer and give the information, and the writer turns this information into a post. Essentially, they take what you say and turn it into something presentable for the web.


• You have an idea, but you don’t necessarily have the knowledge. You give the writer the assignment, and they perform the research. They present to you a post, and after potential revisions, you have a blog post worth publishing.


• You have a topic, but neither a specific idea nor the knowledge to fill out a post.You give the writer the assignment and they do what they can, creating a piece of their own. This is typically the most expensive, because it’s the most time-consuming for the writer.

You also have to consider extras. Do you want links in your post, or are you going to add them yourself? Do you want images? Some writers will refuse to find images for you, while others are happy to do so. Are you very picky about voice and require revisions frequently, or are you happy to have anything with a suitable message and a good style?

The Ethics of Ghostwriting

There’s a social contract between a blogger and their readers. You publish content under your name, and the reader expects that you wrote that content. If you’re hiring a ghostwriter, you could be considered in violation of that social contract. It’s an ongoing debate, and it gets more heated in certain industries, where readers expect a certain level of knowledge.

For example, just about anyone could go in and write a basic guide to Football. You don’t need to be an established authority with insider vision in order to write that. It can easily be ghostwritten and no one would care. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to learn that anything on WebMD with a doctor’s credit was written by an inexperienced freelancer, would you? A misdiagnosis in that case could literally cost someone their life.

It’s up to you if you find ghostwriting ethical enough to do it. You should just be aware that, well, basically everyone does. Small businesses, large companies, fortune 500s, and everything in between; ghostwriters occupy every niche.

Low Tier Costs

Yes, I know. You came to this post hoping for specifics on the cost of content. I can’t give you exact prices; those are negotiated between you and a writer. I’ll give you general tiers, though, and what you can expect from each tier.

At the absolute rock bottom, you have the crazy outsourced content or the super low quality content mills. Something like Textbroker’s 2-star level, where you’re paying fractions of a penny per word. You might get thousand-word blog posts for $3 or less, but you’re getting very low quality content for your cash. Some of it will look like it was written in India and run through Google Translate, which it very well might have been.

A bit higher up the scale and you’re still paying only a few dollar per post, but you at least have a bit of a guarantee of readability. Think Fiverr and the like. I don’t recommend going this route; not if you want to engage readers and keep them around. It’s more useful for paying to populate 10,000 product descriptions or copy that doesn’t need to be perfect.

Mid Tier Costs

In the middle, you have paying anywhere from $25 to $100 per blog post, depending on the length of the content. Higher levels of Textbroker, Writer Access, Constant Content and other content mills fall under this heading, as do many freelancers you might find through personal sites, LinkedIn or oDesk.

Middle tier freelancers are also where you start getting people potentially asking for bylines. It’s also where you start getting people who are willing to do more than just give you a text document. Links and some research can be expected in this tier.

High Tier Costs

At the high end, costs can soar. You might be paying $1 per word or more, which many professional magazines and publications do. A good 1,200-word post for Cosmopolitan, for example, might cost as much as $2,500.

On the other hand, this tier is where you get writers willing to do anything for you. Pay them enough and they’ll bend over backwards for you.

Don’t forget; all of these costs are per post. Remember to multiply the price by the number of posts per week you expect; seven posts per week per blog can get expensive very quickly. This is why it can be a good idea to hire multiple writers, if your funds can cover them.

 

You can make a lot of money with CPA ads. When one lead for one offer can generate $100 or more, and you have a ready source of tens of thousands of interested people, you can make absolute bank.

That is, right up until the CPA network finds some excuse not to pay you. This happens all too frequently in the world of CPA, and it’s a serious problem affecting new marketers. When you don’t know any better, one attractive network can screw you out of thousands of dollars.

Oh, rarely will the network disappear with your money. They won’t be so blatant. Instead, they’ll find some excuse, some rule you violated, and present you with the violation in lieu of a real customer service response. As far as they’re concerned, the money you earned wasn’t legitimately earned. It’s theirs to keep. Of course, you’re new to CPA marketing and don’t have the legal or financial resources available to take action.

This gets even worse if the traffic you drive to your offers came through PPC. You’re paying for the traffic, and you’re getting conversions, which you expect will cover the cost of the ads and profit. When you find out those conversions didn’t count, you’re in the hole for your ads and you have no profit to cover them. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Thankfully, if you do your research, you can identify the worst of these scam networks and avoid them. What follows is a list of only five, and then some tips on researching and judging any network that isn’t on the list. Never take a network at face value; scammers lie.

Feed Flare Media

Feed Flare is notorious for changing up their minimum payment and for not paying people, or for declaring leads to be invalid. It’s painful all around to try to contact their support and their owner, Collin, makes excuses for advertisers but refuses to relay direct complaints.

EWA

EWA does a lot of PR management to hide their scams, every several months sending out placating messages to sacrifice a major player, announce the sacking of some poor dude who might not even exist, or to talk about a reorganization meant to rid the network of fraud. It never sticks, and a few months later, EWA just stops paying again.

1GreatCPA

Anyone advertising themselves as great is either full of themselves or lying. This one is both. Frequently, they won’t pay, or if they do, they conveniently lose a number of qualified leads to pay less. There have even been reports of them sending out tax documents to people they didn’t pay, just for that added kick in the pants. Always be wary of a CPA network that spends a lot of time replying to reviews on third party sites, particularly if they ignore the good ones.

1st Class CPA

Okay, so this one isn’t that bad, but they’re pretty bad with customer service. In fact, they have even been known to call out their affiliates as illiterate, lazy morons who don’t know how to read TOS documents or parse the dense legalese they use to try to scam newbies. They pay well, for those they like, to keep reviews up. They scam the people who aren’t as invested, and drown out their negative reviews.

COPEAC

Even if I wanted to, I can’t link you to COPEAC’s website, because they finally shut down back in 2012. This is after literal years of doing basically no business. No advertiser would work with them, but they still presented offers, they still ran a public face, and they still duped CPA marketers into sending them traffic. They didn’t pay anyone a dime, and no one lasted there for more than a few weeks, but they were a huge trap for newbies. Thankfully, they’re gone now.

Warnings and Methods for Identifying Scams

So, here’s the thing. Anyone at all, even you, right now, can start an affiliate network.All you need is some web hosting, a software suite for tracking affiliates, and a lot of time. Go out and sign up for 200 CPA networks, register for every offer they have. Now forward the offer to people in your network, and pay them less than you’re being paid for the offer.The referral goes through you and your network.

For example, say Dating Site A pays $50 for a lead. You sign up for that offer and put it on your site, paying $35 for a lead. Some poor newbie CPA marketer signs up for the offer and runs it, and gets ten conversions. That means you have to pay them $350, and you do, and that’s fine. Because you refer the leads to YOUR offer, and you get paid $500 for them. That’s a profit of $150, and you didn’t do the advertising work.

Add on a ton of volume and offers from a ton of affiliates and you have a massive moneymaking scheme. Now toss in a little loose bookkeeping – “losing” leads here and there, or disqualifying some perfectly legitimate leads but counting them for yourself – and you have a lot of money you’re scamming out of people.

Now look at it from the CPA marketer newbie’s perspective. They see a network that accepts anyone, and decent $35 offers. They sign up, they run them, they get paid, though maybe some of their leads go missing. They never know that a better network around the corner – one they can’t get into as a newbie – has the better offers without the middleman. In fact, they never know there’s a middleman.

And this is all just one of many ways a CPA network can introduce fraud into the proceedings.

Whenever you’re investigating a new network, check it out on both Affpaying and oDigger. These will give you an idea of the sorts of offers available, as well as their reviews, their minimum payment, and a number of other terms. Pay special attention to negative reviews; positive reviews are easily faked and aren’t worth much anyways. Negative reviews, well, you need to take with a grain of salt. Some users really will be breaking the rules and complaining about not being paid. Some will legitimately be scammed by the network.

 

If you’re in the affiliate marketing industry, you know all about CPA marketing. If you’re new, though, I’ll give you a quick rundown.

CPA networking is a form of advertising where you build a site and run offers from various companies. It’s your job to get as many people as possible to sign up for those offers or buy the products on offer. For each lead you generate or each offer claimed, you get paid. CPA itself stands for Cost Per Action, where the offer claims and leads generated are the actions.

CPA is one part of a spectrum of affiliate marketing. Other forms include ads that pay you per thousand views, or ads that pay you per click. You also have straight affiliate sales, where you try to get users to buy products, and you’re paid a commission on every sale. Of these, product sales can be the most lucrative based on either sheer volume or on selling high priced items. Beyond that, CPA is the most lucrative. Views are the easiest, followed by clicks, followed by leads; thus views pay the least, and offers the most.

If you’re getting into making money online using CPA, you want to take every step possible to maximize the amount of money you earn. How can you do that?

Join More Networks

In order to gain access to offers, you need to be part of a CPA network. There are literally hundreds of networks out there available, ranging from utter filth to insanely lucrative. They also range between “accepts everyone” and “you have to be a six-figure earner professional to get in.”

The more exclusive the network, the better the offers you find. This is because the companies willing to pay a lot for leads don’t want unqualified leads coming from spam sites; it wastes their time and it tarnishes their brand image. When they work with a network, they want that network to vet their advertisers to meet certain minimum standards.

When you’re first starting with CPA, you won’t be able to get into the best networks. You’ll be limited to a lot of low-tier networks. That said, you should join every network you can, or at least the best ten or twenty that accept you. This way you have your pick of a wide range of offers from various networks and can experiment. You can also:

Join Better Networks

Work your way up. As you join networks, you gain experience. You can leverage that experience and those past earnings as proof that you know what you’re doing and you can work successfully in CPA. Leverage the name recognition of those networks to get into slightly more exclusive better networks.

Repeat this process. Join networks, use them for a while, and then apply to better networks using your existing experience. You’ll be able to climb up the ladder in terms of network quality, which also lets you access better offers, so you can make more money while you’re at it.

Build Better Sites

Offers are just one side of the CPA coin. On the other side, you have your site. In reality, you will have numerous sites, spread out throughout various niches. The goal is to find lucrative offers and build sites around those offers. Work to optimize the traffic and the audience visiting a site, to boost your conversion rate and your raw conversion numbers.

For the most part, this will involve all the basics of SEO and site building that come with any form of website ownership. You’ll need a solid design that appeals to both desktop and mobile users. You’ll need enough content to make your site look legitimate and helpful. If possible, you’ll want to keep an ongoing update schedule, though you don’t need more than one post per week to maintain a niche affiliate site. Just make sure your content isn’t copied or stolen, and that it’s high quality and useful.

Focus on Individual Niches

As you grow and rise in the ranks of exclusive networks, you’ll find a lot of appealing offers that don’t quite fit your niche. The number one killer of CPA sites is trying to cram those offers into your existing sites. Rather than waste time and dilute your audience with a shift in focus, just make another site. You can take the basic template of your successful site and apply that to a new niche, with new content and new topics.

Once you have the pattern down, it’s very possible to start a site from scratch and build it into a solid earner in the space of a few months. Some successful CPA marketers build a new site every 3-6 months. They also aren’t afraid to sell off old sites through a site sales marketplace to get rid of lower earners and focus on the higher earners.

Vary Your Offers

It’s easy to find one offer that converts well and run with it, but sometimes better offers will come out. You can do two things about this.

The first is to switch to new offers when they become available. However, you want to do some split testing first to make sure the new offer converts as well as the old offer. It’s no good switching to something that pays $1 more per action if you lose 25% of your conversions doing so.

The second is to play two networks off each other. Talk to your account representative on one network and bring up the fact that you found a similar offer on a different network and it pays more. In order to keep your business on their network, they’ll probably try to negotiate a better offer for you. By doing this when a new offer appears, you can stay ahead of the curve.

Spend on Advertising

You’re an advertiser and a marketer, and if you’re not spending on advertising, you’re missing out on a huge portion of your potential audience. Using other forms of advertising through other ad networks, you can bring people to your CPA site. There, they’ll be exposed to your content and your offers, where they can convert and earn you cash. You have to spend money to make money, after all.

 

HubPages has become one of the largest networks of amateur online content on the web. They have attained this rank through a combination of their own growth and acquiring other content hubs, primarily including Squidoo.

HubPages is a focal center for content on the web for one reason; they pay writers. More importantly, they accept virtually anyone, on the premise that the best content floats to the top and earns the most for the authors. Content that doesn’t meet expectations settles to the bottom and is either quietly removed or largely ignored.

Those familiar with SEO might wonder about this strategy. Wouldn’t such an unfiltered and variable quality feed lead to massive SEO penalties? Well, you’d be right; HubPages was hit notoriously hard by Panda, and struggled for years to recover. Part of their solution was to filter their worst performing content onto subdomains, reserving their main domain for only the best content.

The end result of this strategy is that the main HubPages site is full of great content, and that great content reinforces the quality and search ranking for the rest of the content on the main site. Meanwhile, poor content is shuttled off to branch sites, where it quietly dies under the grip of Google penalties.

As a writer looking to make money from HubPages, this means you need to produce great content. If you produce mediocre or poor content, well, it’ll just end up in a dead and dusty corner of the site, where views are low and payments are measured in pennies. If you manage to get your content in the central hub, you join a network of brilliant earners and can make a lot of money with relative ease.

This makes HubPages an incredible fickle place to try to make money online. Some writers are making hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. Others struggle to make pennies and abandon the site in short order. You can find reviews from both perspectives online, which makes it hard to figure out just how to be one of those big earners.

How Earning Money Works on HubPages

Before you can figure out how to make money, you should understand how the monetization process works on HubPages. It’s fairly simple.

Essentially, all you have to do is publish content and sign up for monetization. From there, each time you publish content, advertisements are added to that content. When readers click those ads, HubPages earns a commission. You, as the referring writer for that click, also earn a commission.

Sound familiar? It’s basically CPM and Affiliate marketing, through a centralized hub. In fact, some of the monetization methods are directly affiliate marketing. In addition to the standard HubPages Earnings Program, you can also sign up for their Google AdSense integration, their eBay program, and even their Amazon Affiliates program.

Amazon, as anyone who has investigated them before knows, pays a commission based on volume. Sell more products in a given month and your percentage commission increases for future sales. HubPages, carrying everything under one banner, has a significant throughput and thus maintains a higher level of commission than an individual user might.

Making Money on HubPages

If you’re looking to make money on HubPages – and I’m talking dollars, not cents – here’s a quick and easy guide. Make no mistake, however; it’s going to take a lot of work to reach an earnings tier that’s worth the time.

Step 1: Sign Up

The registration process for HubPages is really quite simple. All you need to do is fill out a quick form with a pen name, an email address, a password and a captcha. You may or may not need to go through some tutorials before you can get to work; this tends to change from time to time.

Step 2: Write Content

On HubPages, they refer to a given page as a Hub. A hub is basically a blog post or article, but with a little extra functionality thrown in design-wise. Think of it like a midway point between purely writing content and running a blog of your own. You don’t have control over the site design, but you have more control than just plugging in words in a form.

At this point, you’re stuck in HubPages boot camp. This is a sort of beginner scrutiny and filter period, where HubPages admins monitor what you write and may reject it for not fitting their guidelines. Fitting in is beneficial, because it keeps you in their good graces.

Step 3: Register for Monetization

HubPages offers several monetization plans. You have to sign up for the HubPages Earnings Program in order to access the rest. Think of it as an umbrella “I want to monetize” button, which gives you access to the other methods of monetization.

The exact methods are eBay affiliates, Amazon affiliates, and Google AdSense. In each case, when you sign up for a program through HubPages, you’re given a special affiliate ID. This runs at a 60/40 split with the overall HubPages ID. In other words, if 100 people visit your Hub, 60 of them will see ads with your ID, wile the other 40 will see ads with the HubPages ID. As a result, your payments aren’t cut by HubPages taking a slice of the pie, they just take a slice of your traffic.

Step 4: Realize Content Isn’t Enough

At this point you’ll probably notice that your earnings are either zero or close enough to it as to make no difference. This is primarily a trap new writers fall into; writing about anything, rather than writing about popular topics. If you want to make serious money, you need to pick your topics according to what people are searching. You need to learn keyword research.

Step 5: Research Keywords

The world of SEO keyword research is too large to cover in this post, but thankfully it’s been covered in great detail elsewhere. I recommend this guide from Moz, but you can use any resource you find that works for you.

HubPages has one benefit over running a blog or website; freedom. When you run an affiliate website, you need to stick to one niche and mine out every potentially valuable keyword you can find. On HubPages, you’re not limited to one topic; you can write about anything with a keyword you think can earn you views.

Step 6: Write More Content

Now that you know how to pick topics according to their potential value, it’s time to write with a real passion. Write as much content as you can about as many valuable keywords as you can. If you find that certain topics work better than others, investigate related keywords and expand your content. Avoid editing and adding to existing hubs, unless you think improvements will dramatically increase views; most of the time, it’s better to get another hub earning than it is to try to refresh an existing hub.

Step 7: Share Your Content

Hubs earn you money through views and ad clicks. Get more views and ad clicks by sharing your content anywhere you can, legitimately. That is, don’t spam your hub links in comment sections or unrelated forums. Instead, share them on social media and post them as resources in relevant discussions.

Step 8: Keep At It

It takes a long time to rack up enough search clout to bring in views. It also takes a while to learn keyword research and get a feel for what does and doesn’t work with HubPages and their audience. Consider that some average-level HubPages writers make around $2 per hub per month, and you see the scale of content you need to make any significant income. Write a lot, publish a lot, and keep it going