Well, in my last post, I promised that I’d be undertaking a 100 hubs in 30 days challenge and so I’m beginning to lay the groundwork this week. I think if you are going to do this kind of experiment, the first thing you should do is lay out the entire project on paper first. Know exactly what you are going to do each and every day. Break down everything. Then, when you start working, you don’t have to THINK, you just have to DO.
The first step in this process is figuring out exactly how much work has to be done. The goal is to exactly what Court recommended at the Keyword Academy. He wrote 100 hub pages. For each hub, he got several links. I think it was a total of nine links. So what I did first was determine that I needed to write the following amount of content:
1. 100 hubs
2. 200 articles for backlinks
That means that for the month, I’ve got to write 300 articles. Over 30 days that is 10 articles a day. I’ve decided that what I am going to do instead is spread the work over four weeks working Monday through Friday – a total of five days a week.
Therefore, I’ll if I break it down by the week, I need to write 300 articles divided by four weeks. That comes to 75 articles a week. Break it down over 5 days and that is 15 articles a day.
In the end what I decided to do was split the work and half and am hiring a friend to write 150 of the articles. This will reduce my workload to 7.5 articles per day. This is still alot but even more doable.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you commit to a challenge. You start to ask yourself what has to happen for you to succeed. Write down your objective on paper and then start asking yourself what’s next. How do I get to the end goal? Can I get other people to help.
I have to tell you that there are very few people who I have seen who have actually completed the challenge in full. If you are coming across this, you’ve got to understand that if you set out to do it AND actually complete it, you’ll be in the upper echelon of the internet marketing world’s work ethic. You’ll also learn what it takes to REALLY make money online.
In my short stint at doing this, I can tell you that I’ve learned alot but have done way too little. I want to change that as I want to get my adsense income up. I’ve gotten it up to a point where I have kind of hit a wall. When that happens, you’ve got step away from the wall, take a good look at it and then crash write through it. That’s what is going on here.
After I decided how much I needed to do on a daily basis, I decided that I also needed to think out how I wanted each post to look. How many words? How many pictures and videos? What kind of sites am I going to link too? How am I going to do my backlinks. The more you can break down before you start the better. Get all of the thinking out of your head and down on paper before you start.
In my case, the next stop is doing keyword research. I’ve got to identify keywords I can rank for right out of the gate. I’ve got that partially done now and am putting all of that information on a spreadsheet. In addition, I’ve set a tentative start date of March the 8th to start my hubpage challenge and will set a target end date of April 3rd.
I am thinking of documenting every step of the process starting tomorrow. If you can think of anything you’d like to know that I could include in that, feel free to put in a request now and I’ll try and incorporate it this as well.
Oh and here is a screenshot of my hubpages to date before we start getting serious.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Michael
Love your blog but I am going to play devil’s advocate here.
I strongly recommend that you consider turning you 100 Hubs challenge into 100 micro sites challenges. Here is why:
i) Exact domain names rank a lot hell faster than hubs these days. Somehow, hubs have lost a bit of their authority and they are not going to be rank as well as before without backlinks. Exact domains can. I did a little experiment where I set up a hub page targeting the same keyword as the micro site that I sent you. My site is now rank #19 while the hub page is nowhere to be found. Both have the same number of backlinks and the same amount of content initially
ii) Self hosted sites can allow you to experiment which key to learning how MMO works. With your own sites, you can create related posts to test new related keywords that you might have uncover from your search logs. You might also do that with hubs with you will not have the clout of the site’s authority on that niche. In addition, some keywords are really hard to write a readable article, but you can do so on your own site. Finally, you can also test your ad placement, affiliate products continuously with your own sites etc which you cannot do for your hubs. With 100 micro sites, it is like a huge test bed for your own experiments and you can learn a lot from them.
iii) You can easily create backlinks on your own micro sites to other related sites. Nuff said : )
iv) The last point is a bit like (iii) but different. I have learned, many times, that old domains have a lot of clout, be they targeted or not. I have a couple of blogs that are a year ago with more than 20 posts. These were untargeted posts but after a year, they started to rank for some of the terms contained in the posts. I optimize them and now these old blogs are able to ranks for anything related just by having the keywords in the post titles. One example I have is about iPhone games. Previously, I used this blogspot blog to talk about games and technology in general but after knowing I got ranking for some iPhone keyword, I optimise it using the SEO knowledge I acquired and now I can rank for almost every new iPhone game if I include the game title in my post title.
So the point is that if you have 100 micro sites that are going to age, you will have a hell of a backlink resource and maybe even a couple of niche authority sites a year from now.
Sorry for the long rant. Just thought if you are working to do the work, might as well get the highest possible return.
Just my 2 cents : )
Good points there. Are you keeping all of those hundred micro sites on different IP’s? Just a side note, I am also working on about 25 other sites.
We’re going to run several experiments here over the next year. The first is the hubpage challenge. I don’t think that anyone knows for sure how strong hubpages really are because there are only two people I’ve seen document that they have done it completely and only Court has claimed he has done all of the steps he outlines. I think that micro sites are potential money makers too but that’s for another experiment.
I think it’s safe to say that anything done on a large scale is going to bring some returns. I see what you are saying there about getting the biggest bang for your time spent.
Personally, I have about 5 hubs or so. I have one at number one for the keyword I targeted. It’s received about 2000 plus visitors over the last year plus and has made me a few bucks. The same information on my own domain on the same subject matter had been my second highest earning site. This seems like a huge disparity to me too just like you’ve illustrated.
The key on hubs is three things in my opinion:
1. A large number of posts
2. Unique content
3. Links
While I do have reservation about putting all the content on the hubpages, I am doing it anyway to prove a point. That point is this. If you join the keyword academy and do exactly what Court says, what will happen?
And, that’s what we are going to find out.
Keep us posted on your niche sites as I am interested in your results.
Heya. I’m the Community Manager over at HubPages (in case you don’t recognize the name). Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you! I’m interested to see what kind of results you get. I think you’re absolutely right to put an emphasis on unique content. That’s where a lot of people get hung up. They think volume is what makes the difference, but in my experience, having readable, informative, original content pays off. Keep us posted!