Alternative Article Marketing Strategies For Hubpages.

Alternative Article Marketing Strategies For Hubpages.

I've been here at Hubpages for a year now, but I've only really been focusing on article marketing for the last six months. In that time I've learned a lot of strategies for article marketing, and getting traffic, and such; but in this article I want to discuss some alternative strategies that I've realized that work for me. These strategies may, or may not pay off in the long run, time will tell, however, as these strategies involve more actual "fun" for the author, they are definitely a "no lose" proposition.

Now, in the paragraph above I clearly stated that for six months I've been fairly focused on article marketing, learning the lingo, and what it means, and creating hubs. What I DO NOT mean is that I've been really focusing on what I know to be the types of hubs that really will generate the most income for me from Google Adsense. I KNOW for certain that for me, with what I've done so far, articles about shotguns and expensive acoustic guitars seem to be the most successful in terms of creating and sustaining organic traffic.

What is organic traffic? Organic traffic is simply search engine traffic. Product articles, or articles that answer specific questions are the types of articles that will really make you some passive income here on Hubpages, Info Barrel, Squido, or whichever other site that you write for that runs Google Adsense ads.

Now, it was and is fun for me to write articles about shotguns and expensive acoustic guitars, and other products that I truly do use, love, and recommend to like minded individuals; those are the articles that get ten hits from google most every single day, and so, product articles are what you should create for passive income; but what about an alternative strategy? If you don't have followers or fans here on hubpages, people who will read your more creative work and leave you feedback, then Hubpages won't be much fun for you.

Create Content For YOU and your Friends First.

What makes Hubpages fun is the wonderful people on this site, the people that give your feedback: comments and fan mail, answers to your questions in the forums and Q and A. Write articles that you enjoy looking at yourself, and chances are, you'll make some friends here that also enjoy those same articles. What happens next is that these new friends of yours and mine will sometimes hit the Facebook "like" button at top of our hubs, and then maybe someone that isn't even on Hubpages is reading your content from someone's Facebook. What COULD happen from there is that your content could wind up getting shared in some other domain, which basically means that someone created a backlink for you in some site that you've never even heard of. This is wonderful stuff when it happens, and it happened with me on my hub about Al Di Meola, now, Al Di Meolahas his own website, and there are forums there. My hub about Al has got a lot of hits from his website, and I'm not a member of his website, so I couldn't have put the link there, someone else did that for me, and I've no idea who it was. Obviously, someone either loved or hated what I'd said, either way I win.

You and I should never make the mistake of questioning the power of either Google, and now Facebook, for more on the power of Facebook, read the info, and watch the video on the following link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12180845

Music.

If you've not figured it out yet, I'm very music motivated. This is why you see music videos on almost every hub I publish, hubs about expensive acoustic guitars, musicians, and even hubs about songs. The example I used up above though, about Al Di Meola, has happened for me in similar ways with other hubs too. All of them being with hubs that I wrote to entertain me, and the people that I know read these hubs. I get traffic from weird sites that I've never heard of, and so I know that either someone on hubpages linked me there, or someone from somewhere else did.(DUH!)

So what about music and hubs? Well, when someone clicks a video on your hub, and watches the thing they then have spent more time on your hub than they would have had you not put a video for them to watch on the hub, correct? Correct! Well guess what, Google likes urls that people like to spend time on, so backlinks and keywords aside, pages that unique visitors spend time on get ranked higher than other pages. So if you've backlinked to some other domains, used decent keywords, and provided good videos of relevance; then you've got a three fold winner for something that you might have created simply for the pleasure of creating it.

Another thing that happens, and I'm positive that everyone has seen this, youtube videos get deleted from that site by the channel operator, or due to copyright infringement. If you've put a video here on a hub that that happens to, then that capsule is no longer functional, and needs to be updated with another video. Also, another thing could happen as well, you sometimes see videos on hubs or on Facebook that someone has shared, and that video will say something like "embedding disabled by request, watch on youtube?" That sucks as bad as one saying "this video was disabled due to Sony copyright infringement." replace those videos, and update your hubs with new, functional videos. This only helps YOU out, and keeps your reader on your hub for longer periods of time. Updating a capsule on a hub makes your content "new content," and at the same time it is aged content, with the original publication date, so even if your feeds that you've placed on the hub haven't updated recently, then updating an old and dysfunctional video capsule will do the job of a feed, and freshen up your hub for improved search engine results page rank.

Hubpages vs Info Barrel

I also write for Info Barrel. I think branching out, and not putting all of your eggs in THIS basket is a wise idea, and I don't mind telling you that I got the idea from one of the most successful writers on Hubpages, Sunforged. Sunforged is a guy who, besides being pretty humorous, is exceedingly wise and knowledgeable when it comes to this article marketing game. If you think that Hubpages is restrictive, it's not. Infobarrelis MUCH more restrictive than Hubpages, and that is why I've only got five articles right now on Info Barrel. Yes, I'll put more there in time, but I have to say, I do the same marketing and back linking there that I do here, and I just don't get much traffic over there. Now, that could be because I'm not really putting my best writing there, but that is only a matter of someone's opinion, and that wouldn't be MY opinion. You're only allowed one outbound link on Info Barrel articles, and that can only be in "your signature," and I've not figured out how to put a link to my Hubpages profile into my Infobarrel signature yet. Because Hubpages is kind enough to let us put outbound links into our hubs, so long as we don't do more than two to the same domain, I incorporate some of my Info Barrel links into my hubs.

So what's good about Info Barrel? Well, Info Barrel pays more, or gives a better split to the writer than Hubpages does. Hubpages gives you a favorable 60/40 split in Google Adsense revenues, whereas Info Barrel gives the writer a more favorable 75/25 Adsense revenue split. Here's the thing though, Info Barrel isn't such a high search engine result page site as Hubpages is. However, I should also say that highly sought after urls that are already taken here at Hubpages, are a lot less likely to be taken at Info Barrel, as it's smaller, newer, and has fewer articles and writers. If you are interested in joining Info Barrel, then below is my referral link, and that leads me to another thing; Hubpages gives you a MUCH HIGHER Google Adsense split for referrals than Info Barrel does. Hubpages gives you 10% compared to a mere 2% at Info Barrel.

So really, Info Barrel is a great site, but I'll probably be doing most of my writing here.

http://www.infobarrel.com/signup.php?ref_id=33854

Backlinks, Keywords, SEO

I want to take just a minute here to tell you the sites that I backlink from. I don't do anything shady, and I don't advise doing anything weird or "iffy" for increased backlinks. I keep getting kicked off of reddit.com; but I'll create another profile there because reddit traffic almost matches my Hubpages traffic, but at the moment I'm not backlinking to reddit. I backlink on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Redgage, and sometimes I backlink from Tumblr, and StumbleUpon. I recently created a Shetoldme account, and I couldn't be more impressed with that place; but I've not gotten around to doing much there, because they want you to write a 300 word description of your article. I need to just stop being lazy, and do it. Thing is, I'm always more busy creating another hub. Shetoldme is AWESOME, because you get 100% Adsense revenue sharing there, that means that they REALLY want you to put your links there, and all that you have to do is give them you Adsense ID, and create an account, and you get advertising on your articles that advertise your hubs or Info Barrel articles that also have advertising on them. It's a total win for us all at Shetoldme. I've provided an example of a Shetoldme article of mine that links to an Info Barrel thing I wrote below.

I've played with the Google Keyword tool exactly one time. I know that I'd really benefit from experimenting with it, I just haven't. I can't recommend that you do like I do, and NOT use the keyword tool. Here's the thing though, any article that you create is a good article, and should you create enough articles, you can't help but win in the long run, and this is what my strategy is. I'm doing some product articles, articles that are stories that I write because I enjoy doing it, and because I've got readers that seem to enjoy reading them; and then there's this type of article, which is meant to help anyone that is new here, or is looking to learn something that maybe they didn't know, and I do. So, I'm not just trying to win with SEO article marketing, I'm also hoping to write enough little stories that maybe somebody somewhere will see one, really like it; and maybe I'll make a name for myself in that way too. In any case, I hope that this has been useful to someone, and I'm very willing to answer any questions that anyone might have at any time. In the meantime, let's all keep writing.

http://shetoldme.com/Lifestyle/Simple-Life-on-a-Rural-Texas-Farm