John Locke is the newest member of the “Kindle Million Club,” and the first independently published author to receive this distinction.  As of June 19th, John Locke has sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The Kindle Million Club recognizes authors whose books have sold over 1 million paid copies in the Kindle Store. Locke joins Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins and Michael Connelly in the Kindle Million Club.

“Kindle Direct Publishing has provided an opportunity for independent authors to compete on a level playing field with the giants of the book selling industry,” said John Locke. “Not only did KDP give me a chance, they helped at every turn. Quite simply, KDP is the greatest friend an author can have.”

Want to sell YOUR fair share of Ebooks?

John Locke’s book How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! is also available now on Kindle.

Kindle books selling for $2.99 to $9.99 pay a 70% royalty to the author. If you have Kindle publications selling for just $2.99 each, you could earn an extra $500 per month with only 250 sales per month! Any author should check out How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!

I know there are people earning much more because they focus more on the mechanics of keyword research instead of just winging it… and they usually also (with Hub Pages Terms of Service) also promote selected outside affiliate products, depending on their niche.

It’s an interesting reflection though – it shows a perseverance most people who say they want to make money never get around to demonstrating.

I’ve included a graphic he made to show how his income progressed on Hub Pages. Now if you do the math the figures didn’t seem to add up, but he explains that he based the number of $816.96 monthly Adsense earnings from what was shown in his account though he had not actually received them in that year (there’s a 30 day time lag in receiving them because it takes time to settle accounts).

He also explains his approach to earning on Hub Pages. Note that in addition to these earnings, many writers on HubPages earn money from contests and that can be pretty substantial as well when you’re just getting started.

His approach, like most of the people profiled in the official Hub Page Success Stories is one of QUANTITY (though your pages must have a certain amount of quality as well. At the very least, they can’t be cut and paste PLR that’s available everywhere else on the web).

As he mentions though, the management of Hub Pages disclosed that one writer made $1,500 per month in Adsense by focusing on a niche and that contained only 50 hubs. That’s some strong content in a niche with some high dollar adsense clicks. Each page was earning $1 per day after HubPages’ cut.

If y0u wonder “Can I make money on the Internet?” it’s worth checking out.

If you can “write”, don’t give up too soon. Check out  Instant Article Wizard to help you!

Here’s the article…

Reflecting on My Success with HubPages

As I said yesterday in the post about making $100 per day on Hub Pages, if you follow the success principles enunciated in these Hub success stories and then add some VERY basic article marketing strategies, I believe you could EASILY DOUBLE what these folks are doing!

Why would you wait for months and months to earn money on Hub Pages when some simple strategies could help you earn money much sooner?

Anyway, here’s what I’ve found since 12/16/2010 on Hub Pages.

1. Follow ALL their rules.

2. No more than 2 affiliate links per hub.

3. No duplicate content.

4. Link to other pages on Hub Pages in each hub.

5. Write quality content without spamming.

6. Do your keyword research up front so you know what keywords you can rank for!

7. Be patient it can take a bit for search engine traffic to appear but Hub Page traffic can get you affiliate product sales.

8. Do whatever you need to keep your user score above 75 (then all your links outside Hub Pages will be “do follow” links)

From my stats, I know that most of you haven’t done that. But that’s ok, I know that only a few really WANT success. The rest just talk and moan.

Here’s an article I wanted to pass along to you though, because it addresses an issue you see again and again at the Hub Page forums.

People say “I’ve built ___________ hubs and been here ________ months and still haven’t made my payout from Google Adsense yet!” (The payout level is $100 per month. That means they are making only pennies per day. Then they’re wondering if they’ll ever make pay out again.

It’s unbelievable. Those people have very high user scores, 80 to 90 so it looks like they’re brilliant. But in reality they are earning nothing.

The sad thing is that it doesn’t need to be that way.

I’ve already had one $80 day and another $47  day and another $90 day and I’ve just been there 6 weeks.

Now these weren’t with Adsense, but I’ve even made more money with Adsense this month than some people say they make in a month evidently!

In other words, if you know A THING about affiliate marketing, using reviews to pre-sell products, some basic keyword research, etc. HubPages can probably make you money when you can’t break into earnings on your own websites.

Anyway, here’s the post. It’s called “Make $100 a day on Hubpages”.

If this has fired you up, check at what traditional hubbers are making here: Success Stories at Hub Pages Then join there.

When you add selected affiliate marketing products, you can probably DOUBLE what these people make. I’m absolutely serious! Try it!

TextBroker.com lets you write for people who need unique content for websites, reports, etc.

The site connects people seeking content with writers, especially US based writers.

Text Broker has a fee schedule based on the quality level at which you write…

Interested? Here’s their information for writers: Text Broker – Writers

Here are some I’ve enjoyed reading:

Analysis of a Successful Hubber: Nelle Hoxie.
Nelle says she is an affiliate for 1,000 merchants but evidently Amazon is one of her best performing ones! Here you can learn a bit more about how this full time internet marketer operates. She has both Hub Pages and her own hosted websites. She earns $1,000 (at the time this Hub was written) from Hub Pages alone, not to mention her other sites.

Analysis of a Successful Hubber: Ryan Kett
Actually Ryan was the guy whose work suggested to me that HubPages was a good income opportunity. His work helped me “take the plunge”… Ryan publishes lots of Hubs and is on his way to earn $2,000 per month. He hopes to be a full time online marketer as his profession.

Last but not least,

Analysis of a Successful Hubber: Misha
Misha doesn’t have as many hubs as the previous two, but he reportedly earns $100 per day from just 21 hubs (other big earners usually have 100′s of hubs!) He proves you don’t need to have 800 hubs to earn $800 per month. How does he do it? He uses this linking system to make sure his hubs get the attention they deserve!

My main negative about “Easy Paycheck Formula” is the word “Easy” in the title. The word “easy” has about a million possible meanings to people. What makes something “easy”?

Compared to catching a speeding bullet with your teeth and not getting killed in the process, everything Sara talks about IS incredibly easy.
But I know that for most people writing anything for the internet is difficult. I love to write but I know that while following her instructions isn’t difficult, costs no “out of pocket” expense to apply the information, and doesn’t require you to climb Mount Everest in a swim suit – some of the things Sara talks about require sheer effort and the will to persist.

Whether you’re totally new to making money online or have some experience under your belt you’ll appreciate:

1. Learning how to craft and implement online marketing campaigns in an hour or less
2. How to accomplish your income goals using free resources like HubPages (that also keeps money in your pocket)
3. It’s ok if you’re just starting from ZERO. Easy Paycheck Formula does not require any technical or internet marketing experience, no lists involved or joint venture (JV) partners to recruit, and best of all you do not have to supply your own product
4. You can see some fairly quick results (i.e. within a week or two, sometimes days though) that encourage you to keep doing more… this creates a “snowball effect”.
5. I’ve never received any complaints that Sara leaves out any important detail. Everything is offered in a step by step fashion.
6. She shows you how she used free traffic methods to ear $100 per day or more from just one project… pretty awesome.
7. She shows you how to pick the right keywords to identify a  buyer.
8. She shows you how to create a “landing page” that “sells”.
9. How to turn an article you write in an hour or less into long term income month after month.

As with any information product of this type, you should be ready to “just add hard work”.  That’s where most people fail I think – giving up too soon.

Here’s what one of her students said:

“I recently took Sara Young’s class and was very impressed with it. I have to admit it took me a little to get the hang of it, but only because Affiliate Marketing was completely foreign to me.

I was a little nervous at first because I am not a writer, but it didn’t make. Sara showed me the most important things to include in my articles, which made it very easy to write.

I absolutely loved the fact that I could go at my own pace. In fact, my family and I went on vacation right in the middle of the classes, then the Holidays hit, and then I had an unexpected death in the family, so I couldn’t always work on the lessons when they were posted. I took a little time off then picked right back up where I left off and still completed the classes with in a three month period.

Best of all I made my first 4 sales before I even got to lesson 8.”

– Kim Schmidt

Likewise, here are some videos about Sara Young’s “Easy Paycheck Formula”:

Want to know more? Check out Sara Young’s “Easy Paycheck Formula”. There’s a money back guarantee if you’re not delighted!

Here’s the simple answer… I’ve had several people sign up from my HubPages links. 1 out of 5 on average actually built a hub! So I can tell you right now that the 80% who haven’t done anything will NEVER earn money on HubPages!

But if you go to the site and check out their “success stories” you’ll find people who – after a while (on average 2 years and many “hubs”) are earning up to $1500 per month from HubPages.

Does such earning have to take forever?

I mentioned this one case study where a fairly experienced (in terms of keyword research) person made $475.26 in his first 30 days. He’s gone on to make $4,000 in fairly short order. Remember that he built 40 hubs using extensive keyword research in his first week.

I’ve been doing the hubs at the rate of about 1 per day over 2 weeks or so (maybe 3 now) and have 17 active hubs with some just being published.  I’ve put in a couple of hours per day maximum. Now I’m about to give you an affiliate link, but this is the product I used to isolate the keyword in question. The product is MicroNicheFinder and it helps me brainstorm keywords to write about (unless I’m just ranting about something where no keyword research is involved! A few of my hubs are just that sort of thing.)

In that time – between Adsense, Ebay, and Amazon – I’ve earned @ $18.70. I consider that pretty decent because lots of people on the forums there talk about going months to a year to get a $100 Adsense payout. At this early stage, most of the traffic is other people on Hub Pages checking out your hub. These are usually other authors, not buyers. 

The best part of that were two product sales from Amazon from a highly targeted keyword for an electronics product.

Bottom Line: while the “real money” at HubPages is in the long term “residual” traffic and (usually it seems) Adsense clicks, you can start earning money right away if you use a tool like MicroNicheFinder to find keywords that are highly targeted, have decent traffic, and little competition. HubPages can get you at the top of the search engines for these “long tail keywords”  all by itself without lots of back linking on your part.  For more competitive keyword niches, you’ll need to do backlinking too most likely.

The best thing about HubPages is that you can start for free, get experience, learn from the other folks there, make some money and impr0ve gradually. You can see how your hubs are producing and then work to refine them.  There are many helpful people there and as long as you try not to produce spam pages, you’ll be welcome!

And now you know you can start making some money right away… maybe several hundred dollars if you have the time, knowledge and energy!

One more thing. People who are successful writing hubs often make more money than just from Hub pages. The person making $1,500 from Adsense monthly makes twice as much from other ventures that are attributable to what she learned at HubPages. She works from home in a beautiful rural area and attributes much of her success to learning to write at Hub Pages.  You may find people who check out your hubs asking you to be PAID to write for them. Not too bad…

If you can write without spamming people, you can stand to do well there.

Any topic you choose when put on a Hub Page stands a decent chance (just from bieng a hub page) of getting on Google’s first page of search results.

Combine Hub Pages with SEO, Keyword Research, and backlinking, and you have a very likely topic for a top ranking on Google.

Here’s a hub I made today. I think I’m learning a bit more about optimizing hub pages.

I am trying to more seamlessly intertwine text and ads.

I’m still learning but this is the progress so far:

Natural Remedies for High Blood Pressure

Amazon is a major source of affiliate revenue on Hub Pages, so it pays to know how to do this correctly.

I’ve been telling you how much I’m enjoying HubPages, but I wanted you to get started correctly, and this advice from WryLit that could save you time and speed up the learning curve for making money.

WryLit is a writer from Australia and she suggested that this was the first thing she’d do if she were to start all over again.

I’ve included a small portion of her Hub on this topic. If you like it, click through and read the whole thing!

When I first joined hubpages, the idea of writing sales hubs not only scared me, it also made me feel like I was ‘selling out’ as a writer. However I’ve since come to the conclusion that:

Informational hubs don’t sell Amazon items – people who visit how to or guide hubs are usually just looking for answers. To sell items you need to aim at buyers, which means you need to write your hub, title and tags based around an item. You may get occasional clicks or maybe hit it lucky with a particular information topic which attracts buyers, but this is rare.
Sales hubs are where the money is – I earn reasonable amounts from Adsense as well as Amazon on my sales hubs.
Being a writer is about making people want to read what you’ve written, not just about writing a famous novel or a poem.
Of course the idea can still be a little scary if you’re trying to make the transition from informational or creative writing to sales writing. However I can guarantee one thing – it does get easier with time.

Read it all: How to Write an Amazon Sales Hub and Sell Amazon Items