I have mainly been using Hubpages to do some SEO experiments and try and get a couple of extra links to my websites. I did one product review type hub, where the products are around $450, but didn’t expect to make any sales.

I was checking my Amazon earnings and I found I had made a $450 sale, which I get about 5-6% of. The hub didn’t take long to write and I have zero knowledge of the actual products.

Although you might not see immediate results, doing keyword research, writing articles and knowing some basic SEO, like how to get links, can make you some decent money.

I suggest signing up with Hubpages and giving them a try.

I like setting new challenges, so I thought I would run a little experiment to see if I can get a new site to rank on page 1 for a two word key phrase.

I have registered the domain quite some time ago and could only get a .info. The top sites are wikipedia, which I don’t think I will be able to outrank, but it would be nice just to get on the front page.

The keyword phrase has a global search volume of 22,200 searches a month, but only 204,000 competing websites.

I am not a big fun of doing lots of scientific testing. I just want to see how much work I have to do to get this site ranked. I have added just one link from one of my own websites, so far. It is indexed and is getting a little traffic from Google.

The site just has a few pages of a few hundred words a page so far. I thought about revealing the site in the post, but on second thoughts, I don’t think it is a good idea.

I have now completed 47 articles on Infobarrel and just 3 articles away from my September goal of 50. I have lost a little interest in Hubpages and still stuck on 60 hubs. I also haven’t done any ezine articles yet.

I just came back from a short break, so I am feeling a little refreshed and hopefully will able to all of my articles done.

I suppose the Olympics and spending 6 months in China was the high(low?)light for me in 2008. It was an unforgettable experience in so many different ways. One thing is for sure, I won’t be going back to China for a long while.

The past few months have also been fun and interesting. Two months in Thailand, a bit of time in Malaysia and the past couple of weeks in Sumatra, Indonesia. I had another bad experience in Indonesia a few days ago, losing my passport on a bus. Long story, but I manage to track it down and recover it, along with some cash and my valuable ATM/credit cards, but it was a harrowing few hours wondering if it had been stolen or if I would even be able to get it back.

At least it had made me to be me careful again for a while.

The Olympic site wasn’t so much of a success and although I love blogging and building websites, perhaps I need to sit back and have a hard think about what I am currently doing and what I want to from now. My family also miss me terribly and I have to admit that it is hard not seeing my sister’s children grow up. I also read about so many people actually wanting to move to Australia that it sometimes makes me think, maybe it is not such a bad place to live.

I have thought about running some kind of guesthouse on a nice beach in Asia, but I sometimes wonder if that would be sustainable, with constant threats of terrorism and political instability. Perhaps I should look to my home country where at least I will have full legal rights to own and run my own business.

Some of the things I have thought of doing include:

- getting a job in SEO/SEM for a company in Australia
- becoming a migration agent and leveraging my Australia Forum site to find customers
- starting my own SEO/SEM company and taking on real clients
- starting a website targeted for Australia based on successful models I have seen overseas

Or a combination of any of the above.

Of course I don’t plan on doing any of this right now, with the economy the way it is.