This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.
Christopher asks:
Do you know anything about hubpages.com? Is it a credible source to publish content on and get paid?
Also, can you post content on Hubpages, that you have posted say on your own site?
Yes I am familiar with Hubpages. It is basically a publishing platform where people from around the world can create pages, called hubs, on topics where they have expertise or interest. It is a legitimate website, and yes you can make money with it, because Hubpages will display ads on your hubs, and you earn a percentage of the revenues generated.
How much money can you make there? Well, it depends on how much time and effort you are willing to put into your hubs. I have seen people who make over $1,000 monthly from their hubs. But then again they have hundreds (if not thousands) of these.
Do I think this is a solid business model to make money? No.
First and foremost because you won’t own the hubs you will create. You will retain the copyrights over the content you write, but Hubpages owns the hubs, so they control the traffic, the brand, the backlinks and the revenues, and then they share a part of it with you.
A much better strategy is to publish your content on a platform you own, for example on a website or blog. This will give you complete control over the elements involved. For instance, you would be able to sell the website in the future if you decide to. The same is not true with your Hubpage hubs.
Does this mean that Hubpages is useless? Not at all. Just like any online platform, it can be used to promote your own online properties. For instance, many online marketers use Hubpages to build backlinks. All you need is to create some pages on topics relevant to your main website or blog, and then link back to it as a resource for people looking for more information. The only detail to pay attention on is your Hubscore (a kind of quality score assigned to all accounts). You need to have a quality score of 75 or higher if you want the links inside your hubs to be followed.
Finally, try to avoid creating hubs with the same content that is already published on your website. This is called duplicate content, and it might get you in trouble with Google if you do this in mass scale. The best thing is to create new and unique content for every marketing activity you will carry out online (e.g., hubpages, article marketing, social media marketing and so on).
Very useful article. I read elsewhere earlier that it’s better to be an early commenter but sometimes coming in late can have value. Here for example reading the previous comments together with the article provided more value for me. I agree that it’s always better to have internet real estate that you own, however, as others have pointed out the freebie platforms (hubs, squidoo, etc) can be useful additives.
Making money with HubPages is a little more complicated than just publishing Hubs. I make a lot of money from HubPages, but i use them in conjunction with Clickbank and then promote the Hubs using article directories. It takes a little wotk but because it’s easy to get your Hubs ranked high on Google, it can be very profitable.
Yes! I cannot agree more.
I am a programmer. Despite my previous websites, I started learning and working on internet marketing with Squidoo and felt it was uncontrollable.
I eventually chose to build my own blog. But now I think I was totally wrong because my site is a blog. What I am doing is BLOGGING but not e-commerce. I have been spent a lot of time creating posts instead of building functions and design.
I hope I could treat Squidoo and Hubpages, whatever I use, more seriously in the beginning.
Hi,
I think hubpages is good for beginners who just want to learn about what is blogging, they can learn basic concepts like seo, backlinks etc. and also they can play around amazon ebay, adsense implementation without any investment.
so hubpages is good for learning and backlinks. but your Good will is at your OWN domain.
Thanks
Preetam
I agree with Chris, I think a lot of people don’t fully understand that to be successful with Hubpages I feel you must interact with other users of Hubpages on a regular basis and provide content rich information in order to make money.
Also Keyword Research is vital if you are trying to get traffic from the big search engines and not just through Hubpages.
I myself, have been very successful with the promoting of Clickbank Products within Hubpages and in fact in the last couple months I have seen those profits absolutely skyrocket!
These are some great tips. I have always struggled to compete with other hub page authors in my niche. I promote the gaming niche and was sad to see low score.
And I’ll surely be more active on the forums. Thanks for the tips!
Making money with HubPages is a little more complicated than just publishing Hubs. I make a lot of money from HubPages, but i use them in conjunction with Clickbank and then promote the Hubs using article directories. It takes a little wotk but because it’s easy to get your Hubs ranked high on Google, it can be very profitable.
In a month and a half, I’ve written more than 100 articles for Demand studios. Sure, they are pretty mindless, but say I could write 50 relatively interesting articles per month. Then, on HubPages, I’d have exactly 600 articles in one year, feeding me hundreds of dollars per month, say $400 per month, for as long as HubPages is running. Meanwhile, at the rate I’m going, I’ll earn 8,400 in a year at Demand Studios. It would take me 21 months after getting my HubPages up and running to get as much as Demand would pay me… but I wouldn’t have to work too hard during that time. Immediate reward v. long-term income. Very interesting.
@Jason, thanks for stopping by.
You have some valid points on your comment.
Hubpages has a good reputation with Google and other search engines which means your hubs will index quickly and often rank well too.I use hubpages to link back to relevant post on my own blog.
However, what you are not telling your audience is that they will get much more traffic for writing a hub than if they simply published an article on their own website. I write on blogger, examiner.com, ehow, and Hubpages, and by far I make the most from Hubpages. Also, selling your website at a future date seems a little iffy to me, and some of us actually write on the web because we enjoy writing.
You can make money on hubpages if you produce enough fresh, original content that people will search out. Of course, that assumes you have your hubs monetizes (i.e. use adsense, ebay or amazon ads). That is the rub, finding the hot topics. That can take a good amount of time in itself.
Many people use hubpages along with other publishing sites like Squidoo, blogs, social networking and bookmarking sites as part of a larger niche marketing plan. Essentially placing backlinks in multilple places to drive traffic to their desired targets. It’s not easy and can be a lot of work but, if done well, can generate substantial traffic and revenue.
You speak truth. I’ve been writing on Xomba almost since they started in 2006, and Hub since 2007. You mentioned those who make serious money on Hub have hundreds, if not thousands of articles posted, and, for the most part YOU ARE RIGHT!!
I have done a little math regarding the number of articles actually needed to realize $100 per month on Xomba or Hub or combined. The magic number is 600 articles.
And, as you know, there can always be a wildcard (one particular article) which will propel you on the fast-track to more revenue. I like to call this the “dice-roll” for Adsense revenue.
Your points are absolutely true. Using writing platforms to write will not make you wealthy fast — unless you get a winning dice-roll, but, for most I believe its 600 articles + 2 to 4 years of regular posting, and don’t forget to bookmark.
I use my website in a way like a pathway between Xomba and Hub using links and extensions of the articles content…
So, listen to Mr. Scocco, he speaks truth….
And, Daniel thanks for following MyrtTheTurtUSA on Twitter….
Some people just use hubpages for backlinks. Some people makes money by creating hubpages for other people
er, sorry .. typo ..”i’m a little bit confused”.
Is Squidoo a lot similar to HubPages?
I wonder why Google banned Squidoo and why Google approve HubPages.com, i’m a little bit confuced on it.
i agree with V.C.
i feel little proud of writting on my own blog
I don’t like the idea going to write at hub.
I like owning my own website/blog.
Agree. I have made several hundreds of $$$ with Hubpages. However, you should never think of a solid business model as you will die if HubPages die. You should build up your own image and reputation and do not need to share your revenue at least with Adsense
We can also rewrite our old post and submit it in hub page to avoid duplicate content. 😀
Interesting Post.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Hub Pages and that it’s good for getting some dolif traffic and back links, but i still think you’ll be better of with a own hosted blog or website where you have 100% control.
@ Tom
I didn’t do much split testing but at the time when I was using both squidoo and hubpages (about a year ago) for driving traffic to another website, my hubs were ranked higher than squidoo lenses. But it really means nothing, depends on your niche and keywords.
I think that duplicate content is not a problem when we’re talking about two separate domains. You can get in trouble if you publish duplicate content within one domain. It makes sense, because in other case sites like ezine articles would not have very good rankings.
There’s another thing… as far as I know it’s against hubpages rules to publish content that is not original.
Stay away from hubpages, the fact that you need to maintain a quality score just to have your links dofollow is ridiculous.
You are much better off using such basic platforms as blogger.
I am actually starting with Squidoo, is there much difference between the two?
@ Oscar. I think getting someone to do it for you is kinda frowned upon on Hubpages. People pride themselves on producing their own work and growing from that. They have a great supportive community of “Hubbers” and it becomes fun after some time but I prefer having my own blog and website. You get to keep 100% (wink)
Hubpages are like social networking…there is a great community out there…building relationships would be the key
It is also great from traffic point
I’ve written a review on Hubpages a while back. Great we share the same opinions. Hubpages is a good medium to make your articles read by more users. I used it myself to promote the articles on my blog. I must say it didn’t give me too much referring visitors or a much bigger audience. I didn’t keep in mind Google’s duplicate content rule. I’ll definitely check into that.
Thanks for the tips!
Of all the revenue-sharing article sites out there, HubPages is one of the better ones.
Although it is a lot of work, some folks do earn $1-2k/mo, not bad if you don’t have much else going on.
For me, I’ve used Squidoo and eHow to help drive traffic for my sites. Kinda like killing two birds with one stone.
I saw hubpages on Shoemoney’s site a few weeks back and considered making one. The more I thought about it, the more I realized exactly what you said: they keep the site, the traffic, and the brand.
I didn’t know that having a score over 75 would make your links dofollow. It sounds like that could make it worth your time to increase your PR/SERP.
If you are writing different content for your hubpage for backlinks, why not just write slightly better work and try to secure some guest posts? I would think the link would be more valuable and the traffic is already there…
Good tips, Daniel. I didn’t know 75+ quality score fetches dofollow links from HubPages.
You mentioned the backlinks. But the referrals are important as well. My HubPages articles bring the maximum referrals to my site.
What I normally do is write part of an article in HubPages while dropping a link there to my site for the rest.
However I do agree with your contention that one should have contents in his own site.
This was interesting. I didn’t know they pay us. Maybe I could try to get my VA to create some hub pages.