WHEN I GET RICH .com

What’shub with Hubpages?

// oktober 5th, 2009 // Internet & Software, Social Networking, Sponsored Reviews

Hubpages, you might’ve heard of it already and perhaps you’re already using it. For bloggers that don’t care about or don’t want to waste time on the looks of their blog Hubpages is a good opportunity. Let me rephrase that: for bloggers that just want to write, Hubpages is a good opportunity. Their motto: Publish Easily, Get Traffic, Make Money. Well, do they meet up the promise? Read on and find out.

What’s a Hub? According to Wiktionary: A point where many routes meet and traffic is distributed, dispensed or diverted. And this is exactly how Hubpages.com works. With 101,212 users and 516,211 published articles it’s a well-sized society of writers and readers.

So how do you stand out in this crowd? Well, in the same way as you’re trying to stand out with your blog. But now, the only thing you have to worry about is  writing. Plus, with a couple of clicks you can create a nice, simple layout for your articles. Complete with pictures AND advertisements – if you have an AdSense account.

Get traffic and be widely read

According to the illustration it should be easy to get traffic. Is it?

The good thing about HubPages is the direct feedback you receive from your fellow Hubbers. When you publish a post, some people will read it. Some (aprox. 2 out of 10) of your readers will rate it with a ‘+‘ or a ‘-‘. In this way’ll you’ll quickly know how you’re articles are received by the public. This can be used as a great tool for improving your writing skills and/or to learn what you’re public is interested in. But an easier way to learn what your public is interested in is the ideabank, where readers drop their questions and ideas about stuff they would like to read about.

From all this we can learn that the best way to gain traffic to your articles – or hubs – is to answer the questions of the readers. At least then you can be sure that people’ll read it. The idea behind the ideabank is nice, even though 70% of the ideas are a bunch of crap (see illustration). I have one answer for most of them: GOOGLE! Will this give me traffic to my hubs. No, it won’t.

The Frontpage

One important aspect in maximizing your traffic is the rating system. As mentioned earlier, readers can ‘+‘ or ‘-‘ your hubs. This has an influence on your rating as a writer – or Hubber. Other factors that influence your rating are originality of your articles (did you write it?), your number of posts and the size of your fanclub (HubPages’ very own version of Digg, etc.). So keeping your rating to go up shouldn’t be too difficult, as long as your original.

Hubpages has a ‘Featured Authors’ heading at the landing page, which gives Hubbers that hit a rating of approx. 97 (out of 100) a chance to shine. And this is what makes HubPages an interesting medium. As soon as you hit this point, the traffic to your hubs will be skyhigh.

Make Money with HubPages

So is it really that easy to make money with HubPages? I don’t know. It is easy to insert the ads into your articles. You just enter your Google Adsense and/or Kontera Publisher ID in your account info and you’re ready to go! The downside to this is that it takes a while (about 4 days!) for Google Adsense to detect what kind of content your articles are carrying. For example, my first post on Hubpages was disturbed by dating-ads for a couple of days. Which isn’t very charming – or relevant – if you’re talking about an online casino scam. After one week of running Kontera on my Hubs, their ads still didn’t appear. So this also doesn’t seem to be all it’s cracked up to be!

The Verdict

It’s a great idea! Altough I prefer to run my own blog. Because then I’m in control and have more insight.

It might look like I’m talking down on Hubpages. I really think it’s a great service. It offers a great change for people with no knowledge of HTML or PHP to reach out to the world and do what they always wanted to do; writing. And if that is all you care about, you should definitely go for it.
However, what we are here for is to earn money and traffic, which isn’t as easy as they say it is. This needs a lot of work, writing and patience. Much like running your own blog.