HubPages, one alternative to blogging.

HubPages was one interesting surprise when I was looking for another source of passive online income.

At first I was very sceptical:

You start with a PageRank 0, because your HUB is placed in a sub domain of HubPages. And I know It takes quite a lot of work to make blog from scratch when you are just starting with it.

But I was in a need to create a long list herbal remedies, that I have collected in a big notepad, so I’ve decided to give it a chance. It is FREE after all.

It took me about 2 months of clever, non-spammy backlinking until my PageRank went to 3 and my work started to pay.

(my chosen niche for HubPages is quite well filled and explored, so it is normal not to have much traffic at first. Everyone knowing from where to copy and paste creates medicinal articles, because the ADs are a bit better paying.)

But never the less, the back linking and promotion I did in the bookmarking sites and my own blog paid off well in 2 months.

There are some important things you need to consider, when you subscribe to HubPages.

• It will take writing at least 50 articles (HUBs) to start seeing some revenue.
• It will take 1-2 months for Google to start taking you seriously and calculating your PageRank properly.
• Don’t ignore the greeting members and try to follow people that are writing in the same niche you decide to focus on. The community is very good and you will find ideas for more articles in what your followers are writing.
• Hop some hubs every day. Give frank opinion by voting or tagging interesting/useful/etc. By doing this, you help the moderating team to raise overall quality of the site and this will reflect on better AD revenues shared with you. Your opinion matters.
• Don’t expect miracles. You still need to make some backlinks to your HUB if you need to have high authority in SERPs.
• Link deep. Don’t just link your profile page. It will go UP naturally, and you need high page rank to pages that are loaded with ADs and Amazon/eBay links and offers.
• Try to do some of the challenges, such as 30/30 or 100/30. You don’t get accolade, but you will feel better when you do.

HubPages Cons

1. Writing a new hub can be a bit of a slow process with the builtin editor. It is very easy to use and powerful, but the JavaScript will be a bit slow on weaker computers. Huge articles (2000+ words) can be quite a challenge for a 2 GHz machine.
2. Title tuner suggestions sometimes are complete nonsense. You better learn your own best SEO practices and ignore the suggestions.
3. Sometimes your hubs may be flagged for moderation by people that don’t like your tone or your ideas. If you can’t stand criticism – better stick with private blog like this one.
4. It was considered Content farm by Google once and severely punished. The site is still recovering (with fast pace) and the moderators are very careful if you upload copyrighted, spammy, low quality or duplicate content. If you are copy-paster HubPages is not for you.
5. There is no possibility for 100% photo or video article (There is a minimum limit of words per picture). If you make such a hub, it is automatically marked as substandard and flagged for moderator review.
6. Pictures used in your articles need to be 100% checked for Copyrights and with good quality or your hub may get unpublished until you fix the issue. (but you are motivated and pointed to free creative commons sites for finding quality images with allowance for commercial use).

HubPages Pros

1. You have a title tuner, that helps you with search engines. The keywords in your article header is very important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Whenever someone searches and lands on your articles, the keywords used will be provided to you, so you can optimize your header if needed. Sometimes it does help a lot to generate more traffic.
2. You get some cash even from visits on your profile page (there is one medium AD unit below your details and accolades).
3. If you are good writer, you will find loyal readers automatically from the ones that are “hopping” hubs of the other writers. With ordinary blog like this one,  this can take months.
4. Monetization is very easy. You only need your own AdSense code. Other possible revenues come from Amazon affiliate sales, that are very easy to setup or eBay (HubPages will help you make eBay account).
5. Layout is quite good and AdSense ADs are added automatically, you only need to take care for the Amazon and eBay if you decide to include them.
6. You easily get between 5 and 6 EUR for 1000 visits, without doing much. Compared to my main blog (yes, this one) it is about 5 times more. I get lees than 1 Euro per 1000 visits (mixed AdSense and Chitika). This is because HubPages is quite big site and they can be on much better terms with Google, Amazon and eBay than the terms a single blogger like me can have.

So, why you don’t signup?

Disclaimer: All the links to HubPages in this article are affiliate links. (You lose nothing by clicking them, but I will get small bonus when you start writing and earning through HubPages)