How to Make Money with HubPages

Hubpages is one of the write-and-get-paid websites where you can write about pretty much anything you want and earn money for your efforts. This is the short explanation of the site - but there is quite a bit more to it.

You earn money when there is traffic to the articles you write and the visitors click on advertisements that are displayed on the page. For this reason, traffic is one of the most important elements that will help you make money online with Hubpages. On thing is certain, making money online is not an easy feat - but there are quite a few ways to do it.

You can obviously provide a service or sell a product. You can also do online copywriting or freelance writing. But that is not for everyone. I have been watching HubPages for a while and I think that if you can learn how to use the site to make money, i.e., you learn how to create so-called “hubs” that generate a lot of traffic, convert traffic to ad clicks or affiliate sales, and rise to the top of the search engine rankings, then you will know a great deal about internet marketing. (Basically, you need to do the same things you would do with your own blog or website.) And this experience will help you a lot in whatever kind of business you plan to get into online.

In the online environment it is all about words. Words are where search engines can really dig in and find relevant information for people surfing the web. Because of this, online marketing or making money online more often than not depends on writing, good writing.

A lot has been published on the subject of writing for humans versus writing for search engines. In my mind, it is important to do both, meaning that you do have a focus on certain keywords, but you do not want to write in such a way that the content is unreadable for a human being. You always want to write for people first, and for search engine bots second. There is a lot of value in enticing people not only to read your content but to come back and read it again and/or more of it.

However, that being said, there is also a lot of value in getting visitors interested in your work in order to encourage a click through on AdSense and affiliate links. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but if you write really hacky articles that are filled only with keywords and nothing else, your work will be weeded out by Google and sent to search results nirvana. If people cannot find your work you will not make any money.

HubPages is a good place to start your writing career because your articles immediately get a boost in search engine rankings since the site is regarded by Google as a network that produces informative and helpful user-generated content. HubPages does a good job of policing itself in terms of eliminating crap or spam content and making sure their advertising networks run smoothly and there is no fraudulent activity going on. As a result, your content will be indexed by search engines a lot faster than if you started posting to a blog of your own. It could take you months to get a few readers to an article on your own blog or website, whereas it may just take a few hours or a day or two to get readers to your hub.

How to Make Money with Hubpages

First, you have to sign up. If you haven’t yet, sign up here. Then return to this article to read the rest – I promise it will help you.

The way you earn money on HubPages is through Google´s AdSense program, Clickbank, and affiliate links through eBay and Amazon. You can also make money using an advertising network called Kontera, but do not worry about it for now because it really does not pay that well. If you are a savvy internet marketer you can also make money on HubPages with your own affiliate links to third party websites.

The revenue is split with HubPages 60/40 in your favor. It works like this: 6 times out of 10 your ID is used in the advertisements, which means you will earn on a click or sale made during this time. The other 4 times HubPages has the potential to earn money for an action taken. People sometimes think that the total revenue is just split 60/40, but that is not the case. Your ID is used randomly 6 times out of 10. It is a generous pay structure that allows quite a few people to make good money by publishing articles on HubPages.

HubPages is a good place to start writing online, and even making money online. I mentioned earlier that you will want to use keywords in your articles in order to be competitive and gain traffic to your work - because that is what you need to do if you are interested in making any money. The best way to do this is by imagining what someone would type into a search engine in order to find the information you are providing.

If you were going to write about “making money online by writing,” then you should choose that phrase as your keyword phrase and use it in your article. The next thing you need to consider is how competitive a term is. You can do this by using the Google Keyword Tool at the following URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool will show you how many times your keyword has been searched in the past month and will give you a monthly average. It will also provide you with suggestions of related terms that may be better options for you to use because they are less competitive. It may sound a little confusing at first, but you will get the hang of it after you do keyword research a few times. You also want to look at the price paid per click, which will give you a good idea of how much money ads that will display will be worth. The figure shown is not the total that you will earn because Google keeps some of the money, but you can easily see which terms are “worth” more and which ones are worth less.

In my next post I shall go into more detail about choosing keywords for your internet writing. But for now, write down or copy and paste two or three sets of terms and how often they are searched and what they are worth. Now, type the keyword phrase into Google to see how many pages pop up. This is not an exact science but it will give an idea of how much content on the internet uses the term you are searching. If 100,000,000 pages come up, there are a lot of entries about what you are planning to write about, so it may be a lot more difficult to compete and get to the top of the search engines with your page. However, if only 250,000 pages come up, you have found a niche in which you can compete and that you may even be able to “own” by getting your page to the top. This, in short, is how you make good money in internet marketing with content and Google AdSense.

If you have a specialized skillset - and every single one of us has at least one - I highly recommend you start creating content based on it on the internet. For instance, I notice that I sometimes get a few visitors to this site who are looking for ways to make money while unemployed. HubPages is one such way. Start creating content about stuff you have expertise in. It does not matter if it is plumbing, roofing, gardening, or investing. If you can create content that is useful to people and valuable in one way or another, you will be able to make money.

Once you have signed up, let me know if you need some help figuring out what to write about. I’ll do my best to help you out by giving a push in the right direction in terms of keywords and ideas.

Please read my second post about HubPages called "Make Money with HubPages Part 2: Backlinks".

Good luck!

P.S.: A very nice post on how to make money with HubPages can be found here.

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