HubPages is what I call an “article aggregator“, meaning that articles are posted by anyone without any strict editorial guidelines or category structures. Anyone can post about anything, more or less. There are many out there, but I have had good successes with HubPages. Since they aren’t as well known as places like Associated Content, I thought I would take a moment to introduce you.

You can sign up for a HubPages account with just a username and email address. Write up a nifty profile about yourself, and you’re ready to go (here’s mine). Once you’re set up, you can use their online tools to post your first article, or “hub”. The tools are different than most, using a capsule system that lets you group text, photos and more together really easily. You can add revenue-earning capsules like Amazon book links or Ebay ads with just a click.

The real earnings come from Google Adsense ads. When you are signing up for HubPages, it will help you apply for an Adsense account. Once that has been approved, you need to paste your Google code into your HubPages profile under Affiliate Settings. Then you automatically start earning from the Google ads that are formatted into the pages. No work on your part to include the ads. Very nice.

As with most aggregators, you’ll find a great deal of questionable content on HubPages. But you’ll also find that most of your traffic comes in directly through search engines, so you’re not going to have to worry so much about what anyone else is writing. And Google will pick up good hubs VERY quickly, meaning that you’ll get a decent amount of traffic coming in from search engines. HubPages does have a great flagging system in place too, so you can let the main editors know about posted spam or really bad articles.

There is a good community among Hubbers, and you can add other writers to your “favorites” and join their fan clubs. Getting to know other people can help build a readership for your work, and build traffic by linking to and from other articles.

I like writing for Hub because I can cover any topic that I want, and the tools are easy to use. No messy editorial guidelines or deadlines to meet. They have traffic statistics for each page you publish as well. Your Hubscore reflects your popularity, success and productivity levels. Not that meaningful, but fun to watch. Gives me a personal goal to keep my score above 90.

And yes, I do earn from my HubPages articles. Most of my websites get an average 1% or less rate of ad clicks. Meaning fewer than 1 person out of every hundred readers clicks on an ad. But with Hubpages, my click rate is usually more than 4%. Of course, it all depends on your subject matter and how much effort you put into getting readers to see your site.

If nothing else, it gives you a place to have your work visible online and can be a great location to link to when providing links to your work in your online resume or other job applications.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under Sites to Write For. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.