Using Hubpages to Earn Passive Income
Different Kinds of Money
There are scads of ways you can earn pennies here and there on the internet but they always lead you down the time-consuming path of doing a bunch of menial tasks to earn a few pennies. The money you earn is never worth the time you commit and the income stops when you do. Then there's the odd site or two like WebAnswers, which works on the premise of earning royalties for question and answer submissions. It's still more or less instant money for an up front investment of your time but it lasts a little longer, the payout is more reasonable and the "work" could even be considered fun, if your chief interest isn't making money but using the site as a social media outlet, as many members do.
On the far end of the spectrum then you have the passive income category, where sites like Hubpages publish your articles and pay for page impressions, AdSense clicks, Ebay and Amazon Sales. This is the type of site where you can earn a steady flow of truly passive income, provided you follow a few basic rules and put some effort in without expecting immediate gratification. After all, if you can't bear to publish 10 hubs without seeing a paycheck arrive on your doorstep, then you really aren't the passive income type. Passive income sites always require an enterprising spirit and a degree of patience. The reward, in the end, is the best value however because the more work you do and the quicker you manage to get it all done, the sooner you can get on with your life and forget about Hubpages altogether while receiving checks every month. That's the ticket. As they say, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained".
That's all well and good, you may be thinking, "...but just because I can succeed with Hubpages, doesn't mean I will. How can I rise to the top instead of floundering with the rest of the masses?". Well, read on because that's what this hub is all about!
The Big Question: How Much Can I Make On Hubpages?
I've seen all the journals from members who tracked their progress as they wrote more and more hubs. There seems to be a turning point at which earnings become non-trivial but you MUST realize something first. These guys all followed the rules above and are all skilled at writing quality hubs in an area or two that they have authority in. They aren't just churning out crap for the sake of hitting a target number of hubs.
Having said that, most decently skilled members who are an authority in a couple of niches seem to start hitting their payout threshold once a month after they've published around 100 hubs. The payout threshold is $50 by the way. This is guaranteed cash for them and they can rest assured that the money will still be coming in even if they take a permanent vacation from writing hubs at that point. So what's it take to reach this point? Consider that during the wintertime, people are less active and spend most of their time indoors vegetating, especially on weekdays after work. If instead you wrote 1 hub each day, then after about 3 months (half the winter) you'd have enough hubs to bring in some significant earnings. It may sound like a big commitment but what would you otherwise do with that time? Are you really losing time or simply putting it to better use? Not only that but it shouldn't be torture if you're interested/skilled in these topics as I suggested and you're going to be making money from it. On top of all that, you get to freeze your knowledge and indeed your personality forever and share it with others so that they may benefit, if you need a truly altruistic motive. Certainly beats clicking on casino ads 5 times to make 6 cents, doesn't it?
Write About Things You Enjoy
How to Make A Hub Walkthrough
There's a Formula to Success on Hubpages
Doing well for yourself on Hubpages requires a certain level of experience, or in this case, experience handed down. After a while you start to figure out what works and what doesn't. I didn't know what I was doing when I started so what do you think I did? I looked around for all the members who were making all the money and examined what they were doing. I read their hubs, I read their posts, I tried to understand how they were any different than me. I noticed a few things they were doing that I was not. Having written many hubs myself, these should seem self-evident but I'll say it anyway because you'd be surprised how often it ISN'T self-evident to a lot of new members.
Writing Skills
This isn't some forum to post how you're feeling in a poorly constructed sentence fragment. This is a place to write rich and flowing articles, ideally like those you might read in the newspaper. There's no reason why you should be making spelling mistakes, using poor grammar, L337 speek or any such nonsense that would degrade your reader's impression of your work. If you don't have a good command of the English language, Hubpages isn't for you... yet. If you're too immature to use the English skills you were taught properly, or you tend to just ramble on and on about nothing, again, not the site for you. Write each article with intent and with a passion for articulating your opinions, ideas and information.
Article Topics
While it is true that certain topics have more readers than others, you will fail if you try to write about things you know little about simply because you believe those articles generate more money. They only generate more money if you're actually competent in a given topic. I can't stress enough to write about things that truly interest you (like this hub) or things you can speak to from a position of authority because you have a skill in that area (like this hub). Don't write a bunch of hubs about cord blood transplants (knowing the ads pay high royalties) if your only knowledge of the topic came from Wikipedia 5 minutes ago.
How-To Articles Are Great
Complete Hubpages' Checklist!
At the very top right of every hub you make, there's a checklist of things you should include so that Hubpages considers that hub "rich and high quality". You'll see a bunch of empty boxes with word counts, number of images in the hub, number of videos, polls and other capsules. You should strive to check off every box in that list for every hub. It's really easy to get them all and doing so will pretty much ensure you get a decent hub score. Statistically speaking, hubs that satisfy the checklist are viewed more often and with more returning visitors than those hubs that ignore the checklist and just fill the hub with a big gob of text.
Dominate Your Niche!
As I am a very methodical and logical person it seemed a good idea to diversify my range of hub topics as much as possible, writing across many different categories so that I could use the Hubpages analytics to see for myself which topics tended to grab the most traffic. While I was successful in learning which hubs performed the best, I failed in maximizing my income because I spread myself too thin and made myself out to be a jack of all trades and master of none. Having 1 hub in a category makes your exposure very limited and you won't get many cross-links from other related hubs. To make money you need to dominate a category so that your hubs are everywhere and are linked everywhere by other hubs from other members. Once I figured this out, I chose my most successful categories and started focusing on them exclusively. It's not the absolute number of hubs that determines your income but the mastery you possess in a certain area and the exposure in terms of number of hubs in that category. Of course it helps if people also enjoy reading those hubs and are drawn to them with a little SEO and aesthetic thumbnail art and hub descriptions. To re-iterate though, become a master at what you do well already and make a name for yourself by centering your hub campaign around it.
Don't Be Anti-Social
Much of your traffic will come from within Hubpages itself. That's not as bad as you might think. Organic searches from Google may not hit your page but someone else's who wrote on the same topic. If their hub links to yours under the "similar hubs" section at the bottom, you get their traffic, which is just as good as if the traffic were organic. By being an active member of the Hubpages community, you can get noticed by other members who may read your hubs, you can inadvertently influence their need to write on the same topic (thereby netting more traffic to your category) and you can gain followers as well. When someone follows you, you'll show up on their page, which is yet another form of networking that helps send traffic your way.
Sign Up For All the Affiliate Programs and Use Referral Links
You should integrate your Adsense account with Hubpages as soon as possible and sign up for earnings with Ebay and Amazon too. The earlier you do this, the earlier you can draw an income from those capsules in your hubs. Also, use referral links in your social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, to draw people to your hubs and sign up for Hubpages themselves. You will earn extra income from their traffic without taking any profit from them. The extra money comes from Hubpages.
Do You Use SEO To Increase Traffic?
About SEO and Hubpages
SEO or "Search Engine Optimization" is a skillset that people use to increase the likelihood of someone finding their page in a Google search (or any other search engine for that matter). It involves creating links to your various hubs by various means like posting in niche forums, begging, purchasing them, making donations to niche websites, sharing links on social media, etc. It's important to note that you can sink a lot of time, effort and money into backlinks and see no results, you can get results that are proportional to your efforts or you can do nothing at all and see great results. The outcome that applies to you depends on how viral your hubs are. If you're good enough at writing hubs then people will actually want to not only read them but to bookmark and share them with others. In so doing, they're doing all the SEO for you. If you're doing SEO, then at least to some extent, your hub isn't commanding the attention that you feel it should, which is a clue that you need to have a closer look at how you're writing and possibly change your strategy.