Get Started Writing Online with HubPages and Google AdSense

Having been an eBay seller for 5 years, I’ve realized that writing online is very different from online selling. With online selling you have an item, write a listing, sell the item, make some money and that’s the end of it. With online writing you can write an article, upload it to the Internet and it can stay there, earning residual money potentially for ever....

This is not a get rich quick scheme, it’s a method of earning money by working. You have to put in the hours, the people who put in the hours get the reward.

The principle is, you write an article, then there are Google ads on that article. When people click on the ads, you get the money. The article that gets the most clicks doesn’t necessarily get the most money. I’ve heard people complain that their articles get many views, but they don’t earn much money. It takes time. Don’t click on your own Google ads, when you sign up for Google you agree not to click on your own ads. People have done that, they get banned from Google for life, there’s no second chance.

When once you write an article and it appears on the Internet, it takes 3 months before it really gets into the searches. The length of time your article has been up on the Internet makes a huge difference. Keywords also make a difference. Having good keywords on your article is a must.

If you already have a blog, you can go back through your articles and change them so that they have good keywords.

When you apply for Google you need to have something to offer to Google. It usually takes 2-3 weeks to get an account. Go to Google and search for “apply for Google Adsense” and follow one of the links. Then they give you a code which you enter into the correct place wherever you write.

There are other places you can sign up for ad revenue, Google is just the biggest and most widely used.

How do you earn money?

· Advertising

· Affiliate marketing

If someone clicks on the Google ads on your article, you earn money. The ads range from 5 cents up to about $35. If the ad is on your own webpage you get 100%, if it is on HubPages, it is split 60% for you, 40% for HubPages. HubPages is higher in Google searches, so you are more likely to get more hits on HubPages than you are on your own webpage.

If someone clicks on an Amazon ad they go to Amazon. If they make a purchase, then you get a percentage. It starts at 4%, but the more volume you do, the more the percentage goes up, to a maximum of 15%. You can choose to advertise specific products, or you can put an Amazon ad on your webpage and Amazon chooses the products to advertise.

When to sign up

If you already have a blog or a webpage, then apply to Google now, but if you are only writing on HubPages, write 10 hubs before you apply to Google.

Where do I write for residual income?

There are many places you can write for residual income, but the top 4 in my opinion are

· HubPages

· Squidoo

· Xomba

· InfoBarrel

You can also write on your own blog.

I personally think you get more money writing articles than writing blogs. If you already have a blog and already have followers, then keep it going, but if you are new then I suggest you write articles not a blog.

Who pays you?

· Google Adsense

· Amazon Associates

· Kontera

· Chitika

· Bing

Any of these you can sign up for and put on your own webpage. Each one has their own rules. One Google rule is that you can’t put other advertisers on the same page as Google (with a few exceptions).

The internet is fluid. Companies close down and other companies open, so in the future there may be others and these companies may not exist.

I did a search on Google, “write online earn money” there are about 30-40 sites where you can write. I believe right now HubPages is the best, but in 12 months time may not be.

How much can I earn?

Here is an article by relache

Scroll down to “my adsense results”, you can see her earnings over a period of time. I find that what she says here is typical of the amount others are earning too. Time on the Internet makes a huge difference. Don’t write articles, think they are not earning anything and then remove them and put them somewhere else or you will lose the time they have been on the internet. By the time you’ve written 100 articles, you could be earning $80-$100 per month on those.

If you are writing on a few different topics you can have more than one HubPages account. I have this account, Cyber Scribe purely for helping people get started writing online. I also have 2 other HubPages accounts dedicated to other topics.

Click here to open a HubPages account 

Then go to the top right and click on the word join in order to join HubPages. Choose your sign in carefully as when you have joined you can never change it.

What can I write?

Here are just a few ideas to get you started writing

· What are you knowledgeable about?

· Where do you live? Where did you used to live?

· Where have you been on vacation?

· What can you do?

· What can you advertise?

· How can you help people?

· Life experiences

· Cooking

· Health

· Free things

Writing your first article

Now go and write your first hub.