Celebrating 5 Years On Hubpages: A Writer's Experience

Having recently celebrated 5 years on Hubpages I thought it would be nice to reward myself with some of the earnings I had saved from all the hard work. I have therefore just bought myself a lovely new semi-acoustic guitar (for a very good reason) and a top of the range Android tablet PC to celebrate... and just in time for Christmas too!

My experience with, and opinion of, Hubpages over the course of the last five years has changed dramatically. When I first signed up in 2007 I wasn't that active and I thought that Hubpages would turn out just like all the other writing websites out there like Helium. I had tried Helium but once I reached payout there they refused outright to pay me but I hadn't earned much there anyway.

At first I was using Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate links on my hubs although the amount of income generated was minimal, despite receiving good traffic. I reached payout from Adsense a couple of times over the years but my earnings from Adsense don't amount to much, just a few pounds (dollars) a week on average.

Eventually I switched my Amazon affiliate links for eBay affiliate links, signed up to Hubpage's very own earnings scheme and integrated my Adsense account with my Hubpages account and all of a sudden I was set to hit the payout threshold every single month! Since setting up my account like this my Hubpages earnings have been consistently increasing, as is traffic. It's certainly not as much as I would make from a full-time job but I'm happy with my earnings at Hubpages so far. I seriously now believe that with hard work, time and dedication a very real career can be established as a writer at Hubpages. However, for a writer such as myself I believe this could take another five years yet to establish.

What Has Hubpages Done For Me?

Whilst I believe that it could take another five years to get fully established, I also believe that Hubpages shouldn't be solely relied upon in order to build a career. Hubpages should be used as a springboard to your writing career in order to branch off into other areas such as self-publishing - a mission which I am about to embark on. Although I have already published a mini-ebook entitled Mother Earth: Prison Planet, I am now in the process of writing a book on the subject of NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) entitled Know Your Enemy: Reflections Of NPD, of which only a few Limited Edition copies are to be printed. The books will never be made available commercially, except as a downloadable e-book.

I am hoping that the hard copies of the book, due to their rareness and the information contained within, will go on to become worth a fortune. If this happens the few people who paid for the copies to be printed may have made a good little investment and will be able to make a profit on them should they decide to sell.

As I delve into the world of authoring books you can expect many more books from me in the future on a variety of my favourite topics (assuming I can survive that long).

In addition to becoming a writer Hubpages has helped me showcase some of my knowledge and experience and has helped me attain some work outside of the site including audio emastering, writing music and web and software development. I haven't made a great deal of money from this but every little helps. Back in 2007 I was making good money judging music, investing in albums and more although by 2012 this had dried up massively and Hubpages had become the leading website that I was using. Hubpages now accounts for 90% of my online earnings.

I will now continue to write here at Hubpages whilst moving into the world of writing books, though it probably won't be quite as regular and I have bought the semi-acoustic guitar with the intention of providing guitar tuition to the schools and colleges in my local area and also to get back out and about playing gigs. I will also continue to write music with EleMental Tunes and we now have another album in progress.

I have also just invested a small chunk of money in three upcoming albums by a well known artist and if this artists last album release is anything to go by I am set to make an absolutely huge profit. The sooner these albums get released the better!

So What's So Great About Hubpages?

I have tried running my own websites, blogs, online businesses, etc and it was very hard work. I found that it wasn't worth the effort. However, Hubpages takes an awful lot of the hard work out of online publishing making it much easier, quicker and much more efficient. For example, Hubpages is fully equipped with capsules for adding quick content without any coding and also social networking buttons are automatically including on every hub published. In addition, Hubpages has it's own active community of users and therefore manages to bring traffic to your hubs without much outside promotion. These are all factors which you would have to consider when running your own website.

Hubpages provides all the tools you need and has become my all-time favourite (and most successful) website.