Having joined hubpages earlier this year my expectations were not about how to make money here but how to start off a new experience I believed would impact positively on my writing. Hence in the first 7 months of joining I had written only one hub initially doubting if my expectations could ever be realized from here.

But about 2 months ago I started writing hubs that I fancied without doing any of the SEO rituals most hubbers in search of passive income would get themselves into. Suddenly I started making money from some of my hubs and even though the amount wasn’t much it was encouraging for a start. The questions that came to my mind were; what makes one hub lucrative and others not so lucrative? And how can one create hubs that make money? How can one find a good ‘money making’ topic to write about? This led me to using the idea bank on hubpages to look for topics I believed were in demand and to also investigate claims made by some hubbers on how they make money on hubpages. The outcome of my investigation has led me to list out 5 ways of making money here on hubpages.

The 5 ways I have been able to identify on hubpages to make passive income are;

1. Hubpages in house Affiliate program

As the name implies, it is an affiliate program by hubpages designed to reward referring hubbers as they bring in more membership and swell the ranks of hubbers on hubpages. The process of bringing in new hubbers will certainly not be easy considering that most people who sign up to hubpages do so after their first visit so a referral link in one of your blog posts or website articles or even forum ID signature may not do much in compelling people to sign up to hubpages through your referral link. But if you are lucky to get a number of hubbers to sign up through you then you are on your way to generating additional income as you get paid a commission on every dollar your referred hubbers earn.

2. Affiliate programs from Kontera, Adsense, ebay and Amazon

Everybody knows about these affiliate programs but not everybody seems to be interested in the other three (Adsense is the most talked about). I can understand this because a lot of hubbers are excluded from Kontera, ebay and Amazon because of their country of residence plus not having necessary tax data and information that would qualify them for such programs. However for those that are lucky, in addition to adsense there is the option of promoting products being sold on ebay and amazon through reviews and articles that highlight the benefits and features of those products and subtly requesting users to buy such items through the use of polite but instructive statements. On the other hand the use of search engine friendly articles containing keywords that is in demand from search engine users is often times employed to get pay per click income from advertisers. Kontera and Adsense work on the second premise.

3. External affiliate programs

Some smart hubbers are affiliates of online merchants and they ensure that many of their hubs contain information about the products their merchants are selling. By including their affiliate or referral links in their hubs disguised as part of the hub, they drive traffic to such merchant’s websites with the hope that a buying decision has already been reached by their readers and hence end up receiving commissions in the process. The drawback with this just like the first example is that most people do not buy anything on their first visit to online merchants and once the reader/qualified lead has the merchant’s address he doesn’t need to click on your referral link in future to make a purchase thus robbing you of commission.

4. Searching the forums for hot hub ideas

Hub Pages is a good place to seek for income generating ideas through its forum. One of the ways to go about this is to check the ideas bank segment on your account settings for topics that have been receiving attention from both the hub pages community and from search engines and queries from other online forums. Another way to go about this is to check for unanswered questions from various topic segments and threads. This would take time but is actually worth the effort as you don’t have to waste time writing non-performing hubs. Two of my three best performing hubs; how to dress like a real nerd and how to become a good journalist were possible thanks to the ideas bank. The fact that you can create a money making hub in the same way as writing an e-book for sale through a direct response website makes hub pages a very worthy companion for passive income seekers. Little or no need to do keywords research means you can concentrate on writing quality hubs while hub pages tells you what to write on.

5. Writing commercial topics for sale

Hub pages is also good for finding hot topics for commercial use. It is full of questions and answers on almost any topic you could think of. It is in hub pages you can learn how to optimize web pages for adsense, how to make home made soaps, how to answer job interview questions or even how to prepare yoghurt. These are topics people elsewhere pay more to learn about. One particular online source of down loadable information products is click bank which in my opinion is an all comers affair with virtually everyone claiming to be an expert in something they may no next to nothing about. My point is if people pay money to learn about these things which are available freely on hub pages then you are sitting on a large database of commercial information. Mining the hub pages field ought to unearth many similar ideas for use in making money.

That is my contribution on how to find income generating ideas on hub pages you could also say it is my way of showing you how belonging to hub pages can make money for you even while you sleep.