Develop Your Own Site or Write At HubPages?

This is the 2nd of my series of How to Earn Money Writing on Hubpages hubs: check out the first part here: Make Money Writing

Hub pages is a content sharing site. They provide a free platform for you to write a page (hub) and in return they take 40% of the advertising revenue: you get the remaining 60% of the revenue.

You can write a hub on almost any topic. The only forbidden topic are those not approved by most advertisers (illegal drugs, bomb making, sex and similar).

A hub must contain text but also can consist of pictures, videos, news feeds, eBay and Amazon products, polls and comments. Think of it as an article with multimedia. Hubs should be well structured articles rather than stream of consciousness blog posts.

• its easy to write a Hub and publish it. You don't need many more skills than those that you have from knowing how to use Microsoft Word or use a web browser. You don't need to know html or how to use a ftp program.

• its free - you don't have to pay for hosting or a domain name

• Google will index and give Page Rank to Hub fast compared to your own, brand new site. HubPages gives you a head-start over your competition. It also gives you quick feedback, which, for most people, is important when you are learning a new skill. Hubs are easier and quicker to rank in Google so you get search traffic to your hub, and the searchers are the one's who will make you money

• Other writers at HubPages will comment on your hubs - and feedback is a huge boost to most people's self-confidence.

• HubPages will accept authors from anywhere in the world - though Hubs must be in English. Many paying sites restrict the countries that they will pay writers to, mostly to the US only.

Photo Credit

• You have to share. HubPages is free to join but you only 60% of the amount that your hubs earn - the other 40% goes to HubPages to pay for it all. Now at the start 60% of something will generally out-weight 100% of nothing - but later on you may want to reconsider this.

• You are effectively renting space for your article or hub. HubPages may disapear tomorrow, though I don't think its likely, just a point to remember -keep an off-line copy of your hubs.

• If you are already banned from programs such as Adsense or eBay then you won't get paid because you are directly paid by these programs not via HubPages

• You also need to have a Paypal account to be paid by most affiliate programs. Again if you live in a country that PayPal does not operate in you will have limited options to get paid unless you can get a friend in an approved country to assist you.

HubPages, with a couple of exceptions, does NOT pay you directly. For exceptions see the side bar.

Instead you earn revenue from either contextual ads (Adsense and Kontera) or affiliate sales (Amazon and eBay). All of these programs are open to non-US residents, but residents of some countries will have a harder time getting their accounts approved than others. Hubpages can't directly influence the third parties who pay you and approve your application, but as HubPages has a good reputation it seems reasonable to assume that applying using your HubPages profile page as a reference for your "website" must be a good tick.

It is however getting harder and harder to get approved and it the reality is that you might as well delay applying to these programs until you have 2 to 6 months worth of hubs developed.

The money you make from HubPages comes directly from the partner programs. You have to sign up directly with each of these programs to earn your share of income. To make money from Adsense a reader must click on a classified ad showing on your page, Kontera is similar except that certain words in the hub are underlined and when clicked a balloon-like ad appears. To earn on eBay or Amazon you have to have someone click through on your hub and then buy something (doesn't have to be the original item them clicked on).

Publishing an article on HubPages is not the same as publishing on ezinearticles.com or other article directories. You retain ownership and copyright of your work and your hub cannot be reproduced elsewhere on the web. The multimedia options means that you can do a lot more than just publish a short article. In fact the best article length at hubpages seems to be around 800-1500 words.

You can go back and easily update or revise hubs - you can't do that on an article directory.

You can have links to your own sites, within the Terms of Service, not just at the bottom of the article in a resource box.

HubPages and Squidoo

Although similar to Squidoo HubPages has some clear and distinct differences:

• HubPages does not allow overally promotional hubs: you cannot have a hub which is just a teaser for your site; You cannot add your own links unless the content you provide on the hub is unique on the web.

• Regardless of whether or not you own the rights you cannot reproduce you material if it has already been published on the web. If it has never been on the web but has been published off-line and you own the copyright: then you can re-publish it on HubPages. In fact there are number of real-world writers and journalists doing just that at HubPages.

• Because of this attention to developing quality unique content Google considers HubPages an "authority" site which means that new HubPages are very rapidly indexed by Google and Page Rank is also quickly assigned. I find it consistently easier to get a HubPages ranked on the first page of Google than a Squidoo lens or even my own sites!

Hubpages is about publishing single articles - or even a series of articles on a single topic. Its different from blogging in the sense that there is no requirement to keep on producing articles, posts, on a daily or weekly basis. Hubpages is perfect for timeless content as it just sits around and doesn't go out of fashion.

Below are some hubs I've written comparing HubPages to other popular free publishing sites and blogging in general.

Thanks - you've just read the second hub in the series: it was going to be an e-book so these are being published quickly!

Part One: Make Money Writing

Part Three: HubPages - Start of Your On-Line Business?

Part Four: Rank Your Hub In The Search Engines