Should you create your own website or use HubPages as your primary money generator?

The general answer is simple - you want to do both. However, this does not tell us which one you want to focus on? What are some of the risks? What will you gain from having your own website and what will you lose?

I started my own website about 2 years ago, but it was only in the last couple of months that I started focusing on building it out. I also began to move some articles from HubPages onto my own website.

Here, I will discuss the pros and cons of having your own website vs. HubPages, and share some of my own experiences in shifting my focus from HubPages to my own website.

1. You have much greater control.

If you run your own website, you have total control of your website design, content, advertisement placement, and everything else. You can personalize the fonts, colors, images, and other website design elements to specifically suit your content.

You can use whatever advertising links that you want and place them wherever you want. All you need to do is follow the guidelines of your advertisement partner (e.g. Google AdSense). You can also place as many affiliate links as you want, and from any company that you want. HubPages only offers affiliate programs from Google AdSense, Amazon, and eBay. If you want to place other affiliate links, you are limited to a total of two promotional links from a given domain.

2. You get 100% of the clicks, and 100% of the revenue.

With HubPages you only get 60% of the total number of clicks. If you are using your own website, you get all of the clicks and all of the click revenue.

However, note that HubPages has gotten special permission from Google AdSense to place more advertisement units in a single page. General Google AdSense policy only allows three AdSense units per webpage, whereas HubPages is allowed to have four. This extra advertisement unit may make up for some of the shared clicks.

In addition, you can make some extra money from HubPages by referring others to join.

3. You get all the benefits of your website promotion efforts.

One of the most difficult and time intensive aspect of online success, is promoting or marketing your online brand. If you use HubPages as your primary revenue generator, you will partly be promoting yourself (i.e. your online author name and picture) and partly be promoting the HubPages website.

If you have your own website, you can focus your promotional efforts on your site, and get the benefits of all the incoming links, visits, and clicks. With enough effort, you can slowly build up your Google search rank, and then use that to launch new websites.

On the other hand, if all your promotional efforts go into the HubPages site, you lose some of those key online marketing benefits.

1. You get free hosting.

HubPages hosts your content for 'free', i.e., you do not have to pay any upfront fees. However, HubPages gets paid by taking 40% of your advertisement clicks.

If you host your own website or blog, you will probably have to pay monthly hosting fees. I am currently using Bluehost for my website which charges $6.95 US per month. In general, I am happy with their hosting service. There is little downtime, and they have an automatic script for installing WordPress blogs, and updating new WordPress releases.

Note - if you currently make $17.50 US per month from all your affiliate links on HubPages, then you are already paying HubPages about $6.95 US per month. If you make more than that per month, then you are paying HubPages more than normal hosting fees.

From that perspective, Bluehost does not seem to be that expensive after all.

2. You get crawled and indexed by Google Search very quickly.

The most important benefit of HubPages, as I see it, is the search engine advantage.

The HubPages homepage has a Google search rank of 6. In addition, Google search crawls the HubPages site very frequently, and your articles can get ranked, and appear on Google search anywhere from a few hours to one or two days after publication.

This is in contrast to using your own website which will usually have a much lower Google search rank, and is crawled less frequently by Google and other search engines. It usually takes about two weeks for static pages on my website to appear on Google search. My blog entries appear within one or two days.

Publishing on HubPages will help you generate more visitors for your content because HubPages will provide you with better search engine visibility. This is especially true if you are just starting out with online writing, and are still learning about search engine optimization and online marketing. You will likely have your hands full with learning how to optimize your individual articles, and may not want to deal with the added issues of running and marketing your own website.

Remember too, that the articles you write on HubPages will not be wasted. If you choose to start your own website later on, you can use your existing HubPages articles to generate back-links for your new website. You can also move some of your HubPages articles over to your website, because you retain all the rights to your HubPages articles.

3. You get help from a fun and knowledgeable community.

HubPages has a very knowledgeable community of users. There are many people who know how to write well, there are many people who know about web marketing, there are many people who know about Google AdSense and other advertising affiliates. In fact, there are probably hubbers who know something about everything you might want to do.

By joining HubPages and participating in the HubPages community, you get an initial audience for your content, as well as help on your online journey; whether it is to make money, have fun, express yourself, or something else.

The main risk of using HubPages as your primary money making site is that you have no control over the site.

HubPages may institute new content or advertisement policies anytime they choose, and you must either comply, or leave. HubPages may suddenly decide to change their revenue sharing model, and you will have few options but to accept all their rules and policies.

HubPages is also a public site, and open to everyone, including spammers, plagiarizers, and everybody else. You have very little say over the site participants. You also have no control over how the site is viewed by search engines. If Google search, Yahoo, or Bing decides that HubPages is producing too much spam, and downgrades its search ranking; you will suffer the consequences even though you may not be responsible for the actual downgrade. For example, many social networking sites already do not accept links from the Hubpages domain because of previous spamming activity.

For these reasons and more, I have decided to focus on building my own website. However, HubPages is still very useful for generating back-links, and testing out new topics. Therefore, it makes sense to maintain a presence on HubPages. In fact, I still visit HubPages very often because I enjoy the HubPages community and the articles that get published here.

The main risk of moving to your own website is that you may lose visitors and search engine visibility. As stated above, one of the key advantages of using HubPages is that it is well liked by Google search.

Because of the large number of articles hosted by HubPages, on a large range of subjects, you may also get visitors from other HubPages articles and from the HubPages community. Moving to your own website, may significantly reduce those visitors, and possibly also your search engine visitors. This could ultimately result in a loss of advertising revenue.

Moving to your own website will also require some startup costs. You are now responsible for your website design, operations, comments, users, and everything else. However, using a blogging platform such as WordPress will simplify many of these tasks, so the startup costs may not be as great as you imagine.

When I first considered moving articles over to my own website, I was ready to take a short term reduction on number of views and advertising revenue. After about two months, I am glad to see that my number of visits have increased and my revenue has remained stable. I have lost some views from the HubPages website, but have gained it back on my home website.

If you plan to move articles from HubPages to your own website, you will experience some disruption in your search engine traffic because of the change in URL. For this reason, move your articles over slowly, so that you minimize the search engine effect. In the past months, I have moved about 10 articles from HubPages to my own website. I chose articles that have medium traffic, and mostly search engine traffic.

In this way, I keep all my high traffic articles intact until I get more experience with my website. I will also leave all my HubPages oriented articles on HubPages. My plan is to only publish articles that are of interest to the HubPages community, and to use HubPages to test out new content areas. Because of the high crawl frequency from Google search, HubPages is ideal for testing out new content.

In terms of startup costs, there were several things I had to learn when making the move. In particular, I wanted to transfer my HubPages comments over to my WordPress blog. I also wanted to add polling capabilities to my articles, similar to what I had at HubPages. I was able to accomplish both of these tasks within about one week, with the help of WordPress.

I am also starting to learn more about web design and the WordPress environment. This process has been very interesting and a lot of fun. It has also resulted in many HubPages articles about WordPress, as well as a better designed home blog and website. Since the move and refocus, the number of views on my website have grown by about 35%.

If you are thinking of starting your own website or blog, go ahead and take the plunge. It is will likely turn out to be a lot less effort than you imagine.

Find a hosting company that supports WordPress installations and you can get started right away. All you need to do is pick a compelling WordPress theme, and a good domain name.

From there, you can put in as much or as little work as you want in terms of website maintenance and enhancements. Spend some time learning the WordPress system, as that will allow you build-up your blog, and improve user experience. Whatever work you put in will expand your web knowledge and bring tangible results down the road.