Joining Hubpages takes just 2 minutes and is very straightforward. There is no charge whatsoever to join Hubpages and earn money from it, it's entirely free, you simply need an email address and to be able to follow the signup instructions on the Join Now page

You're then just a few steps away from building a great income.

Hugpages is a great way to write information, articles, tips lists, give advice, or simply write short stories - whatever you want to do ... and drive traffic to your website, or just rely on the income hubpages can generate for you through Google Adsense, Ebay and Amazon.

You do not need to have a Google Adsense account to join. If you don't already have one, then what you need to do first is to write some good hubs (webpages), then apply to Google for an Adsense ID. To get a Google Adsense account you will need to send them to your hubpages, so they can approve you. Signing up to and getting approved by Google Adsense is a lot easier/quicker these days, a friend of mine joined Hubpages recently, wrote one simple hubpage and applied to Google and got accepted straight away ... jammy, eh!

Ideally, the proper way to go about things would be to create a handful of hubpages, wait until you have some traffic to them (easily done because hubpages ranks high in Google and has its own traffic moving around the hubpages), then once you've done this for 2-3 months, apply to Google.

Be Unique

The hubs you create need to be unique. You can't copy what other people have written and hope to skimp and get away with it. Write about things you're interested in - from your old family recipes, to your favourite toy or TV programme, perhaps give your views on your favourite sport, or compile a list of places to eat in your town. Just write short articles that will be of interest to other people.

Writers' Block

If you get writers' block, then why not pick up a newspaper and see what adverts catch your eye, maybe you could write an article based on the industry being advertised. Whatever's caught your eye and intersted you, will interest others.

Writing Commercial Hubs

Stay away from trying to write a commercial hub if you're completely new. Bide your time, build on your writing skill and get the traffic coming in. Learn about all the modules you can use in hubpages and work at building GREAT pages. You can build the commercial pages in a bit. You'll be building a good residual income, a regular income, from building good hubpages, why spoil it by rushing in, not getting $10k in your first week, then never returning? View hubpages as a job - a well written hub can take you 1-2 hours, but could even produce you $50-100/year every year for years to come.... can you see the financial potential in that? And all at no risk, no cost to you. Imagine if you'd joined last year and had just written one hub per day ..? You'd have nearly 400 hubs by now, quietly generating you an income every day. Take the long-term view!

Getting Your Google Adsense Account Approved

If you don't already have an account, then you'll need good quality hubs for Google to visit - you want them to approve your Google Adsense account on the first attempt; you stand a much better chance of being accepted without question because your content is valuable and interesting than because you immediately started writing madly about your latest affiliate find.

Once you have your Google Adsense account, you have the ability to track your earnings from each of your hubpages if you wish, check out the channel url features in Google Adsense, although mostly I'd leave that on the To Do list until your earnings are interesting you enough to start monitoring your highest traffic hubs - the reason I say this is because you can only track a total of 200 channel urls and with hubpages it's a good idea to mentally head towards getting 1000 created over the next three years. I feel that 1000 hubs is achievable over time and is a "tipping point" between making money and making a really good full-time passive income from it.

Google Analytics and Hubpages

Hubpages also gives you the chance to use Google Analytics to track all your hubpages traffic, I won't be covering this here as you'll either find out how and why to do it by yourself, or you'll take the time to investigate it when you're ready - it'd be a hub in itself!

When you create hubpages, you can also add your Amazon and Ebay Partner Network affiliate ID. This is made quite straight forward as you have to copy/paste each ID into your account.

To do this, just log on and in My Account, under Your Account, click Affiliate Settings and there is a box to type the numbers into the boxes provided.

Special Instructions for Ebay Partner Network and Hubpages

To get your hubpages linked to your EPN account, you will have to activate your domain. Now, I didn't even learn about this until I wrote this hub! So it's done me a favour already, this might be why I haven't seen any earnings from EPN via hubpages so far.

You'll need to log into your EPN account, then choose Account, Domains. You then need to type your domain names into the box.

Here is the ebay help about this: https://publisher.ebaypartnernetwork.com/PublisherUserManualPage?page_id=account.domain-mgmt.howto-validate

For hubpages, the process is a bit different. see h ere (you need to be logged on): http://hubpages.com/my/epn_activation - you will need to copy/paste the activation code into the box on that page, then back in the EPN page you type in hubpages.com as the domain and then click on CONFIRM DOMAINS - but you have about 90 seconds in total to do these actions.

Once that's done, you can then offer your hub visitors and readers the opportunity of investigating the subject further and potentially buying an item from ebay or amazon and boosting your income.

Personally I've not had much income from this at all, but it might be because I've only JUST found out about the domain activation! Whether it generates anything significant for you will depend on your hub, the layout and options you choose and the products you present them with. There are some hubbers who actually do quite well from their ebay income through hubpages, so it's worth trying out and seeing how it works for you. Amazon's cookie length is only 24 hours, the Ebay Partner Network cookie lasts longer.

The other option when you set up a hubpage is for Kontera ads to show. I've left it ticked just to see how it goes, but so far I've not made much, but then I have so few hubs. The key to everything is to create a lot of good hubs (over time, not all today!) and get traffic going to them. So, if you have a handful of hubs and just 30 people/day visiting, then you can't expect a full-time income ... you have to work to get that.

There's a fine line between writing a hub, using available modules - and spamming. So, if you're an affiiate, you will want to know what is acceptable and what isn't.

I wrote this hub because I've been a member here three years and have never quite found out the answer, so always played it safe and kept away from anything really commercial. But now's the time for me to get to the bottom of the question and try to make some sense of it here.

The official answer is in the Hubpages FAQ page, which is at: http://hubpages.com/faq/


What does commercial mean?

Commercial hubs are required to have an ad level setting of High. Your hub is considered to be commercial if it meets any of these conditions.

* it is monetized through a non-hubpages affiliate mechanism
* it contains links to other commercial sites
* it promotes a for profit business, especially a business that you have an interest in

So, if in doubt, just tick the box until you're sure

What are the Implications of Declaring a Hub Commercial?

All that will happen is that the ad level will be set to high, this means there will be more adverts on your hubs. If you don't tick it and a Hubpages moderator thinks your hub is commercial then they will tick the box.

Whether a hub you write is commercial or not will not affect your overall Hub Score.

Explain That Simply

OK, so you write a hub, if you use any of the hubpages affiliate modules (ebay, Amazon) then that is not considered commercial.

If you insert any outbound affiliate links yourself by any other method (including rss modules etc) then you must mark it as commercial.

If you are writing a hub to promote your business, then you must mark it as commercial if it has links to your company website.

Right, I hope that helps somebody! It's certainly helped me as I've just had to go off and check this stuff out in the FAQ section.

You can add your own affiliate links into your hubs by various methods.

If you are just writing a hub, you can just paste the affiliate url into your hub, but note it will show up, so people can see it. Although you can't mask your affiliate link, you can go into the html of the hub code and change what shows on the screen. Alternatively, you could use a shortening url service (e.g. tinyurl) to insert them.

If you have an rss feed with affiliate links, you can use that feature too.

Remember, there's no point spamming your affiliate link - provide your readers with good, easy to read information and let them decide whether to click or not. They don't need to find an affiliate link in every line. Also, don't mislead people or they'll just be annoyed and stop using hubpages, which would be a shame. Hubpages gets great ranking in Google search results, so used sensibly it can generate good long-standing traffic to your website and affiliate link.