Info Barrel and Hub Pages – Which Delivers the Most for Writers Online?

Hundreds of thousands of writers are making money online with AdSense simply by publishing their articles online. But where to publish? The days of good income from blogs without a huge investment of either time or money are long gone. This leaves selling articles for cash (often only a few dollars for 800 words) or self publishing sites like Hub Pages, Info Barrel and Squidoo.

These sites don’t offer huge rewards immediately either, but a hard working writer can quickly work up to an income of a few hundred dollars a month even in the present recession. Remember too that you will always own the content that you create for these sites and over the years, what can sometimes seem like a mere trickle of income will add up to a substantial reward.

Why there is a Buzz around Info Barrel.

The self-publishing model for content providers has been around for a few years now. When I started, the main players were Squidoo and Hubpages. Then Squidoo fell foul of Google for allowing too many second rate, over-commercialized pages and for a long while, Hubpages was universally acknowledged as the prime self-publishing site.

The new kid on the block is Info barrel. For writers around the world, it is creating a lot of excitement because it offers such a generous share of adsense revenues for content creators.

How Self-Publishing Sites Get You Read

Both Info Barrel and Hubpages provide tools to create web pages quickly and easily with very little web know-how. The page that you are reading right now is a Hubpage- I say this for those people, like me, who often read at speed without too much interest in web addresses!

Apart from the simplicity of use, established self-publishing sites also offer you a chance to get good traffic for your articles quickly because they have authority with Google, Bing and Yahoo. If you write a good page on a well chosen topic for Hubpages, it will soon be on the front page of major search engines. Sadly, the same article on an average blog will disappear into the Google abyss and only get a fraction of the traffic.

Revenue Splits

Hub Pages give you a 60% share of all AdSense revenue from your pages. It has dedicated affiliate program connections with Amazon and EBay with appealing ads (example to the right) that you can select and set up very quickly. The revenue from sales through these sites is around ten per cent of what is sold and Hub Pages give you 60% of that. This blog entry has more info:hubpages revenue-split-explained.

Info barrel offers 75% of all income from AdSense with a chance to increase that to 90% if you win any of their writing competitions. I thought that was worth putting in bold.

It’s the 75% adsense figure which is sucking in writers fast. It’s by far the best deal on the net. On the other hand, you need to ask what you get for the money that goes to the site provider. For instance, If Hub Pages delivers fifty per cent more traffic than Info Barrel it will give you a better return overall.

It is possible to get an EBay account using Info Barrels but it is not easy. EBay is getting very picky about who it will give an account. Recently, even experienced Hub Page writers have had problems getting an EBay account.

Search Engine Authority- Getting to the Top of Google

Search Engine authority is by far the most important thing when it comes to self-publishing sites. If you know your stuff (or are willing to learn) and can produce great content, you still need your site to rank well in Google, Yahoo and Bing to get readers.

Hub Pages has a proven record in this area. A good hub page can easily be at the top of Yahoo a day or so after publication. Google takes a little longer but the number one spot for a popular (and income rich) search term can be achieved in a few weeks.

Info Barrel has things to prove in the search area. Whilst some of it’s most popular pages are on the first few pages of Google for their keywords, they are in areas without too much competition. Also, I couldn’t find a single popular search phrase that an Info Barrel absolutely dominates in a major search engine. Of course, it is still early days for Info Barrel and this should change as the site gathers momentum. The more pages Info Barrel generates the greater its authority will become. A massive breakthrough can be expected, as long as it avoids the pitfalls that damaged Squidoo.

What is the Writing Experience like?

Hub pages has the easiest format for creating pages. Once you have written the article in a word processor, it is just a question of copying and pasting the page into the hub template then loading the images. A page like this one can be loaded and published in ten minutes, even by a novice.

Copying and pasting into an Info barrel can drive you crazy The word processor formatting often breaks and getting the text back to something readable can be hard work. You can learn to work round this- pasting text from a notepad file works pretty well. Maybe one day they will find a fix for Word.

Videos

On Hub pages you can include a video from YouTube to play on your site (like the one above). Info Barrels can contain videos but you must upload them from your computer- and have the right to use them. You can’t simply ‘borrow’ one from YouTube. Videos are important in keeping visitors on a page. The longer your visitors spend on a page the more plus points you get from search engines and the higher they will rank you.

Publishing

On Hub pages you can publish what you want immediately after sign up. On Info barrel you need to have your early pages approved by a staff member. This takes time- a few days at present. They will eventually give you the right to publish without vetting but only if you satisfy their criteria. Hub pages maintain quality by flagging any pages that don’t meet their criteria after publication and allowing you to change them.

Help with Making Money on Hub pages and Info barrel

There is a huge amount of information available on Hub pages to help writers perfect their skills. Info barrel is new and the same level of resources have yet to develop. Hub Page forums and help pages are worth regular visits even if you never write a word on Hub pages. The video below is one of many created to help writers improve their income. The lessons can be applied to any self-publishing site.

Style

One drawback on Hub pages is that there is only one style open to you (the one you are looking at) and it doesn’t necessarily suit every subject. If you are writing about online games, for instance, the traditional background is dark- usually black.

Info barrel have more options for customizing a page including backgrounds. If you have any website creating background you can make genuinely unique pages.

The Advantages of Being New

Infobarrel’s newness is useful for getting good web addresses and titles for very popular subjects. Many of the best titles are already gone on Hub pages. The search term ‘Make Money with Adsense’, for instance has had over a thousand Hub pages written around it. Finding an address and a unique title after all that output is not easy.

Other People’s Experience of Info barrel

There has been a frenzy of online blog posts and reviews of Info barrel. Most of them are positive and some bloggers claim to have achieved impressive returns after about 100 Info Barrels. Prolific writer, Ben K, of 'Make money online with Seo' reports around 15 dollars a day coming in after only a few weeks. Of course not many people can produce a hundred articles in a month in the way that Ben can!

Personal Experience

My own personal experience is inconclusive. I have had plenty of success with Hubpages. A recent page- FarmVille Tips and Tricks- shot to number one on Yahoo after 24 hours and has generated around two hundred visits a day ever since. A week later it was on the first page of Google and is now getting around six hundred views a day. My best Infobarrel is only delivering about ten hits a day- but this is not exactly a scientific experiment, some of my hubs that don’t hit the spot, for whatever reason, do worse than that.

My Recommendation

Why not join both? See what works for you. Hub pages will certainly deliver but Info barrel has plenty of potential. If they carry on with their present exponential growth they will soon match Hub Pages for search engine authority. One of many reasons to join early are the competitions for a 90% share of AdSense income. The more writers on site, the tougher they will get.

Shop Around

Remember you always own the content that you create, so there is nothing to stop you from unpublishing an article on one site and republishing on another if the first site doesn't deliver what you want.

Sign Up Pages

http://hubpages.com/user/new/

http://www.infobarrel.com/signup