I write to share thoughts, knowledge and experience. Writing without an audience is mere cerebral onanism, but the prospect of a passive income that may let me research and pass on the results of my researches, is seductive. Here I would like to share some ideas on how to make money on the web using Hub pages as an example.

In his book “The Black Swan” Nicholas Naseem Taleb mentions the disproportionate influence of certain rare events, which he calls "Black Swans" and makes much of the concept of scaleability, a concept best explained with an example. I have issues with the book but he males a number of valuable points

At one time I nearly became an Insurance Salesman – err sorry, tied financial advisor. I was told that if you contact 1000, people 100 will reply, ten will want to talk to you and one will buy. That is scalability of prospects. Similarly for every hub that earns £10,000 a month there will be (say) ten earning £1,000, 100 earning £100 and so on. That is scalability of reward.

The key point is that you cannot predict in advance what will be popular and, for hubs, which will prompt a lot of clicking through and hence a high advertising income. More generally you cannot predict which opportunity will pay off, or not (remember the music company executive claimed the Beatles would flop).

Try a lot of low cost opportunities (write a lot of hubs), Taleb call. Be wary of paying for an opportunity. If it were that good the person would not be selling it.

Apparntly it takes  about 7-10 months on average to get $100 from adsense on your hubs. If you assume a 25c income in month one and  double it each month  you will get $128 for month 10. Probably. Don't quote me. I  currently have over 40 hubs and  made a bit less than $1 in month two

Writing hubs takes time. Writing a lot of hubs takes a lot of time. Most hubs will pay nothing. I found the hard way that most business opportunities take time to grow. You can open a newsagent's shop and make money right away but building up a legal practice or a translation agency or becoming a translator is a long slow haul. Even the how-to-build-a-business crowd take a long time -years – before they get an income that lets them ditch the day job. Be ready for the long haul be ready to talk to anyone and everyone. Be open to opportunities.

If you write what everyone else writes about you have to be better (i.e more appealing) than the rest). If you write about a specialist topic you will have a smaller market but less competition. If you ignore the advertising potential of your writing you will make nothing, if you only consider the advertising potential you will make nothing because you will probably write rubbish.

The three points made on Hub pages are valid. Write on what interests you: If you don't it will show, Write on what interests other people: If you don't no one will read it, and write what will be of interest for a long time: or you will be on a treadmill.

If the topic interests you your enthusiasm will translate into knowledge and interesting writing ( assuming you have learnt your craft). This does not mean you need only write about what you know and interests you. Sometimes it is good to research a new topic which may spark a whole new range of interests. The general rule is share what you love and the money will follow.

If the topic interests others you have an audience. Almost anything will have an audience though I doubt that discussing your collection of 1930's Welsh cinema tickets or will ever generate a best seller. On the other hand a good writer can build an audience for even more esoteric topics.

You cannot predict which hubs will give you an income but with enough hubs  the laws of large numbers start to operate.  Assume a click through rate of 1%   and note  that you get  60% of the clicks ( HubPages get the rest)  so you will get paid for   6 clicks out of every thousand views. If a hub  gets 5 views a day that is 150 a month  so you  cannot expect any income with fewer than 10 hubs.  You might get lucky but those are reasonable statistics.

Do  you maintain your car?  Your house? Your body?

All these  deteriorate without maintenance and you need to review poorly performing hubs from time to time. My criterion is to look at the  hubs last viewed in the last 30 days, those  where traffic is falling and those with the lowest score.

You may love writing but if you want money for it you are selling a product and need to get it in front of as many eyes as possible which means a catchy title  with keywords  in it and promoting your hubs at every opportunity, for example via twitter, your business card and any other means you can think of.  Marketing and promoting  your hubs is important but  you will reach a point where  the hubs promote themselves.

Don't expect to get rich quick, write  interestingly on what interests you  and try to make the content timeless.  Be ready for the long haul and keep the statistics I gave in mind. Be ready to promote your hubs and expect this to take time.

After two months I have earned just over a dollar from Adsense and zero from Amazon or Ebay.  I will enable Kontera on all my hubs and see what happens.

Right now we have to sell our guesthouse in Edinburgh, Scotland,  and find renterst for a furnished thre ebdroom house, and that is taking up a lot of my time, which means I may produce write less for a while