Income Control: How to Make Money Writing for HubPages

If you want to make money writing, you can go the traditional route of looking for publications that will publish your writing interests, submitting queries for potential stories, receiving an assignment, submitting the assignment and hoping for acceptance to finally receive payment.Or you can write about anything you want on HubPages and get paid depending on how many people read your efforts.

© 2012 by Aurelio Locsin.

Like Blogger, WordPress or other blog services, HubPages lets you write online. Unlike the others, HubPages lets you publish articles as individual self-contained units known as hubs. Since there’s no overriding topic, you can write anything you like such as how-to articles, recipes, poetry, fiction, and news flashes. The process is straight-forward:

1. Assemble your hub from capsules that can contain text, photos, video, table, maps, quizzes, rss feeds, links, polls and comments. You can arrange these capsules in any order.
2. Fill the capsules with content such as a short story, pictures of flowers, videos of your travels, or a table of statistics. You can easily edit, add, move or delete capsules.
3. Publish the hub under a relevant category and it appears on the Internet. You retain total ownership of your content.

HubPages automatically puts advertisements on your article.

• You have no control over where these ads are located or what they contain. But the system does not allow offensive ads nor ones for gambling, weapons and tobacco.
• You can turn all ads off, but will earn no income from them. About 60 percent of the time, the ads generate revenue for you. During the remaining 40 percent, the ads generate income for Hubpages.
• Depending on your settings, your ads can come from Google AdSense alone, or a combination of the HubPages Ad Program and Google Adsense.

Another way to earn income is to place capsules containing Amazon merchandise or Ebay auctions. You can put in specific items or specify keywords to have the system automatically select products based on those keywords. Commissions come if anyone buys your selections.

You can view the number of impressions each of your hubs receives. This information is updated continuously. However, your earnings are only revealed and deposited into your account once a day. If your monthly earnings exceed $50, you automatically receive payment via PayPal.

Essentially, the more articles you publish and the more readers they gather, the more ads you’ll display and the higher the income you earn. Other writers, called hubbers, can become your Followers to read your articles. But most of your traffic will come from people searching for your articles on Google and other sites. Thus, it’s important to write original, high-quality content and use Search Engine Optimization techniques when possible.

Don’t expect to earn a lot of cash right away. But if you write interesting hubs steadily, your income will rise. The great thing about online articles is that they continue to generate money day after day, without your touching them. Most hubbers make under $10 a month, though several make hundreds of dollars, and a few make full-time livings from their efforts.

The main advantage of HubPages is that its articles seem to place higher on Google faster than with other online publishing systems such as Blogger. This increases the number of readers and income potential. It also includes a Goals table, which show how the number of words, images and capsules that you use can affect your readership. Hubs that do not meet a minimum standard (such as having at least 700 words and one image) are still published, but not featured. This means search engines do not find it and it is not indexed on the site.

Some disadvantages are the lack of ad control, the fixed layout of the page and the inability to add other affiliate marketing links other than Amazon and eBay. The RSS feature, which is common on many publishing platforms, is missing. So you have to manual announce any new articles you write in your indexes.

But the bottom line is that my extra income keeps going up because I write a few articles on HubPages each day. Please check out my other efforts on the site by clicking this link.

Sign up for HubPages by clicking this link.