Blogger or Hubpages: Choosing the Right Writing Platform

Hearing about the potential of making money through a blog or similar platform such as Hubpages will sound like a dream come true for a talented writer or young entrepreneur. Unfortunately many of these writers fail to realize that this form of profit is not something that will come willingly, instead requiring a very specific set of skills that are commonly referred to as 'internet marketing', 'search engine optimization' or even 'website promotion'. If you are one of the thousands of writers trying to figure out how to actually get this online writing thing started, you must first understand the key concepts that act as an underlay to your writing efforts, truly directing the flow of advertising income through Adsense and other affiliate programs.

The Hubpages platform is essentially a massive domain that accepts articles from all of it's members, creating individual pages for every single one of them under their domain. Although the entirety of Hubpages content is provided by it's members, the website is ranked by search engines as if it were all provided by Hubpages. The recent subdomain update provided every author with their own subdomain (http://www.PaulPd0.hubpages.com), but the root domain of a website still has an effect on all of the subdomains that exist under it - only to a lesser extent.

Other benefits of Hubpages include the social aspects of the site that allow your content to easily be seen by like-minded writers and readers. Still, even though you might build some decent traffic from within the Hubpages website, rarely will any of this traffic generate any sort of income for you through advertising clicks.

If you decide to make your own website, you will initially face a number of limitations when it comes to traffic. You will have trouble appearing as a relevant result for any search term during the first three months of your domains existence, and returning visitors is an obvious impossibility when you have yet to have any visitors to your domain. With Hubpages, you get the ability to remain unaffected by either of the previously mentioned restrictions from the very first day you sign up (newly created subdomains on HP may suffer initial setbacks, but I have yet to truly test this).

Hubpages also provides an individual with the ability to create an acceptable webpage with potential to profit through advertising, and this is great for people who don't consider themselves internet savvy. Keep in mind that Hubpages keeps a portion of your earnings, so you wont get the same amount per click as you would with your own website.

Different from Hubpages, blogger allows you to create an entire website. Although Blogger is primarily used for blogs, you can make a legitimate informative website that most people wouldn't even know was hosted through Blogger If you know how to edit some of the HTML and CSS.

Your domain will initially be located on blogspot (yourdomain.blogspot.com), but you can connect the website you make on blogger to your own web address and host all of your content on your custom webpage. Bloggers receive the opportunity to cycle through other blogs, but the interactive levels between writers are nowhere near what they are on Hubpages. Still, having your own dot com has quite a few advantages.

One Blogger fact that is of extreme importance is the fact that all of the information and coding that makes up your website will be hosted on Blogspot, even if you decide to upgrade to your own custom domain address. Blogger provides free server space for you to host your website with, but this is not the same thing as purchasing your own web server through Hostgator or another provider. You will not be able to create databases or certain functions on your website if you host on Blogger, so don't expect to make an effective E-commerce or business website this way.

The blog roll is already built into every Blogger website, and will allow you to post an unlimited amount of articles as you see fit. You can also organize these articles by creating focus pages with links to the relevant articles you have, or by date, etc. Every new post you submit will exist on it's own webpage within your site, so you can link to each post as desired.

If the ideal online writing platform is what you are looking for, you are going to have to ask yourself some questions first.

If you haven't the slightest clue how to perform SEO (search engine optimization) on a website or page (link building, keyword targeting), then your own website probably won't have much success. What many people fail to realize is that, even with Hubpages, you wont be very successful without knowing how to generate search engine traffic through SEO.

Hubpages provides the writers with an immediate community aspect and rating system. Blogger is a easy-to-use web designing platform that allows you to build your own site without needing access to expensive and extensive web design software and knowledge. Both of these platforms have helped people to make great amounts of online income, but both of them can just as easily fail for you.

Be sure to follow me and check out some of my other SEO articles that just might teach you how to profit from all of this writing!