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Evil Truths About HubPages and Making Money: What the FAQs Don’t Tell You.

Updated on July 4, 2013
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© 2012 by Aurelio Locsin.

I’ve technically been a member of HubPages since July 2008, but abandoned the site after three articles because they produced no income. I returned in May 2011 to give the site another try, and realized some unpleasant truths since that time. Note that if you’re not on HubPages to make spare cash, you can ignore this information since it won’t apply to you.

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The writing you learned in school doesn’t count for much.

The expository writing you learned in grade school and high school is great, if you’re main audience consists of English teachers who are paid to read your efforts. Today’s modern online readers don’t have time for languid exposition, complex sentence constructions and descriptions like the “rosy fingers of dawn reached into the waiting sky.” Instead, they prefer incomplete, slang-ridden phrases; special effects like multimedia; and the punch line up front.

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Quality writing and good grammar aren’t enough.

If you don’t incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques such as long-tail keywords, link building and site optimization into your writing, you might as well keep your hub in a drawer. Your work will be buried on page 100 of Google search results and will remain unread. Instead, users will read articles by others that appear on page 1 of Google search results because they use SEO techniques.

If you can’t recognize bad writing, it’s probably yours.

If you don’t know the difference between a well-written and poorly written hub, then you most likely have bad writing to begin with. And the sad part is, you’re never going to improve because nobody will want to hurt you by telling you the truth.

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You’ll spend too much time on the care and feeding of Followers.

The ideal followers are hubbers who find your work so worthwhile that they want to know when you publish your articles, which are known as hubs. You can follow someone whose writing you find interesting. The more followers you have, the more visitors your pages receive, and the higher your income.

In reality, many people follow you because they expect you to follow them, and vice-versa. They rate your hubs and leave comments, expecting your to visit their hubs and do the same. As the number of your followers increases, you may be devoting more time to following and being followed than to writing.

If you don’t bother to market your hubs, the market won’t bother with your hubs.

Writing is only a small part of making money on HubPages. You have to devote as much or more time to marketing your hubs outside of the site. This means publicizing your efforts through social media, email, blogs and related websites. Otherwise, no one will know your hub exists.

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You won’t earn enough to make a living.

About 65 percent of HubPage writers, known as hubbers, make less than $10 a month. Or so says a poll by Relache in her excellent article called Improving Your HubPages Earnings. Her 260 respondents show 65 percent earning under $10, 24 percent earning $10 to $100, and 6 percent making from $100 to $300. Less than 5 percent earn higher than that. Many only reach the higher threshold only after many years of regularly writing articles. This makes earning a college degree a faster way to make living.

But WAIT, there’s more!

Feeling a little shaken up? Dreams of an online cash cow all dashed? Think this is too pessimistic? Don’t give up hope yet. Just go read Happy Realities About HubPages and Making Money: What the FAQs Don’t Tell You. It shows you the opposite side of this angst-ridden point of view. In the meantime, disagree, agree or otherwise critique this hub in the Comments field below.

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