How to be successful on HubPages, With personal success story of Johnrr631992

In this guide I will talk about a few things. First off, I will tell you exactly what to expect, and how to make money on HubPages. Second off I will talk about the big niche topic you see on here, with people saying you need one to be successful. Then I will also talk about my success that I have had on HubPages, and how I went from .46 cents in a months to $5.00-$7.50 a day in 1 year. I will also tell you what to expect, what not to expect, and exactly what you need to do to make money. While this guide will talk about mainly my personal experience, tips, and exactly how and what you need to be successful at writing. I will also mention things about why HubPages is better than the other sites, why HubPages is better than a personal website, and why writing here is the best option fo you to choose to make decent money with.

Please feel free to follow me on Twitter... @johnrr631992, or twitter.com/Johnrr631992

Also, during the guide I may or will refer to Hubs as guides once in a while because that is primarily what I write, and how I usually refer to HubPages as for my writing.

ALSO!! Please feel free to comment below and let me know your feedback. That is a very important part of my writing is hearing from the viewers to answer questions, or to know what you think, thanks for reading in advanced of this fairly lengthy hub.

When I joined HubPages 2 years ago I did not write. I joined solely to make money, but did not start writing until a year ago. Initially it seemed like to much work, and did not want to put in that much effort, nor did I like writing to the point where I wanted to earn my living doing that. Never the less one year ago I decided to write a few guides or hubs and see where that would take me.

I was a reading a lot of the forums, and other people hubs about making money, and saw things I liked and didn't like. One thing I saw was the difficulty of getting viewers, and how you could only do 1 niche to be successful. Another thing I saw was someone writing "in the end if you have 1 thousand hubs written it is impossible not to make money". So after reading both of those I was going to set out to one day reach 1000 hubs, and hope to make a decent amount of money writing on HubPages.

Initially starting off I had the same troubles that EVERYONE else has. I started off with about 10 hubs after about 2 months. I was making about .46 cents a month, and after 3 months I had a total of $4.50.. While this was not great, this was still something, and seeing a return on my writing investment of time was a lot better than nothing. So with that being said I continued writing. I wrote about 5-10 hubs a month continuously, and it was not until about my month 4 or 5 (February-March 2012) that I started to see a return worth continuing my writing for. I started to see a return of about 1 dollar a day. While I was not making payout, I was still starting to see a decent return on my time. I got my first payout in April 2012, and with that I made about $86.00, and that was a combined amount from the first 8 months of writing. From there I assumed that I would be able to start attempting to make a payout each month.

In May I made payout, and continued on each month. I was making a decent amount of money off of each month worth of writing using a couple niches that I have been successful with. So overall I have been able to continuously be successful with some of the tips that I will talk about below.

ALSO BELOW!!!!

Something that some people get sensitive over is sharing how much money they make on here... WELL Below are my photos of my actual personal earnings from HubPages. You can see my full success from HubPages, and see how I went from earning pennies in a month to earnings payouts each month. Come December/January I will include pictures of September on when I can get another full picture of stats. That will include me having my record amounts earned, especially from finding another niche in my sports game that I started writing about.. In my first year of Hubpages I earned about $600.00 which is good knowing that I had little experience, and did not know my niche, or what to write about. But now since August in the months of September and October I have already hit the amount of money that I have earned essentially the amount that I made in my first year, and I am excited knowing that I am able to keep finding success here.

Another thing that is a touch subject with people on here is how many views people get. Well I think it is worth showing you that you can have success on here, and that I am not just blowing smoke above in my success, so below I have attached a photo of my hubs that are very productive, along with my daily views, all time views, comments, and other information.

So one of the biggest discussions people have about being successful is finding your niche. Well this is important but not a deal breaker. As said above, if you have 1000 quality hubs, even if every one is on a different topic you are bound to make money. Although choosing one niche can help your readers find other articles by you that will interest them. Having multiple niches allows you to prevent a writers block, and allows you to get a vast amount of groups of people. For instance, if you write product reviews, your readers will be interested in those, but writing do it yourself guides will also welcome those readers who may read your other guides, but even if they don't you now have two separate groups of people reading your guides instead of one select group of people.

In my case is that initially I was only writing First Person Shooter video game guides, and was being quite successful with that. Now I am writing sports guides, and other video game guides as well through various platforms and that has tripled my daily views, and my income. I have opened up a number of other ways to bring people to my page with writing niches about different topics.

So when you begin writing, while it may be important to find a niche, keep in mind that start out by writing guides, and let your niche come by your success. Focus more on writing articles that you enjoy writing, and if success comes then continue on that path. To set out and say your going to stick to one niche may not work. This is why I have continuously changed my niche, and keep adding new ones to keep bringing in more views and income.

Lets face it, if you are a writer here, then you want to make money. So you should be willing to put in a good effort, and get as many viewers as humanly possible to get here and read your material. So by only having one niche you are limiting yourself to the endless possibilities.

Well this is fairly simple. Do not expect to make money with little effort. I have put in MANY more hours that have not made any money, and I am only now starting to make a decent amount of money off of this site. You will not make a lot of money by putting in little effort. You will need to dedicate a lot of time to HubPages, and this is not for everyone. To be honest, if I was a person who was working a decent job I probably would not have time to work and write here. BUT being a college student with a good amount of free time, I am willing to dedicate a certain amount of time into HubPages. With that being said, you need to have a good amount of time to dedicate if you want to be successful.

If you are going to write on a topic where there are already lots of things written about, then you may not have a lot of success. You need to research and start to find ways to corner the market on your idea. A great new feature I have noticed on HubPages is the fact that they have added a new section when writing your title when creating a hub. As you write your title HubPages will give suggestions to hub choices that do not have a lot of content already written on. So taking advantage of that, and using their suggestions should be a good way for you to start cornering the market and finding ways to find success on HubPages.

This is another question that I see frequently on HubPages. From my experience I have really only used the HubPages AD Program to make my money, and have not focused much on using the Adsense program. Being that said, I still do have some income from Adsense, but that is usually not more than $10.00 per month.

Keep in mind that with the HubPages Ad Program you will essentially get paid for every click, with the Adsense program you ONLY get paid when people actually click on an ad. So to be honest if you intend on making decent money off of HubPages and can get the views I personally suggest taking on the HubPages ad program head on. Although to have the best experience once you are getting at MINIMUM 100 views a day, I suggest trying a week on each of the programs to decide which of them best suits you.

So obviously while your content is very important and you should be writing at MINIMUM 500 words per hub, but I personally try to write at least 1000 per hub, key words play a HUGE part in your success. Let me rephrase.. YOU will not get a lot of Google views, and make good money if you do not use good key words, and a good title.

Now keep in mind that you need to keep the key words in reference to your Hub or that will hurt you in the long run. For instance, do not tag "Justin Bieber" as a key word on all your hubs if you are doing video game guides. While that is a very large search engine key word, you will not have good success in the long run as that will most likely have nothing to do with your hub.

So with that being said you should attempt to try and attach as many good key words to your guide as you can. If it is a guide, write "guide" "tips" "strategy" and other words that will help people get to your hub. Remember that when people are searching for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3 guides they may abbreviate as well searching for COD MW3 guides, therefore you should include abbreviations in your tags to increase your traffic.

Remember that your goal is to make money, so finding as many good keywords will greatly increase your success on HubPages.

Obviously when you are writing it is smart to reference similar guides you have written. Remember you get paid per view, SO if you send your viewer to 3 of your other guides, you just got 4 views off one person. With that being said, you should include backlinks to similar hubs. This will better help convince readers to keep reading. It's good to point out that if a reader comes to your page to read a video game guide, then you backlinking a do it yourself guide to fix a toilet may not interest that reader. BUT by backlinking other video game guides that will convince your reader to read that guide, and may even come back as you publish more guides. You need to be smart when you backlink in order to convince readers to keep reading, or going to another guide.

With that being said, do not write 5 guides on the same subject in order to force readers to go to another guide to keep reading. THIS will also hurt you on Google Rankings, and is bad for getting traffic. The best way for you to increase traffic to your Hub's, and to make money is to backlink to keep readers interested in you, with that being said, I have used an example below backlinking my other HubPages reference Hubs to show you how to keep backlinks that are similar to what you are writing.

Once again another question that gets brought up a LOT. Whether HubPages is better than the other freelance writing sites.

Yes, in my opinion HubPages is in fact better than other writing sites. From what I have seen in the past and trying other sites, I think HubPages is by far the best to write for. Keep in mind that HubPages has a very good Google search ranking which right from the start will help you be more successful writing for HubPages. Also not to mention you get a 60% take on everything your account generates. While that does not seem like a lot, you will make decent money if you get the views and continue writing for HubPages.

I also think that HubPages has a much better community or people then I have seen on other sites. I am very happy writing for HubPages, and have not seen a reason yet to try another site again, or move my hubs to other sites. HubPages has been able to keep me happy, and has gotten me the views to continue writing.

A lot of people shoot for huge success, and do not reach that goal and get disappointed. You need to keep your goals small, and when reached, keep getting bigger. I had goals initially of just making a dollar a day, now I am making goals of $10.00 a day. While It will take a LONG time to reach that goal I still shoot for that with every hub that I publish. Right now the only thing that I am looking forward to is reaching my 1 Million views. I decided to write this 500K, and am on pace to hit 1 Million in about 5-6 months, but hopefully as I write significantly more over the next couple months I can cut that down significantly, and attempt to hit that goal and move on to a higher goal. Although as of now I am happy to stick to my 1 million views as I KNOW I will eventually reach that even if I did stop writing, but knowing I want to reach it sooner has helped me keep on pace to keep writing guides.

So Overall the only thing that I can really suggest as far as setting goals is that you keep them small. Don't focus on huge things and remember that over time you will in fact reach them. That NO ONE became successful over night. That you should not start out reaching for 1000 hubs, but for 50, then 100, then 200.. You should slowly increase your goals as you reach them and you will overall have a much more successful time at HubPages.

Keep in mind that overall everything falls down to you.

You must put in the effort if you want to have success here. To be honest IF I didn't see success after a certain amount of time I probably would have stopped writing for here, like I have with other sites. I have also had a few friends try writing for this site, not make money, and decided to stop writing for HubPages. So overall the experience will all fall down to what you make of it.

If you are able to have success here then you will thoroughly enjoy the site, and enjoy writing. Even if you don't find success I think the site is still a great place for you to try, and read other peoples guides. Essentially any problem, or help you seek through Google will eventually lead to a link to someones Hub on here. There are millions of hubs written on a vast amount of topics, and everyday thousands more get written. So with all that being said, I think that you will thoroughly enjoy your time here.