HubPages Writing Earnings Reality

As a professional freelance writer, I know a thing or two about writing for money. In fact, over the last few years, I've built up a pretty nice little small business for myself. I work from home out of a small, but lovable home office. I earn money writing online and for more traditional clients. I also make a nice little chunk of change building websites and writing my own online content. I make a few hundred a month off of a few different online advertising networks or affiliate programs. I quit my day job. Being a writer is my day job.

What I don't do is sit around all day with my feet up on the edge of the pool and a Corona in my hand while surfing the web, chatting on Twitter, and letting my passive income increase all around me until I can retire and build a castle on a hill overlooking San Francisco.

I work. Yes, writing is work. I work hard. Yes, writing is hard work, at least good writing that someone will pay you for is. Sometimes, I order great Chicago pizza.

It gets old to continuously see websites and hubs here on HubPages touting this great amazing lifestyle of publishing things online and then just rolling in the money that flows like water out of a fire hose. All you have to do is follow these few simple tips, do some clever SEO tricks, and BAM! non-stop cash flow.

I hope by now that you all realize that it's baloney (to be nice).

The people that do make money running websites and selling ads do so by being good at Internet marketing AND working hard at it. They don't just watch the money tide come in.

Evenspinning articles, building spammy backlinks, and the like takes work. It's why so many people show up on HubPages with a username like Bright-White-Teeth and publish 5 or 6 Hubs with so-called high-paying keywords backlinking to a website called tooth-whitening-free-home-system-real.com only to disappear forever. As it turns out, writing those five Hubs, spinning articles onto a hundred other article directories and building a website with enough pages to get ranked highly in Google is a lot of work, and when it turns out that just doing it the one time doesn't give you a condo on Easy Street, they slink away and go back to whatever they were doing before.

If you want to make a living writing, it can be done. If you have talent, drive, and ambition, it can be done fairly quickly. But, that doesn't mean you'll be done.

What it means is that you will have a new job. You'll have a job where you get to work from home. You'll have a job where you can set your own hours. You'll have a job where you can work in your pajamas. You'll have a job where you can read Facebook at work and even play some great Facebook games during business hours. But, and this cannot be stressed enough, you will have a job.

If that isn't what you wanted to hear, I'm sorry, but there is no other way. The Internet and online ads and things like Google AdSense have been out there for YEARS now. You are not discovering something that is new. You are not doing something that no one else has tried. If it was easy, everyone would already be doing it.

If you are glad to hear that you will keep writing and writing and writing and that by doing so you can earn a living if by writing for yourself and writing for clients, then welcome to the club. You are going to love it.