Is It Possible to Make Money with Hubs in the Entertainment Category?

Can Entertainment Hubs Make Money?

"Entertainment hubs are fun to write but I've never made money from them. Is it possible to make money from this type of hub?" asked by prairieprincess

When a new writer first joins hubpages they often wonder what they should write about. There are so many options and people want to put their best foot forward, both in terms of writing ability and what they can share with others. Sometimes, finding a good starting point is half the battle.

If you read the majority of advice given on hubpages, you will notice a reoccurring theme. Experienced hubbers realize that articles written on evergreen content can earn you passive income, long after the page was written. However, it's not always easy to write about evergreen topics, but you can write on entertainment topics that will last a while.

Imagine you'd written a Twilight movie review hub when the first film first came out, over four years ago. If you'd been able to rank that hub on the front page of Google, how many views would you have achieved by now? Maybe that particular hub would have fallen off the front page of Google within the year, but by then you could have written a series of Twlight hubs about the cast and characters, the soundtrack, available merchandise and the list goes on. How many Amazon products or Ebay capsules would have resulted in sales? How many clicked Google ads would this traffic have resulted in?

Of course, the Adprogram didn't exist back then, but there are still Twilight like opportunities in the future. There are new movies being released every month and you're not just limited to movies.

Hopefully, this is a little insight into whether money can be made from great entertainment hubs. How much money really depends on a number of factors. These factors will be discussed in this hub. By the end of this article, you will have discovered if writing in the entertainment category is your path to earning an income on hubpages.

What are Classed as Entertainment Hubs?

Lots of hubs fall into the entertainment category. I don't mean hubs that are written in a funny style or format. I actually mean hubs that fall within the Entertainment and Media Category on hubpages.

Within this wide category there are nine main areas:

1. Cartoons and Animation
2. Celebrities
3. Humor
4. Movies and Movie Reviews
5. Music
6. Performing Arts
7. Photos and Videos
8. Radio
9. Television and TV Shows

As you can see, this is a fairly large remit and there is so much to choose from. Each of these subcategories can then be subdivided many times over. I won't go into all of these divisions as they are so numerous, but the nine subcategories gives us a good overview of what's appropriate for the category.

If you choose just one of these subcategories, you can be a niche writer and gain a following from other authors because readers have an expectation of what you will likely write about.

There are lots of examples of people who have done just that on HubPages.

1. Cogerson is a great example of this. He has written mainly about celebrities and movie reviews. He even has his own scoring system he uses to rank movies. He is a very popular member on this writing platform and is very well respected.
2. Steve Lensman is another author who has concentrated primarily on movie reviews. You can see from his profile page some of the classic movie reviews he has undertaken, along with some he plans to do in the near future.
3. Edweirdo is another author writing about a number of celebrities and movies. He has over 1 million views and hasn't written a Hub in over 14 months. It says on his profile page that he has been a member of HubPages for at least 2 years. We don't know how close he is to the 3 year mark on HubPages, but over 1 million views is still a great achievement, especially with only 87 Hubs.
4. rb101182 loves to write about entertainment categories including movies, but also has at least 10 Hubs that fall within the music category. According to hubpages these are some of his best hubs. It's hard to tell exactly how many views rb101182 has as the profile only says over 1 million views and the next Accolade is awarded at 10 million views.

This list is by no means exhaustive but is a good spectrum of four people who excel at writing in the entertainment category.

Also, there is no way I can tell you how much each of these authors earn from their articles.

You can make a rough guestimate from these authors Accolades. By the number of views they have garnered you can make an approximate guess as to how much they have made. This is based on the assumption they are registered for the HubPages Adprogram and doesn't take into consideration any Google Adsense, Amazon or Ebay revenue. Any earnings from those streams are above and beyond any earnings attained from the Adprogam. These extra revenue streams will also vary greatly depending on layout, products listed and rankings in the search engines.

4 Common Reasons People Fail to Earn in This Category

There are a number of ways you can give your entertainment hubs a fighting chance of earning some money. Many of these factors are the same as for any other type of hub. However, it can be even more vital in the entertainment category and you will soon understand exactly why.

If you miss these 4 vital steps then you have drastically reduced the likelihood of your hubs making money in this area.

If you plan to write hubs in this category then there are a few caveats you have to understand before you take this leap.

1. Expect the CPM of these hubs to be lower than normal. According to some other Hub authors the average CPM on hubpages fluctuates between $3 and $6 per 1,000 impressions. For entertainment hubs, the CPM tends to fluctuate around the bottom of this range, and can go even lower.

2. Without traffic your articles will earn you very little, or even nothing. You need large amounts of traffic, if you plan to earn some money from these hubs. Since the CPM is a lot lower than for other topics, it stands to reason that you will have to compensate for a lower CPM by bringing in more readers.

3. If you write about a topic that very few people are interested in you will fail to earn. You really need to choose popular topics that people want to know more about, or want to read about. Find something that people are interested in and want to talk about, or are interested in hearing someone else's view on the matter. If traffic is the key to earning with entertainment hubs, then low traffic topics are killers to your bottom line.

4. Hubs that are boring, don't contain the information for which the reader is seeking, or are full of useless filler information will fail to earn you money. This is the entertainment category people are reading about. They want to know the information and they want to know your thoughts on it too. However, they don't just want a boring looking page or a whole list of stats.

If you check out Cogerson's Hubs, he's able to get the figures across in an interesting and unique manner. This keeps readers interested and continue reading.

Also, don't provide readers with a woolly hub. Give them specific details of what you are writing about. If you are talking about a movie review, then tell them about the premise of the movie, the cast and characters and your thoughts on the movie. You can also try and provide some interesting facts that no one else has written about. Have a good layout and think about what other information your reader is looking for.

If your hubs have a high bounce rate then you will fail to earn through the Adprogram. Your content is a vital component to your continued success.

If you avoid these 4 pitfalls then the likelihood of your Hub being successful will increase dramatically.

There are 5 secrets to making money with articles written in the entertainment sector. They are not necessarily difficult, or hard to achieve. It's more a system to follow to ensure you capitalize on your chances of at least earning something for your time and effort.

1. HubPages Adprogram. If you want to make money in this category you will be relying on traffic and impressions.

Not everyone is going to click on an ad and your clickthrough rate could be quite low. Your aim is to get paid for the traffic you send to your articles, so turn on the HubPages Adprogram.

Even if your CPM is as low as $2, you're goal is to have thousands of visitors a day. Those small dollar amounts can quickly add up. Yes 0.002 per visitor may seem a low price to get paid, but don't be disheartened. With thousands of readers comes lots of pennies, and pennies add up to dollars.

2. Search Engine Rankings are vital. If you fail to get ranked in the search engines, how do you anticipate getting thousands of free visitors a day?

You need to get ranked on the first page of Google in order to tap into the large volume of people searching for movie reviews, information about cartoons, songs or TV shows etc. Sorry folks, it's that simple. Without Google's help you have little to no chance of making money from your Hubs.

You might be able to share your articles with friends and family or on social media outlets, but these are short term strategies. Once these sharing methods run out so will your revenue and your article will fail to earn you passive income for months or years to come.

3. Keyword Research is essential. You need to pick keywords that have a lot of people searching for them, but not such high levels of competition that you'll never be able to rank on the front page of Google. You can use the Google keyword tool to help you in this area and it's free.

Choosing the right keywords is almost an art form. It's a very important balancing act and if you get it wrong you're sunk before you've even started. By incorrectly choosing keywords, you'll struggle to get a good enough ranking in Google or you'll get ranked but for a term that gets almost no traffic. Either way, your traffic will be insufficient for the pennies to add up to dollars.

4. Original, quality content is king. It's important your reader stays on your page for as long as possible.

To keep the reader on the page aim to write over 800 words per page. Most of my hubs are over 1,000 words in length. It's not always easy, but your reader has no reason to stay if the content is so short that it only takes a few seconds to read.

Aim to be as engaging to the reader as possible through the use of videos, polls and pictures. Make sure the content of your article is to the point and succinct, or your reader will lose interest and leave your page.

5. Remember to add in related products. Not only do you want to try and earn through the Adprogram, but you also want to try and maximize your potential revenue by adding Amazon or Ebay capsules to your articles. It will be hard to live off the small income earned from these product sales but they can be a good bonus, along with a few Google Adsense clicks.

At the beginning of 2012, I made hubpages my New Year resolution. I wanted to see if people really did make money from writing. I started writing about entertainment topics, mainly TV and movie reviews. My Hubpages Experiment documents my progress so far and is further proof that income can be made by writing about entertainment topics on hubpages.

I write almost exclusively in the entertainment section of hubpages. I didn't do this to earn money, but rather because I watch a lot of TV shows. I decided to turn my past time into articles and hopefully make a little extra money as a bonus.

Originally, I really didn't know what to write about. I decided to try and start with something that would hopefully bring a lot of traffic. Therefore, allowing me to hone my writing skills and also tweak and apply SEO techniques to get articles ranked.

Also, the larger traffic numbers would give me more information in a shorter period of time, allowing me to figure out what I was doing well or failing on. I am a numbers gal and like immediate feedback. I wasn't looking for subjective responses. I wanted the hard cold facts which would allow me improve on my performance. Having a larger set of data can give you so much more feedback.

You could send your Hubs to your friends and they could tell you that they love them, but how would you know if they were telling the truth? On the other hand, if you use the stats available to you on hubpages the truth can become clearer. I can see whether readers are staying on my hubs for a long time by seeing how many stars I have in the viewer duration metric. This indicates that readers like my Hubs.

If you want to understand the relationship between your CPM and the number of traffic views you'll need in order to make a decent income writing entertainment hubs on Hubpages, then please read Hubpages Income - The Real Story.

As of writing this page, I have been a member of hubpages for 11 months, have written 44 hubs and garnered just over 175,000 total views. At least 120,000 of those views are made up by hubs in the Entertainment and Media Category.

I qualified for my first hubpages payout in February 2012 and my second in the following month of March.

Not every piece of writing is going to be a success and nor can you expect it to be. However, sometimes all it takes is one successful hub from which you can learn and replicate, in order to increase the likelihood of future success.

Can Hubs in the Entertainment Category Earn You Money?

In conclusion, writing articles about TV shows, movies or songs can make you money on hubpages. It is highly unlikely to make you rich, but the goal is to make you some money.

Most earnings in this area will be earned through the HubPages Adprogram, with the possibility of extra revenue from Google Adsense clicks, or Amazon and Ebay capsules. Not every article will be successful, but with a little practice you will get closer to formulating what works for you.

Try to keep the 5 secrets to earning from entertainment topics in the front of your mind, while trying to avoid the pitfalls. By doing this you will greatly increase your chances of becoming an author who is able to earn some money from entertainment topics. Once you have your system in place, it will be far easier to apply these lessons to other topics on hubpages, in order to increase your CPM and revenue even further.