Make Money With HubPages By Selling Out

Hubpages is an online publishing community that makes it easy for both professional freelance writers, and writers of all experience levels, to publish well designed webpages without any HTML experience or website programming. It's quick an easy to use web-based interface makes HubPages a great way to focus on writing quality articles, entertaining stories, and more. Unfortunately, this same feature may be hampering some writers from making money on HubPages.

Some HubPages users come to the community directly from the dog-eat-dog world of online advertising and Internet marketing. They set straight out to write hubs that will attract lots of traffic. Specifically, they write hubs that will attract more search engine traffic. To do so, they do plenty of keyword research and then optimize their hubs in order to get high search engine results rankings. A webpage on the first page of Google SERPs will get much more traffic than one with the top ranking on page 2 (usually #11).

For these Hubpages newcomers, making money with HubPages is easy. Just pluggin the Google AdSense account number into the Affiliates settings on HubPages ensures that every published page has Google Ads in optimized locations. All the Hubber need do is sit back and wait for their checks from Google.

However, many Hubbers are not from the world of marketing and advertising sales. Rather, these Hubpages community members are writers. They write because they love writing, or because they have useful knowledge they want to share with others. For them, keyword research never enters the picture, nor does search engine rankings or search engine optimization. For them, making money with Hubpages is hard.

For these writers, the idea of doing keyword research and then writing about those topics is selling out. They feel that doing that kind of internet marketing lessens what they are trying to do with their writing, and they strongly resist it.

I know exactly how you feel. As someone who loves writing, I quit my day job a few years ago to become a professional writer. I work out of my home office as a freelance writer, and I wouldn't go back to corporate America for all the money in the world. So, how do I feel about "selling out" and writing hubs about high-paying keywords?

Actually, it turns out that there is no need to sellout your writing to make money with Hubpages or earn money writing online anywhere else for that matter.

I learned this lesson the hard way thanks to one of my freelance writing business clients. In an email, this client said that they loved my writing, and that they felt is was some of the best on their website. However, my articles consistently got lower traffic than the other articles on the site. Taking the supposed "high road" for your own writing is one thing. Letting down a client is another. I jumped into the world of SEO and read everything I could find on it over a weekend. On Monday, I had a new attitude and a head full of ideas.

The results?

I realized that I was following the rules of the offline writing world and writing catchy headlines that grab reader's attention. That isn't how it works in the search dominated world of the Internet. At first, I resisted, but finally realized that successful writing online requires some tweaks. I wrote about How Google Made Me a Worse Writer.

Happier clients, and I was happier too, because now my writing actually was getting seen by people and not just sitting in the dark wastelands of the Internet.

As it turns out, there is an audience for just about anything on the Internet. That means that there is no need to quit writing about what you love and start writing about carcinoma, or whatever other high CPC keywords your research turns up. Instead, the key is to make sure that what people are searching for shows up in what you already write.

Consider someone who loves writing about dogs. Specifically, the love writing about the Boxer breed of dogs. This writer has no need to abandon this topic to generate more traffic, get higher paying ads, and start making more money with Google AdSense or any other money making affiliate program.

The key is getting the right keywords into what is already being written. For example, while a clever title for an article about Boxers at dog shows might be something like Scrappy Boxer Fights Through the Competition. Unfortunately, this title is SEO suicide.

No matter what else is in the article, the title of any webpage makes a huge impact on what terms it will rank for in search results. Notice that the clever title means that virtually no search any other Boxer lover makes will match.

• Boxers at dog shows
• dog show boxers
• boxer show dogs

Even a search for "competition Boxers" will be a long shot because the two words are so far apart in the title. This article, no matter how great, will languish without readers unless the author can deliver the readers to the article themselves.
Far from needing to abandon the article and go write for slimy ambulance chasing lawyers, the author need merely tweak the title to greatly improve their hubpages income and their webpage traffic.
High volume searches occur for both the terms boxer dogs and dog shows. A much smaller volume search for boxer show dogs exists as well. Just changing the title so that these key-phrases are part of the title will deliver much better results.
Boxer Dogs at Dog Shows as a title will draw way more traffic, even if it is much more boring. And, if you love your title? Make it a subtitle. Your readers get to enjoy your entertaining writing, and the search engine spiders get to deliver you plenty of new readers.