My Fourth Anniversary on Hubpages
What I look like now
I was recently notified by Hubpages that I had arrived at the four year mark. I have been a hubber that long. Four years! My involvement at Hubpages has been dialed down of late, but I have never closed my account and am a member in good standing. While not everything has gone as well as i might have liked, I can honestly say that I have learned a lot on Hubpages, and that I would not be where I am today without learning those lessons.
The Trip to New Hampshire 2005
Learning to live as a shut in
Everybody has a story about how they discovered Hubpages and why they found it so compelling. In my case, the story went something like this: I was an ape language researcher who had suddenly found herself shut away in the pens, behind steel grids, in an enclosure within an enclosure, and I was trying to find ways to continue to live and thrive despite this confinement.
I had been used to being able to travel and go places with my two children, the human and the chimp, but now all of that had ceased. I was locked in a cage with a chimpanzee, who still needed almost all my attention every moment of the day, and though I had achieved my research objectives, there was no way to get the established scientific community to publish them.
I was alone. I was trapped, and it didn't look good. And then a woman who was offering me proof reading services for Inverted-A Press, the small press I had inherited from my father, asked me to join Hubpages so I could be her fan. I did, and though she never wrote any hubs, I looked around, and I decided that I would.
What Bow looks like now
No Limit to What You Could Write About
At first, I was quite cautious in what I chose to write about. My first few hubs were about nutrition. Eventually, I took a chance and started writing about Bow. I dared to tell the world about my discovery, and this brought me a certain amount of fame with the reddit crowd, and lots of traffic for a while, but no earnings.
In time I found that I could write about anything and everything, and there would be people to read it and comment on it, and sometimes I even earned some money in the process:
I wrote about:
- Literature
- Law
- Religion
- National Anthems
- Love
- Politics
- Teaching
- My daughter's school work
- Language and Linguistics
No topic was too mundane or too highbrow and since I was allowed to write about whatever preoccupied me at the time, I enjoyed myself immensely.
Making New Friends and Setting New Goals
Hubpages was an amzing place for me, because it was not just a site to write on or a spot to advertise my research. It was also a place to meet new people and to interact with them and learn from them and this eventually led to other opportunities. Some of the people that I met through Hubpages who are still friends today include:
This is not a complete list, for there are many more hubbers whom I consider to be my friends. For someone who is shut in and finds it hard to get out and meet people in a normal environment, the Hubpages site was a significant factor in combating social isolation.
But what about making money?
Isn't Hubpages a good place to make money? Well, not really. At least not for me. For me, it was never a truly significant place to make money, and just as I was beginning to learn the ropes when it came to SEO and was beginning to slowly build some consistent income from HP, the Panda update threw everything off, and attempts to recover have been pretty much negated by subsequent Google tinkering in their algorithm.
Today, I just don't see Hubpages as a significant source of income, now or in the future. Traffic has ground down to a terrible halt, and I'm moving on. And no, it's not just because of mistakes that management at HP may have made as an attempt to react to Google. Other people who have independent sites and used to make significant money both from HP and from their own sites and blogs are reporting the same thing. For instance, read this blog entry by Lis Sowerbutts.
Everyone agrees that the new game is in publishing. Even when Google does its best to label your work spam and to deny it a place in the rankings, you can still sell your books on Amazon.
Here are some books that I have published. Some of them are selling really well, and some less so, but they are all selling and give me more hope both in communicating with others and in the very important question of generating an income for me, for my daughter and for Bow.
Books I Have Published at Inverted-A Press
Hubpages is Still Here
Hubpages is still here, and I will continue to monitor its progress and to see if I should reassess its capacity to contribute to my well being. Things could change for the better, and if they do I will react accordingly. But in the meantime, there is much to be thankful for. I will always have good memories associated with my early years on Hubpages.
Copyright 2012 Aya Katz
