is HubPages for me?

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John Serranoposted 12 years ago
Hi, I'm completely new to freelance writing and I thought I'd give it a shot because writing is second nature to me and it's something I really enjoy. But I'm not sure if a website like HubPages fits what I want to write about. It's been suggested to me that blogging is more up my alley. What I want to write about (and pretty much the only thing I can write about ) is movies. I've been thinking about doing articles that are an analysis of the filmographies and techniques of some of the more prominent figures in the classic era like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jimmy Cagney, Frank Sinatra etc and maybe even more contemporary filmmakers like Richard Linklater or David Fincher or possibly foreign filmmakers like Michael Haneke or Jean-Luc Godard. It's been suggested to me that blogging would be better suited for that, seeing as hubs aren't meant to be 10,000 words long and that they also aren't meant to be read in a series (if I were to split up the 10,000 word article.)

My problem with blogging is that I'm not sure I want to go through all that effort trying to get my blog noticed. It seems like a lot of work and I'm not sure if my heart's in it. Mostly because I don't have much confidence in my writing ability. But I think that I'm fairly decent, so that's why I thought I'd give it a try. But then again, I'm thinking that it might take just as much effort to get my hubs (or any other articles I write on another site) noticed as well. I've seen people who have been members for years and still don't have much success. I realize that whether I pursue blogging or hubpages, that I won't become rich overnight, but I'm just not sure if any of this is for me.

I'm thinking that maybe active income is better suited for me. But then again, I don't really like being told what to write. I can't write if I'm not interested in something or passionate about it. Also, I have zero experience so I imagine I would have difficulty trying to land freelance gigs. I don't really know what to do. Does anybody have any advice? Thank you.
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  Barbara Kayposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  It sounds to me that your writing would fit right in with Hubpages. I've tried other sites and they all take some time to make money.
  
  It doesn't hurt to try different things at the same time. If you need the money use some of the sites that pay right away. The trouble is they pay so little.
  
  Sites like Hubpages take time to earn, but once you start earning it continues for as long as Hubpages exists. My prediction is for years. You'll earn more money in the long run this way.
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WryLiltposted 12 years ago
Each hub is basically a standalone high quality article.

I don't like active income because it means that once you get paid, that's it - you've lost the work and never earn another cent from it again. Revenue sharing, on the other hand, means that the longer you leave your articles, the more you can potentially earn.

It took me about 6 months to earn $5 when I first started. But now I'm earning a couple hundred per month just from this account (and I write on several sites plus have quite a few websites.)

It is worth it in the long run IF you are willing to treat it like a real part time job, not a "now and then" hobby.
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Marisa Wrightposted 12 years ago
I'm going to give this thread a bump because I'm the one who's suggested to you that your material on classic films, which runs to tens of thousands of words, is big enough to justify its own blog.

I understand your hesitation and I hope a few more people jump in to give their opinion!

A couple of years ago, I'd have said without hesitation - start writing on HubPages because Hubs get noticed all on their own, without you having to promote much. Much easier than a blog, no question. But that was when HubPages was one big site - each of our Hubs belonged to a huge, highly-ranked website and therefore was automatically picked up by the search engines.

We now have sub-domains, exactly like the blogs on Blogger and Wordpress.com are sub-domains. The only difference is we have cross-linking between sub-domains here which doesn't happen on blogging platforms, but I'm not sure if that's enough to make a significant difference (some people say it hinders).

What we really need is a Hubber who has started a substantial blog and a HubPages account at the same time, to tell us which one got attention more easily!
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Hey Marisa! I thought I'd find you here. Anyway, thanks again for all your and everybody else's help but I'm still at a loss at what to do. Right now I'm leaning towards posting my article in a blog and then posting a summary of the article here on hubpages with a link to my blog. That seems like a good idea. Or maybe the opposite. I'm still unsure of which I should stick to, blogging or hubpages. I guess I got some thinking to do. Thanks again everybody. I hope to get some more replies to help me make up my mind.
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  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  John, I'm leaning more towards what Marisa has said.
  
  Hubpages and other revenue sharing sites are a great place to start out and learn about online writing online, but in the end YOU don't own the site and if they go broke or change rules etc (which has happened in the past), you have no control over it.
  
  That said, I find revenue sharing sites still bring me decent money and are a good way to promote your own sites.
  
  Plus you can learn a lot from hanging around in the forums
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hospitaleraposted 12 years ago
I would go for building your own blog, no doubt, Hubpages are ok if you want to write about a variety of things but if you know that you will write only about one topic, having your own site / blog is better! You are in full control of what you write about and keep 100% of the income. Setting up your own blog is not that difficult and far more rewarding in many aspects. If you need help with that you can send me a pm ;-)
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Dame Scribeposted 12 years ago
I wrote a series 'article' it was a huge job, mostly about 'anatomy of a wind turbine nothing wrong with whatever style YOU choose to present it. Just keep in mind you're writing to a audience inject your personality into it so people learn your 'voice' I don't think there's anything wrong with your choice of topic either. I find it rather fascinating. When are you starting?
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Lissieposted 12 years ago
There's no advantage to Hubpages over your own site, both require the same amount of promotion these days. So don't rent space here -control your own space on your own site. Hubs don't rank quickly in the search engines they way they used to. There are other sites that still do - but if I mention the site I have in mind it will probably get snipped - PM if you want to know.

If you have a single theme though overall I'd go with your own site, and don't both with multiple articles from here all linking back - not worth it for SEO
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Cassie Smithposted 12 years ago
I think you should write some short articles on Hubpages so that you can build up an audience and direct them to your blog for the meatier stuff.
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IzzyMposted 12 years ago
I would agree with Marisa that your own blog would be better, but make sure you title is correctly.

You have a choice, set up a free blog at blogspot or any other free blogging platform that allows advertising.

Buy a domain name and host it for free at blogspot.

Buy a domain name and pay for private hosting (about $10 a month).

There might be other options but none spring to mind at the moment.

Get a domain or url that closely relates to what you are writing about, and is a search term.

Use the same keywords in the title.

Put all your articles up, as you write them. I would definitely split 10,000 word articles in part 1, part 2 etc.

Then once it is up and running, open a new account here at HP using your blog title (or similar) as the username, and write short blurbs (up to 1000 words) about your posts, with a link back to the post, or write separate but related articles and link them back to your own blog posts.

That way, you have the best of both worlds
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  A lot of great replies here, thanks everybody! IzzyM, I was just wondering, what's the difference in the first two options you wrote there? (i pasted it down below)
  
  "Buy a domain name and host it for free at blogspot.
  
  Buy a domain name and pay for private hosting (about $10 a month)."
  
  Marisa Wright had also suggested it to me before, but I didn't really understand the difference.
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  IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  You can go to Godaddy or whois.com or whatever site you go to where you can see if a dot com is available.
  
  Suppose you wanted films.com - for certain without even looking, that is taken.
  
  But just imagine it wasn't, and was still up for grabs.
  
  Then you can check at those sites that it is available and if it is you can buy it.
  
  It's in the region of $10 a year for a dot com address.
  
  Once you register it, it is yours until you forget to renew or something.
  
  Hosting is how it gets on the net.
  
  I use hostgator but there are a thousand companies out there who will host your site, and they have made it easy for us by providing us with software in which to write our sites.
  
  Blogger or blogspot, same place, is owned by Google and they offer free hosting but you have to use their software and it has limitations.
  
  Having said that, I like blogger.
  
  You can of course find your chosen url from blogger for free, but it will end up being [for example] films.blogspot.com not films.com.
  
  For SEO purposes it makes no difference, that I'm aware of.
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Thanks for the quick reply. So, is the only difference that I have more freedom to make my site however I want? I'm not really picky about that kinda stuff, and I don't really know anything about HTML markup and stuff. Or is it much simpler than that?
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  IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  You don't need to know html, both of their softwares takes care of all that stuff, but yeah having your own domain name gives you a lot more freedom. You can initially host it on blogger, then later change to your own hosting company if you decide it's too restrictive.
  
  I can't help thinking you might be as well starting on blogger, with the free url that comes with blogger, then expanding into a site when you have found your feet, then you can use your blogger site to provide backlinks to your own site as well.
  
  I mean you must have a million topics to write on within your niche, so there is plenty of scope for having the two.
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Sounds like a plan. Thanks again for your help.
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  86
  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  For an idea of the difference between hosting and a domain name:
  
  -The domain name is like the number on your letter box, letting people know your address.
  -The hosting is like the house and furniture and everything at that address.
  
  You can't have one without the other.
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  mistyhorizon2003posted 12 years agoin reply to this
  I just love that explanation Wry, it sums it up so perfectly
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  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Thanks.
  
  Actually I should say the hosting is like the house, and the page and actual content is the furniture?
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hospitaleraposted 12 years ago
As for the difference in using free / paid hosting, a domain name is around $10 / year and hosting can be bought for less than $100 / year. So if you can invest that amount of money I would go from the beginning for your own, self-hosted site. Even if you can transfer a free blog later on, that is always complicated and comes often with a loss in search engine rankings, at least for a time.
Setting up a site / blog doesn't need to be complicated, most hosts have now Wordpress one-click installs, in less then 5 min you have your own blog up and running.
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1. 86
  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Agreed.
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2. 60
  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  what about the difference between buying a domain name or just using a free blog like on blogger?
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  hospitaleraposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Apart of the cost? With your own domain and hosting you are in full control of your own site and can do, more or less, what you want with it. If you use a free platform you have to obey to the rules, plus, there is always the real risk of your blog being shut down if you fail to do so.
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  so, am I correct in saying that the only real difference from all these options (free blog, buying domain name, private hosting) is how much control you have of your site? It doesn't affect how much traffic you get or affiliate revenue or anything like that?
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  IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  They say having a dot com address is best for ranking with, but I have a couple of blogspot blogs that rank as highly as my domains. I like them better obviously, because they are free.
  
  I honestly think because you are just starting out and learning the ropes, it would be easier to have a blogspot blog and buy your domain at a later date when you know what are doing, but that's just my opinion.
  
  Freedom to do more with your site are just words when you don't know what they are.
  
  I'm still learning too, so don't pay too much attention to me.
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  "I'm still learning too, so don't pay too much attention to me."
  That made me laugh.
  
  Anyway, thanks everybody for all your help, I have a much clearer idea of what I want to do and of the options available to me. Thanks again.
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  86
  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  I do like Blogspot. But that said, if you have a year old blog there that you want to change to your own paid hosting, you'll lose that year of "age" you've got with Google when you transfer the data.
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  what do you mean by "age?"
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  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  You may notice that when you Google some things, top results are from pages or forums created years ago (2002 or 2004 for instance).
  
  As sites/pages get more backlinks and age more, they also go up higher in Google search results. So if you transfer them all to new URLs, that age and all those backlinks will reset to 0.
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  I see. Maybe I'll try out blogger for a while (less than a year), and if I don't like it, I'll probably go for the domain name and hosting.
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  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  ...there's an easy solution to that. Use Blogger, but buy your domain name now and use that instead of the .blogspot address. That way, if you want to upgrade after a year, you can move elsewhere with no loss of age, because you still have the same "address".
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  how do I use my domain name instead of the blogspot address?
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  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  There's a help process on Google
  
  http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/s … page=ts.cs
  
  If you buy it through Google they'll set it up for you. I've never done that - I imagine it's not the cheapest option but it looks like the easiest.
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  86
  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Marisa I might be wrong but...
  
  1. There's no way to redirect pages from Blogspot (or is there?)
  2. If you transfer the data to a wordpress site, you couldn't have the exact same page name so Google would see it as either a duplicate or new page?
  
  So yes, your domain is aged, but the pages have to start over.
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  IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  http://moodywatercolors.com/how-to-tran … ia-blogger
  
  http://www.webknowhows.com/how-to-trans … -wordpress
  
  Seems there are ways, but it doesn't look easy.
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  84
  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  You're right, you can't redirect pages from Blogspot. But transferring blogger posts to Wordpress is easy - you just use the Wordpress Importer, and it does it all for you. When you import from another Wordpress blog, it does preserve the same URL - not sure about Blogger, but I don't see why not.
  
  Even if you couldn't (and would therefore have a duplicate problem at first), you're going to go into Webmaster tools and tell Google that site [x] is now located at site [y] and also request the old deleted blog is removed from the cache, so it should only be short term.
  
  The thing is, it's all very well for you or I to say setting up your own self-hosted blog on Wordpress is easy - we both learned more than we realized on HubPages before we took the plunge. Expecting a total newbie to dive straight into it all is maybe a bridge too far.
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  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Alright, maybe so... but I found that I had to Google almost every step along the way and it took me a full day the first time but the answers are there if you look for them.
  
  I remember the whole "name servers" thing confused me SO much!
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  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  But do you mean the transfer of the actual posts confused you, or was it the whole process of setting up your self-hosted blog?
  
  Which is the point I'm making. Understanding stuff like nameservers, Google Webmaster tools, cpanel, Fantastico - it's all a big learning curve. By starting on blogspot, you can delay all that for a year or so while you learn the ropes - all you need to master is how to set up your domain name on the blog.
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  WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  At the time I changed to Hostgator and imported all my content, I had no idea that you could keep the age (which was about 8 months at the time) so they were all reset.
  
  And Blogger doesn't really prepare you for any of that stuff, plus you end up stuck going through Google for your domain name, which I found quite complicated to change to WP at the time - I find Godaddy much easier although now I use Namecheap.
  
  Nowadays if I have a blog idea I want to put on Blogspot I often think "Why bother with all that work/changing/etc" and just throw it on Wordpress.
  
  But maybe that's just me! I still use Blogger for short term or very basic blogs which I know wouldn't be worth investing money into but will still bring me a few dollars, but nothing serious.
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  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  So you can't leave the domain name with Google and just change the nameservers? In that case, getting the domain name from them isn't a good idea. But with Blogger, you can use a domain name you've bought elsewhere, which means you just have to change the nameservers when you move.
  
  So do I, but that's because I already have hosting so it's easy to create more add-on domains.
  
  What you don't have to do now, is struggle with all the setup. I think for a newbie like John, it's challenging enough to start a blog and understand how to write posts, create advertising, do effective promotion etc etc etc. If he also had to jump through all those other hoops, chances are he'd throw his hands in the air and just go back to his original idea of writing on a rev-sharing site - and he'd miss the opportunity.
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  IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  yes you can - http://moodywatercolors.com/how-to-tran … ia-blogger
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  60
  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Yeah, I have to say that you guys are really confusing me right now. So, I don't really know.... what to do... now....? Cause I almost have no idea what you guys are talking about...
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  84
  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Sorry John, we've got into a bit of a technical discussion!
  
  You have a choice of platforms to create the blog on, and we've been discussing their respective merits, and the practicalities of each (which probably went over your head, don't worry about it).
  
  Some people are saying you should go straight for a self-hosted blog using Wordpress software. It's the best option for the long term, but personally I still think it's a bit too complicated to tackle as a first-timer. I feel you've already got enough to learn, just getting your blog started!
  
  The second-best option is to write your blog on Blogger.com. The setup is much, much easier. The important thing is to give it a proper website URL instead of just "something.blogspot". That way, you can move your blog if you need to later, and it will always have the same URL, so people can still find you.
  
  I gave you the link to get a domain name from Google and attach it to your blogspot blog. Choose something that's descriptive of your topic - NOT your name or anything cutesy.
  
  A sample of the names which are available: ClassicfilmsonDVD.com, Classicfilmsonline.net, GreatestMovies.org
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Actually, I already created my blog on blogger the other day and I've posted that article (in parts) that I was talking about before. Though, I'm still working out the kinks on it. But I'm not sure about buying a domain name though.
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  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Well done! Do you mean you're not sure whether to buy one, or you're not sure how to do it?
  
  Just a tip: write something on your HubPages profile and include a hyperlink to your blog.
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  John Serranoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Both. I'm also unsure if it really matters if I get one, because I'm pretty satisfied with my blog at this moment. I know it's only like 10 dollars but I'm having issues with my credit card and I'm too lazy to settle it just for that. hehehe.
  
  By the way, thanks for the tip.
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  84
  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Hey! That's looking good! You can make the link on your profile a live hyperlink by highlighting it, clicking on the chain icon on the top bar and pasting in the URL of your blog. Worth doing.
  
  For others wondering how it's looking, here's the blog:
  http://classicfilmsofhollywood.blogspot.com.au/
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Dame Scribeposted 12 years ago
There is a lot of valuable information right here on HP use the search bar at top right also can't forget videos
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