What I have learned about writing for online income after about a year: My 50th Hub on Hubpages!

What I have learned about writing for online income after about a year: My 50^th Hub on Hubpages!

Alright, it took me a while to get here, but here I am. This will be my 50^th hub…

Approximately 14 months ago I found the website hubpages and it piqued my interest in making a residual income writing online. I started out by writing a few different articles, which I thought (and still think) were pretty good, but didn’t see many views and subsequently many dollars for all my hard work. Discouraged by my lack of views and money coming in, I stopped writing after about 20 or so hubs. Now, I think this is probably very common of a lot of the newbies that join Hubpages, as well as other similar websites. People get really excited by the prospect of making a decent passive income online and then after a few weeks to a month only find themselves making a few pennies a day… if that… Sadly, I found myself in this very situation and got mad that I had spent multiple hours, researching, writing, and promoting my articles. I vividly recall breaking out my trusty calculator and dividing the money I had made by the number of hours I figured I had spent on the entire process (well, truthfully I hadn’t made anything… as you don’t get a payout from Google until you hit $100, and Hubpages does not pay until you reach $50). Now, I can’t remember the exact number but I know for a fact that the dollars per hour were not, by any means, close to what I was expecting. So, I quit.

Fast-forward about 12 months later, and I find myself cleaning out my gmail account (I had over 9,000 emails saved, which I thought was excessive), and I stumble across an older email from Hubpages and decide to see if I had gotten any views since I left. I somehow remembered my username and password, which is a miracle in itself and was pleasantly surprised to find that many of my articles had gotten hundreds to thousands of hits while I was away, and were continuing to get a fair amount of views each and every day. I became encouraged again that this really could work. It was not the Get Rich Quick scheme I had my heart set on when I had found Hubpages a year earlier, but it was indeed a legitimate way to make a passive income.

Since my “hiatus”, I have started writing again and paying more attention to what I write about and how I promote my articles to the public. I also have developed a plan to follow which I believe will allow me to continue my success on Hubpages. In addition, I am spending more time reading quality authors who have been on Hubpages for a while and are gracious enough to leave me with information on how to make my articles easier to find through Google and other search engines, and other great information which I wish I would have followed during my initial few months with Hubpages.

So, what have I learned? It’s hard to summarize everything I have learned over the last 400 days, but the first would be to stick with it. After seeing the money that I make every day with just 49 articles, I feel silly that I don’t have 200+ articles up yet… So, even if you are feeling discourage and that you are just wasting your time, I beg you to be patient and keep on writing. You will learn as you go and the more you learn the more you will earn. I also think that it is important to develop a plan for your online writing (if one of your primary goals is to earn a passive income off of your work… If you are only here to write for the joy of writing, then you don’t have to worry about this one). There is a quote out there that says “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. This applies to most if not all things in life and writing online for residual income is no exception. Create a basic writing and promotion plan that you can stick to and it will pay dividends. First set your goal as to how many articles you will write. This can be done on weekly, monthly, or even yearly levels. However, I feel that when you are goal setting the wider the timeline the easier it is to procrastinate, which is why I suggest setting weekly attainable goals. In addition, create an excel worksheet so that you can track your articles, and how you have promoted and backlinked them. You could also go a step farther and develop niche articles that pertain to one another and backlink them to each other to create a better score from Google and the other search engines.

My final tip would be to read everything you can about the subject of making income online. I realize that there is a lot of bad information out there (google online income and you will find a number of snake oil salesmen out there telling you that if you purchase $100 e-book they can teach you the “trick” to making $1000+ a day working part time… but this is just a sad attempt to get some money out of you… don’t buy this junk). However, there is also some really good information out there as well. Just be careful to recognize which is legitimate and which is trash. If it sounds too good to be true it usually is… The truth is that writing online for passive income can make decent money, but unless you are just exceptional at it, it is likely it won’t ever be enough to quit your day job.

However, if you are persistent, have a plan, and write quality content there is no reason you can’t earn a few hundred extra (or even a thousand+) each month. The best part about writing for a residual income is that it really is extra money, and can go directly to your savings, debt you owe, a retirement account, or your kids college fund. So, put in the work, have fun with it and enjoy the extra money.