Income Streams for Writers: Hubpages

Experimenting With Earning

I made enough money writing on Medium last month to support my family. I’ll do it again this month. That’s unbelievably exciting.

In 25 years of professional writing, March 2019 was the first time that a single freelance source has paid me enough to live on. It felt good. Also, it kind of freaked me out.

I don’t want to become too dependent on one source of income that I don’t really have much control over. I thought you might find it interesting if I highlighted some of my income streams.

I’ll start with a brand new one.

Hubpages

This week I read something about Seth Godin, and it mentioned that he started Squidoo (a platform I wrote on a bazillion years ago) and then sold it to Hubpages in 2014.

Hubpages? I hadn’t even thought about Hubpages in eons. So I went to check it out, to see if it’s still a thing.

It is. According to Wikipedia, Hubpages hosts user generated content and has been around since 2006. In 2016 it moved from a single-site model (where all their content is on one site — similar to Medium) to a multi-site model (where their content is spread amongst vertical sites each dedicated to a single topic.)

A quick Google showed me that they get 36 million readers a month and that there are people earning money writing on the platform via sharing revenue generated by ads and affiliate links.

Hubpages works very different from Medium, on just about every level, which makes it a good secondary income stream.

While Medium relies on tags and followers and Medum offering your posts to readers who might be interested in them, Hubpages relies on readers using search engines to find your work.

On Medium, you earn money if paying members read and respond to your posts via clapping by tapping the little hands icon (similar to liking on Facebook or Twitter.)

On Hubpages, you’re paid via ads and affiliate links.

To Succeed on Hubpages, You Need to Understand SEO

I haven’t even thought about SEO optimization in a long time. I’ve never been very good at it, to be honest. But occasionally, I manage to get it right by accident.

When that happens here on Medium, a post ranks on Google and gets a lot of traffic — and almost no pay. Because random readers usually aren’t Medium members and don’t clap. I’ve had posts with 5,000 views or more, only a tiny handful of fans and very little pay.

Those posts would do better on Hubpages.

Hubpages delivers ads on your posts and allows you to use affiliate links. (My experience as a reader is that the ads are generally unobtrusive and don’t affect the reading experience the way it can on some ad-heavy sites. I didn’t run into pop-ups, for instance, or any posts that require you to click through ads to get to the content.

So, on Hubpages, the more traffic from any source, the better.

Posts on Hubpages have a long shelf life. As long as Google serves your post up to people searching for what you’ve written about, you’ll continue to earn money.

In theory, if you work toward building a catalog of posts that consistently draw readers, you’ll get a steady flow of passive income even if you don’t create more content.

Posts That Might Do Well on Hubpages

I think that Medium and Hubpages might work well as two income streams, because they don’t compete. Posts that do well on Medium — authentic, personal essays — would do less well on Hubpages.

People come to Medium looking to read a certain type of post. Someone might come to Medium with a general desire to read, rather than on the search for something specific.

People use a search engine when they’re looking for a specific piece of information.

There are some posts that just don’t do well on Medium at all. Recipes, for instance. Craft tutorials. It’s nice that those should fare better on Hubpages, because I enjoy writing them.

What I Know So Far

Hubpages is slightly less user friendly than Medium. I’m spoiled by the ease of posting photos here, for instance. And I enjoy Medium’s WYSIWYG editor so much that it was a no-brainer for me to give up posting on my own website.

Hubpages is easy enough though. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to post there.

Hubpages has a forum that I like. You can ask questions, or just go look to see if someone else has already wondered the same thing you are.

They have live editors that review all posts, similar to Medium. Posts are ‘featured’ if they pass quality control. Once you have five featured posts, your posts go live and stay live while you wait the 24 to 48 hours for quality control. Until you hit that goal, your posts don’t go live outside Hubpages itself until they’ve been featured.

I’m unclear on what being featured really means, but I appreciate that they practice quality control because a free-for-all would probably limit the whole site’s effectiveness. Their quality control process limits, for instance, how many affiliate links you can have in one post and seeks to control things like stuffing titles with SEO keywords.

Hubpages has it’s own ad network. It also allows you to use Google Adsense. When you sign up as a writer, they walk you through getting that set up. Trust me when I tell you that if I can do it, so can you. You’ll probably have to wait until you have a handful of posts on Hubpages before Google will accept your application.

It’s very easy to get started writing on Hubpages. Just make an account and start writing.

Experimenting With Hubpages

As part of my Hubpages experiment, I moved this post about Susan Powter over to that platform.

I first wrote it two years ago. It made me a grand total of two dollars here on Medium despite being read 6,500 times. That’s because 6,300 of those views came from Google.

It’s not the kind of post that does really well on Medium. I got a some reads as soon as I published it. But no one comes to Medium and searches for Susan Powter.

She’s enough of a celebrity, even after all these years, that people do search for her on Google. And because there aren’t many people writing about her anymore, my post ranked. If my Hubpages post ranks, it will (again, in theory) earn some money from ads and via an Amazon affiliate link for Powter’s book.

My goal is to get twenty posts up on Hubpages and then evaluate whether or not it will work as an income stream for me. I like that it doesn’t require constant writing the way Medium does — I couldn’t take on another income stream that’s as work-intensive as what I do here.

I won’t know for a while if it works. I’ll be sure to report back. If you have any experience with Hubpages or you decide to give it a shot, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the original Ninja Writer.