Summary

Shaunta Grimes reflects on her initial week of experimenting with Hubpages as a potential income stream, contrasting it with her more substantial earnings on Medium.

Abstract

Shaunta Grimes has begun exploring Hubpages as an additional source of income, alongside her established presence on Medium. After one week, she has earned a modest 69 cents from Hubpages, a stark contrast to the approximately $1000 she made on Medium within the same timeframe. Despite the low initial earnings, Grimes remains optimistic about the long-term potential of Hubpages, noting its emphasis on long-term content viability and passive income. She acknowledges that traffic and earnings from Hubpages are expected to grow as Google search rankings improve. Grimes is also intrigued by Hubpages' editing and distribution system, which includes niche vertical sites and human editors, and its judicious approach to affiliate links, which could benefit content like product reviews that may not perform well on Medium. Her goal is to have 100 posts live on Hubpages within six months to accurately assess its viability as an income stream. Regardless of the outcome, she values the ownership of her work, which allows her to repurpose it elsewhere if necessary.

Opinions

Grimes is not overly excited about her initial 69 cents earnings from Hubpages but is hopeful for its potential as a long-term income stream.
She views Medium as a platform where earnings are made quickly after publication, with diminishing returns after the first month, whereas Hubpages is seen as a platform where content can continue to generate income over time.
Grimes appreciates the passive income aspect of Hubpages, where once a certain level of traffic is achieved, the income should continue without the need for constant content creation.
She finds the editing and distribution system of Hubpages, with its niche vertical sites and human editors, to be robust and potentially beneficial for content visibility and quality

Income Streams: Hubpages Update

One week in.

Today marks one week experimenting on Hubpages as an income stream.

Don’t get too excited for me — but I made 69 cents.

I’ll try not to blow that all on one candy bar.

By contrast, I made about $1000 on Medium last week and my income for the month is nearly $4000 so far. I expect it will land at about $5000 after this last week of April.

Okay. So this week, Hubpages is not going to much of an income stream. More like a tiny little tear-trail of an income trickle.

But that’s okay. I’m still excited about continuing this experiment. Here’s why.

Hubpages is about the long game.

When I post something on Medium, I expect to earn most everything I will earn from that post within the first week, definitely within the first two weeks. Most of my posts earn almost nothing after the first thirty days.

Hubpages is, at least in theory, more of a long game. It’s unreasonable to expect to earn much money for posts there before Google gets on board with showing them in search results.

So far, I have had exactly zero traffic from any search engine. Hubpages itself has sent some traffic and I’ve shared some of my posts with my email list and on Facebook and Twitter.

(The ‘ever’ column here reflects a small handful of posts I wrote in 2011, which were all removed from the site in 2013.)

Income from Hubpages is passive.

A little research in the forums told me that I can expect to make between $3 and $5 per month, per 1000 page views. So, if I write enough posts to get to 1000 page views across all of them, per day, I can expect to earn between $90 and $150 per month.

That seems like a good first goal.

I’m about 1/10th of the way there with seven published posts.

In theory, once I’m earning money on Hubpages (more than 69 cents!), I should continue to earn it without having to write more posts. Or without having to write on a constant basis, like I do here on Medium.

Hubpages has a fairly robust editing/distribution system.

They have several niche vertical sites. When a post is picked up for one of those, it gets edited by a person for grammar, etc.

The posts with a little green circle are posts of mine that went to niche sites.

I have no real way of knowing yet, but I think that those posts probably have a better chance of ranking on Google than posts that aren’t published in niche sites.

Your posts do not go live until they’ve passed quality control, which they call being featured. After you’ve had five posts featured, your pending posts go live immediately.

I’m an experienced writer and I haven’t needed more than a couple of small tweaks. But I think for new writers, the editing is nice. I know that having an editor in my 20s, when I was a newspaper reporter, was huge.

Hubpages lets you use affiliate links, but judiciously.

Hubpages seems very sensitive to appearing like spam. They have human editors that review every post and remove affiliate links that are not an important part of a story.

I had one post that included a link to one of my own free classes that did not pass quality control, because of that link. When I removed the link, the post was sent back for further review.

You can use Amazon affiliate links, but you’re not allowed to stuff your posts. Every use of an affiliate link has to have at least 300 words of text, for instance. And you have to have personal experience using the product.

This means that posts that don’t generally do well on Medium, like book or product reviews, might do better on Hubpages. And because they are careful, they’ll have a chance of ranking on Google and earning income into the future.

I’m going to give Hubpages six months, and see what happens. In that time, I’d like to get 100 posts live. That should be enough time to decide whether or not this is going to be a valid income stream.

The good news: I own my work

If Hubpages doesn’t pan out, I own the work. I can remove it and post it on a website or here on Medium.

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.