Improving Your HubPages Earnings

While some are here at HubPages for the joy of pure writing, many people here hope that their writing and Hubs will earn them some royalties. Web writing can be a source of secondary income which earns while you do some other work, or it might be your ambition to break from a regular day job and support yourself entirely with an online career.

I fall into that second category myself and after a few years of effort, I'm having a good amount of success. Now take a moment and read that previous sentence again. It takes time and content to make decent money online, so if you haven't got patience and aren't willing to put in the work, most of what I'm going to say here probably won't turn out all the productive for you.

I started at HubPages just as they were coming out of their beta phase in the summer of 2006. I didn't really get going with the site until December of that year and I got to see a lot of changes and improvements along the way. My number one piece of advice is to forget about how you write for other sites or systems and learn how HubPages works and what the rules are. That's been invaluable for me. This site is not like having a blog, it's not like making Squidoo lenses and it's not like writing for your own website. I learned by trial and error, and I think that method actually works rather well.

There are a variety of ways to earn money built into the HubPages system and I'm going to talk about the following on this Hub: HubPages Ad Program, AdSense, Amazon, eBay, Videos and Referrals. Plus a few bits that seem to go well with talking about those topics. Nothing I'm going to talk about here is a revelation or special trick, it's just plain common web sense, but a lot of people have a tendency to overlook the simple stuff.

There is absolutely one thing you MUST have in order to earn from Hubs and that is a PayPal account. All the affiliate programs are being switched so that they are all administered through HubPages and soon there will no longer be any direct relations with users here and the affiliate companies. HubPages only will issue payments via PayPal. So if you live somewhere that PayPal doesn't work, the entire earning scheme on this site is not going to work for you.

The above poll reflects data from August 2011 going forward. The dollar earning options were adjusted slightly, as were options for the question on membership time. Please answer both questions, thanks!

From mid-August 2010 to early August 2011 there were 499 users who contributed to the poll. The image shown here is a snapshot of that poll taken right before the poll and parameters were reset on August 9, 2011. As you can see 55% are still experiencing monthly earnings of $10 or less. That's down from 66% from last year. But the majority of the data reported in this poll pre-dates the Panda update. It's the period just starting now that will be more accurate to what people are currently experiencing with the site.

Are you writing about things that bring sales?

If you're trying to earn here it really helps to write about things that incorporate a buying angle. Notice I did not say you need to write commercials or flog products in people's faces. I tend to write about topics I really know (i.e. life-long interests or things I studied in college or graduate school) and then make targeted recommendations for products which support what I'm writing about or which I would buy myself. I think a lot of web writers totally blow it when it comes to making recommendations. If you wouldn't buy or use something yourself, why would you expect your reader to want it?

Are you worth the affiliate's time and energy?

More and more in the forums, you'll see posts from new Hub authors who made a Hub or two or maybe even a dozen, and then applied to the affiliate programs and got rejected, and now they need to whine publicly about it. Their personal outrage and insult are a tad misplaced.

• If you get your application rejected, don't just get angry, take a serious and concrete look at the situation: are you a worthy affiliate program applicant? If you don't have an established web presence (a decent breadth and depth of content) you aren't going to be earning the programs any money, and that is, after all, why they want people to join their programs.
  
  
• Having been a member of HubPages for a few months allows you to fine tune your Hubs. And solid Hubs with traffic and reader interaction seem like a good bet to the people deciding who gets to be an affiliate or not.
  
  
• Think about what you are doing because to the affiliates, you are running a business that wants to be associated with their business. That's why those applications ask about your business model. I think that's where a lot of Hub authors fail in the application process to the affiliate programs. "I want to make money" is not a statement that shows you have any clue about running a business or meeting customer needs.

As with many other programs on this site, HubPages does the bulk of the work for this program. The big difference here is that instead of having to sign up with an external affiliate, these ads are sold directly by HubPages and the payments will come directly from the site itself via PayPal.

Using what I can only presume is YieldBuild technology, the new ads are optimized for your Hubs and placed, so you don't have to do anything except build really solid content. Please note, by using this program, it will cause a very significant drop in your AdSense revenue stream.

I was invited as one of a very small group of site users to become part of the beta testing for the new ads in mid-January 2011. It was clear this was something that had been in the works for a long time. Hub authors who opt into the new program are going to have to get used to a few things they might be used to from other affiliates (esp. AdSense) if they decide to utilize this new revenue option:

• Reporting is for the most part once per day. Sometimes the affiliates involved don't update on weekends, so neither can HubPages. Holidays can also delay reporting.
  
  
• There is no break-down of earnings by Hub, just an aggregate total for the day.
  
  
• There have been several "tweaks" to the site post-Panda, including a shift in page layout, so how the program performs now and how it was doing pre-Panda is going to be different from that too.

If you want to participate in the HubPages Ad Program, you need to have a valid AdSense account as the in-house advertising program incorporates AdSense. You can run just AdSense and opt out of the Ad Program, but you can't do things the other way 'round.

There seems to be a significant number of new Hub authors who are reporting not being accepted when they apply to Google's AdSense affiliate program or who find themselves rejected before too long. This is often a simple case of not putting in the basic work or reading the rules.

1) Read the TOS - Due to a rather large rise in the number of fraudulent sites that are submitted to AdSense wanting to join their program, Google has put a mandatory waiting period on a variety of countries, such as India, China and territories where they are finding a lot of web fraud.

2) Read the TOS again - There are some serious things which are forbidden by the AdSense TOS. And if you do get an approved AdSense account and then violate the TOS, it's almost always permanently lost forever.

3) Publish some content before you apply for AdSense. Over the years that it has existed, Google has slowly gotten pickier about who and what they accept to their program. Not only is it now crucial that you have some content up on the web, but it helps if that content has been there for at least a short while. This doesn't mean just one or two Hubs, it means a good dozen or more.

4) Make sure you have quality content - With Hubs, the best way to guarantee that you have quality content is to get your Author Score (the number that appears on your avatar) over 75. That's the nofollow/dofollow threshold. If your Author Score is below that, HubPages considers your content to not be very good quality and they mark all outgoing links on your Hubs as nofollow. That also communicates to Google that HubPages doesn't think your Hubs are very good and they pay attention to opinions like that.

Amazon is one of the king's of online retail. What started out as an online book seller has branched out into just about anything for the home, inside or out. To sell items from Amazon on your Hubs, you'll need to sign up as an Amazon Affiliate, and enter your affiliate ID into the HubPages system.

None of the tools that Amazon offers will work for adding links for products to HubPages. Here you use the built-in Amazon capsule, which has been expanded and improved since HubPages started. You can pick items by selecting keywords, choosing a department to narrow the search (or not) or you can specify exact products listed on the Amazon site.

I think the more specific the recommended items, the better your chances of making a sale, so I tend to hand-pick the items I'm recommending. There is also a spot where you can enter a brief description of your own instead of just showing a picture and price for the item selected and this was a feature I actually requested when I visited the HubPages office in October 2007. This lets you highlight exactly what you like about a product or why it's so great, which is what people tend to do in real life when talking and sharing info with friends and family.

Just about everyone has some familiarity with eBay. It is an auction site where just about anything can be sold or bought. As when making other retail decisions, you want to pick items that directly relate to what you are talking about.

You get two options for how the eBay capsule picks items to display: keywords or seller ID.

If you are an eBay seller, by all means write up some relevant Hubs and link them to your auctions. You'll be able to drive viewers and sales right to the items you're selling.

To make the keyword selection process work better, be sure to take the time to optimize the keywords. This means playing around with different keywords to see what products are selected. Most often you'll want to use three or four keywords to get the best items. Try different words and combinations and see what different items show up. To make sure a keyword is included put a "+" in front of it, and to eliminate products that aren't quite right, put a "-" in front of specific keywords you want to remove.

The eBay program here on HubPages changed in 2011. It used to be that you couldn't get accepted as an affiliate in less you had your own site. However HubPages negotiated a site-wide deal with eBay and they now handle all the administration and payouts. So you can get into eBay with just your Hubs, however the catch is you can only get paid by HubPages if you have a PayPal account.

The HubPages video capsule allows you to pick from a variety of video hosts to include videos by you or others as part of your Hub. As with anything else, making sure your vidoes are relevant and informative to your content is vital. Writing about cooking? You'll want to make or find some "how-to" videos that illustrate what you are talking about.

I use YouTube a lot for videos, but the capsule also lets you add videos from Google, Metacafe, Revver and more. Slowly but surely, I'm making more of my own videos and getting them into my Hubs.

Here's a short video I made when I was in San Francisco that's about riding on the famous cable cars. It's hosted by YouTube, and if you qualify, you can show ads on your videos there. BTW, I made this video for my hub about Great Stuff To Do In San Francisco.

HubPages has a detail in their earnings program whereby if you refer someone to the site and they come in via a link you've marked with a tracking code, and they then sign-up and start building Hubs, you can earn more.

How that works is that your affiliate codes will be displayed 10% of the time on their pages, giving you a chance to earn during those times. Notice I did not say you get 10% of their earnings, there's a big difference.

This appears to apply to all your affiliate codes, which means it would be prudent to not click on the ads of other HubPages users, especially people who are your referrals as that could jeopardize you if you happen to start clicking on your own ads.

If your referrals don't build lots of quality Hubs, the amount you will earn from them is really negligible. Even if you refer friends and family, they really aren't going to be earning you much.