HubPages helps pay the bills

In the beginning, which is now over two years back, I came to hubpages in the hope of making money here. I had been searching on the Internet for ways of making money online and came upon a recommendation for this site.

I thought I would check it out and give it a go to see if I could make money by writing articles. I liked the ease of posting hubs here and also many features the site offers.

I enjoyed the community spirit here at hubpages too, and soon was making friends and also reading some excellent articles by other hubbers. I decided that I really liked hubpages and would become a regular user of the website.

Time went on and months flew by, and although I had added Amazon and eBay as affiliates that could potentially generate money from ads I was running, and although I had signed up with Google Adsense, I still found that I wasn't earning very much at all.

I read in the forums tips for making money at hubpages from more experienced hubbers. I read that you need to give it time here and also that you need to promote your hubs elsewhere, in fact in as many places as you can.

I began posting links to my hubs on my Facebook site, on Twitter, on blogger and on other social-networking websites, as well as on forums and saw the traffic increase immediately. Earnings were still not really happening though, but hubbers told me that it all takes time here. Patience is a virtue I am blessed with.

Fortunately, I had become addicted to hubpages and had praised the site so much that several friends, including CJ Stone and Mistyhorizon2003, had also joined and I was sticking around and posting hubs anyway whether I was earning money or not.

I saw hubpages as an excellent place to showcase my writings and to write about whatever I wanted. As a journalist I already had many articles that had been previously published in newspapers and magazines but had not been published on the Internet, so I decided to publish them as hubs too, as well as new original writings.

After a year, I finally got my first payment from Google. It wasn't a lot by many people's standards but it was exciting and proved that all the hubbers, who had said you need to persevere and that it can take as long as a year before you get results were right.

It gave me an incentive to look at this place again as a site to make money on, and not just a place to enjoy and to post my writings on. It had given me evidence of the reason I had originally come here as being valid. You really can earn money at hubpages and I had done so.

Marisa Wright was the most helpful hubber to me in pointing out what I need to do to help improve the potential money-making power of my hubs. She even wrote an entire hub about it which I have included a link to below.

I have always prided myself on being a knowledgeable and talented writer, and the feedback I get supports this idea, but what Marisa pointed out to me was that it wasn't my writing or even my subject matter that was at fault but my layout.

Marisa explained that putting photos and videos at the beginning of a hub is a very bad move because that is a prime site for advertising. I had been wrongly thinking that a video or a photo looked good there, and so it does, but it does not help you make money.

Unfortunately I realised that nearly all of my hubs had videos to start and photos alongside what was often only one text box. Marisa explained that you should have more that one text box to increase the adverts being placed at the top of the page.

She also explained that having links to outside sites all through the text was not a good idea because people can click on them and leave your hub and maybe not come back. I hadn't thought of it that way but again could see the sense in what she was telling me.

Bearing all these tips in mind I began going through my hubs making changes for the better. I always remember Marisa's advice now when I put a hub together.

Misha told me my hubs needed Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is commonly known. He also suggested that I would possibly stand to earn more from more popular subjects about stuff people want to buy than writing about some conspiracy theory or rare plant. I now try to do a far greater mixture of subjects for my hubs because it seems a logical move if I want to make money with my writings.

Sufidreamer encouraged me by telling me that he makes a living as an online freelancer and thought I could do so too. He knew that I needed to find a way to make more money and was doing what he could to raise my hopes about doing so.

Various other very successful hubbers here have inspired me in various ways by seeing what they have achieved in making money and in their popularity. In the list of links below I have included a few of the people who have directly or indirectly motivated me to keep on trying at improving my earning potential here.

Every time I read of fellow hubbers' achievements or I see hubbers who are able to maintain a score of 100 it inspires me to carry on with my efforts at making money at hubpages.

I found that entering hub challenges is well worth doing too to see both your score and traffic go up. I have completed the 30 hubs in 30 days hub challenge twice now.

I have just joined the Seekyt site too, as recommended by howtoguru, where I have been writing and submitting trailer feeds for links to my hubs.

I have a long way to go to become a high earner here but am on the way and I now often get around €100 payment from Google and have had over €50 from eBay. Obviously I can't live on these sums but they really do help to pay my bills and the only way is up.