Friday, January 8, 2010

Hubpages: Answering Questions

So Maria read my last post and asked:

"I am a UK resident and wanting to start on hubpages and then on to suite101 when I build experience.Unfortunately I don't have such a large choice of good residual or upfront income writing sites. I can't seem to get to the bottom of whether hubpages is worth writing for I have looked at their page rank and its pretty decent but you have a very negative view of it. Could you please elaborate a bit on why you don't think it is a good earner? Also, what do you do when you find a good keyword based on the amount and quality of the competition and you check hubpages and somebody has already used that keyword. Can you place modifiers before or after the keyword? Can you still compete effectively with the other hubpages contributors for that keyword? Excuse all the questions, but after reading around a lot I haven't found a lot of objective information about hubpages except for your site. With thanks for all your kind help."

Truthfully, Maria, I have no idea if HP is a good idea or not. I don't think my experience makes for a full data set. However, I know from my earnings on eHow that I am not an SEO idiot ergo I would expect to be more successful on HP. The fact that I am not, is suspicious.

I love the Hubpages format. It's elegant, easy and there's multimedia. I would love to make my residual income 'home' on Hubpages, but after 12 hubs and some backlinking and time to allow the search engines to find me, I have not seen enough earnings to justify spending any more time on HP. And yes, I know 12 hubs is nothing, you need a lot of hubs just like you need a lot of eHow articles. However, I still would expect to see some earnings. Even on eHow, I earned with just 2 articles when I first started out.

I do hear many people talking about a google 'smack down' that pushed HP off the first page. I would hazard a guess that this is true. HP is not getting the traffic that eHow is and is nowhere near as competitive as eHow or even Infobarrel for that matter. I know for a fact that traffic is better on eHow and Infobarrel, because I can compare that data point for my content one-to-one against Hubpages.

As for keyword modifiers, yes you can use them. How well you can compete against other people targeting the same keyword is going to be a factor of the long tail keywords you use in the article and the back linking you do.

Using HP as a training ground for Suite 101 is probably a good idea. I would not go into Suite 101 completely green on web writing. You can even join eHow and post some content there for additional experience ( you just can't earn any money). I would write on topics you want to address at Suite so you can use your HP work as a back link. eHow's links are 'no follow' but they can still drive traffic so you can also market your Suite work there.

Hope that helps!

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