Surviving HubPages: Not Making a Dime, Low Traffic and Scores Drive You Crazy - 1
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Introduction
Hello Hubbers of all ages, Newbies or Oldies. Welcome! I was browsing around on the site and saw quite a few postings by persons asking questions about traffic, huscores, hubberscores, hubs and a few other things. On a whim I decided to write this hub. I want to encourage you to take heart you will get through the rough times.
It's not easy writing and publishing on HubPages especially when you are unemployed. Are you one of those Hubbers who signed up to make money on HP? If you are one of the few who only write on HP for the love of it then this hub is definitely NOT for you.
I will attempt to help you not to go crazy while you constantly check your hub stats and earnings, only to see a trickle of traffic and a few cents each day.
How to not let low HP income drive you crazy
You will find that everyday a few cents are added to your account but it seems to take forever to reach that $50 threshold, and you wonder when you will start earning a steady $200 or more from a site you signed up primarily to earn from.
A little something personal
I was looking around on the net for online work when HP showed up in Google. The listing was that I could earn money writing on the site. When I visited the site it was the same thing "Sign up", "Write something", "Earn" or something similar. When I browsed the site there were testimonials of people like Katherine Vercillo and other hubbers making over $2000 per month and more than 75% was from Adsense. I thought I would be earning a decent living until the hard reality hit me. If someone did not click on an ad I would not be paid! That threw me for a loop. At the time when I signed up only a few elite hubbers were invited into the HP ad program so about 90% of the hubbers were not making much if any money.
After a couple of months here we were all sent an email that all hubbers were a part of the HP ad program so every one could earn from writing on HP. My spirits were renewed and I started really writing some stuff. I am yet to make the $50 bucks.
What I did was renew myself as a writer. I remember the challenge of having about one dozen of my hubs flagged......well it was about 4......they were all flagged on the same day for various reasons. I had to sit, think....."Do I want to delete? How can I rewrite something that was purely my opinion?" I took up the challenge, I wanted to prove to those persons reading and flagging my hubs that I could write, rewrite and anything else that was thrown at me.
My Advice
Open up other avenues of income on the net. Create blogs, your own website or freelance.
You can download Word Press for free, create a page and get your own domain name. Place adsense and other ads from other companies on it and earn. Blogger and other Blog creation sites are available to create a blog about almost anything for free.
Elance is the best freelancing site that I have found. The clients pay well and with a little patience you will get hired. Place a good bid, sell yourself as the best at what you do and you will be noticed. You can also place a link to one of your hubs in the bid as a sample of your work. When the client click the link they will see your work here on HP.
Freelancer is also another good site but I find it harder to get noticed and the pay isn't as good but you can certainly try. I am a member there too and "every mickle make a muckle" which means every penny counts.
Constant Content is another freelance site that you can join. It works a little different as you can submit your articles and buyers can buy them. You can also choose to participate in the public request. This is where clients request articles and you send in your article and the client choose the one they want. It takes a bit of work but I am sure it will pay off in the end. I am also a member here and it isn't so bad. As I said it takes patience.
If you are a fiction writer and poet you can sell your work to magazines and e-book publishers. Here is a link to the most comprehensive list I have ever found on the web. I have been using this site for years. Ralan's Webstravaganza. This list tells you which publishers pay, how much they pay, the required word count for your story and the genre they are looking for.
This article is too long so I have split it in two. How not to let the low traffic get to you is next........To be continued................................................
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Good start. Demand media, Triond, Helium and Experts column are also paying sites. I belong to all of them. I write to Hub because I enjoy talking to the authors.
I didn't even know there was a website like Ralan's Webstravaganza. I just started blog on Wordpress, and in my concentration of choosing how I wanted it to look I forgot all about Adsenese. sigh. Why do I get inspired to do thing at 1am when I won't remember practical things as well as creativity?
Voted up! Very useful hub. I haven't been here long or written a whole lot yet, but I do get discouraged. It's a lot of hard work, and I hope it pays off one day. Thanks for the encouragement. I'm glad HP started their ad program, b/c I have gotten almost nothing from Google ads. I get at least a few cents a day from HP.
Hi Cardisa! You may not know this but all of the sites I have joined is because of your solid advice in outstanding hubs! Thanks for always helping others to succeed!
Voted up, up and away!
You know, I can write a little, but I'm a complete dunce when it comes to key words, SEO's, back links, and such. I barely know what they are.
Someone who dos understand could make a pretty fair living by just managing dunce-writer Hub-sites.
oh, yes. I will have to update my profile page here when I'm happy with my wordpress site. Yes. Another thing to remember...
Great stuff once again Cardisa, thanks very much
A well-written informative Hub Article that is 'food for thought' for newbie and not-so-Newbie Hubbers.
Thanks for taking the time to write and share this hub with the HubPage community.
I will be making sure that I hub-hop into your other hubs! :-)
What great information thanks so much for sharing. I bookmarked this article, voted up,
I know you said this wasn't for me cos i don't write for money, but i learned something anyway. Thank you Cardisa, keep on trucking, you'll make it..... Cheers
....I didn't come here to make money at hubpages I came here to meet you Miss C - who cares about money and glory and fame when I could be eating rice and peas with you in the golden sunset of Jamaica - now that's bliss - and I haven't even started on about Blue Mountain coffee yet .....
lake erie timeless for you - but if you want to know it's 6:02pm tuesday evening
As always a very interesting and informative hub Cardisa . I want to eventually earn enough money from my writing to be able to have a decent income that will see me getting paid for doing the thing I love most. Every ones dream!
I am here at Hubpages for over a year now and I too got excited about the claims that you could earn money just by writing what you knew about lol.
For the first 5 months I made nothing, zilch not a penny or a cent. Then gradually the pennies started to come in, yes there were only 2c here and 5c there.
It does take time. I made my first payout after 7 long months but that was some day. From last October I was making 3 to 4 times my required pay out and having a great time. As you know it is against the rules of Google to say how much money you earn from Google Adsense.
Then as we all know Google Panda hit us all in the teeth on 25th Feb this year. For 2 months I did not make the payout. They were dark days but all of us on Hubpages were in the same position.
After a lot of work fixing my hubs to comply with HubPages and Googles new rules and changes I made my payout again in June of this year. This has increased steadily every month since. Last month it was over 4 times the required payout.
My advice to anyone who is disheartened is to keep at it. Writing has always been a long process and making money from writing even more so. The thing that keeps me going is that once an article is well written and you have followed the proper SEO rules with the Url, heading, sub heading, keywords, back linking etc then that hub is there for you written and earning you money every day. It will continue to steadily gain prominence in the search engines. This means lots of readers and therefore more opportunity that they will click your ads and earn you money.
Hmmm I do go on a bit don’t I. Never mind I just wanted to encourage people to keep going because the money will come eventually.
I think in America you have to reach a minimum of $100 before the required payout is reached. I live in Ireland and therefore I get paid by Euros. The required minimum to reach a payout in Euros is €70.
Helium Writing Site
By the way I wrote 4 articles for Helium years ago before I found HubPages. They will not let me edit them or delete them. I did delete my account thinking this would remove the articles. No Chance!
They are earning money from these 4 articles for years. They were written years ago and I have matured with my writing since then. They are badly written but are credited to me. I would there fore advice no one to write for Helium.
Cardisa-I think Helium keeps the content work on their site even if the person leaves for at least a year. I believe it is their TOS. Check out hubber I Am Rosa for details about which sites are best for content writers based on TOS-Infobarrel does the same thing to people who want to leave.
Cardisa, thanks for an awesome hub full of interesting and useful information. Like you I joined hubpages mainly because I wanted to earn some money. Like you, I noticed that writing on hubpages requires a lot of time and effort and the payout is not worth mentioning. However, there is one tremendous upside: If writing is your passion, then you will get a kick out of hubbing. I remember the thrill I got from my first fan mail and once more and more followers started signing up. Hey, I got noticed, and that was an amazing boost to my ego. After all, English is not my mother tongue and so far I had only tried earning a few bucks by writing in german. Then another thrill followed, when one of my hubs won the hubnugget of the week! In June it got even better, when I won 50 $ in a hubpages writing contest. Today my ego nearly went through the roof when I noticed that I had reached a hubscore of 95! I do agree Cardisa, you won't get rich from hubbing, but it will definitely make you a better writer. I've noticed lately that you have become a turbo hubber who churns out piles of hubs every day. Cardisa, you're a hub addict! Another great thing is that I've met many interesting people like you through hubpages and come across a lot of useful information. And isn't that exactly what counts. Money isn't everything.
Another freelance site that I have found to be profitable is Textbroker.com ... thank you for this info... :)
I'm not eligible either living in Canada. I think you must live in US only for Textbroker.
Hi, Cardisa, yes it is hard, I must admit that I am lazy, or fussy! lol not sure which! I tried xomba, didn't like it, I tried snipsly, didn't like it, got fed up with redgage as everybody wanted me to click on their stars but never did mine!, and then I found webanswers which I stick with, but hubs are the best, and I know I should spread my work about a bit, but I haven't got the patience! but great ideas here, nice one! cheers nell
It really is addictive,, and pushing the twitter button every day on each one of my hubs (and diggs too) seems to help,, especially if I have a new comment..
Good stuff and resources Cardisa,maybe I'll use them one day. I started on HP to assist my writing when I returned to school. Not looking to make money,just to improve my writing and get ideas and express my view and feelings.
Voted up!
Hi Cardisa. re. your hubscore dropping. I think it might have to do with you publishing so many hubs - one after another. As you notice they all start out with a low score, so the more you publish, the lower your score will drop. Don't know for sure, but that's what my logic tells me. As for my score, I haven't published a hub in approx. 2 weeks and now have a score of 95, however, the score of my individual hubs has gone up, probably pushing up my overal hub score. Re. addiction to hubpages, be careful. Every now and then my husband reminds me to cook dinner, and then he threatens to get divorced - joke! What I mean to say: Hubbing is a great hobby, but it's not a relationship. You won't keep your chocolate hot with hubbing.... (you will understand what I mean). Hubpages has convinced me that I can write in English and that some people actually enjoy my writing. So I now have plans to move on to other writing adventures. You are very talented and should definitely not use up all your energy on hubpages alone. The problem with hubpages is, that most readers are fellow hubbers. So they won't click your links, order your products or hire you. By the way, I loved your hub re. natural beauty products.
If that were true, novascotiamiss, then Patty Inglish wouldn't always be at 100 or 99.
Thanks Cardisa for your encouragement. I have also not reached a payout and I have been here for the last 10 months. But the good thing is that i have noted some improvement in my hubs both in traffic and earnings from this month. So I expect things to be better as we progress.
Thanks again for writing. I am waiting for the other part.
Flora, then I don't know how the hubscore works. All of a sudden I am up to 96 and I have no clue why...??? May be they confused me with Cardisa, the busy bee who should really have my score.
Great stuff I'm pretty much a newbie here, but I do have a little question about how long it took you to write this article, because 600 words is taking me 2 hours at the moment!
I have been on hub pages for 6 months and i have only made .46 cents on adsense nothing on amazon and I'm not good with blogging never done it. Having a real hard time with this. everyone makes it sound so easy. vote you up. you have a lot of useful information.
Hello, Cardisa, thanks for the great advice. I joined HP just about 10 days ago and have managed to publish 3 hubs so I could apply for AdSense. I'm still learning the proper ways to get things done and it gets overwhelming at times. I'm not a natural writer like a lot of the people here. I worked in finance most of my career and thrive on numbers. Writing is a learned skill for me...but hopefully if I put in enough effort and patience, I'll see results.
Has anybody got any experience with Suite 101? This might be an additional source of income. Any feedback would be appreciated
i am happy to see a Jamaican doing good on hub pages, good motivational advice
Really great hub, Cardisa. Thank you for your words of encouragement.
I joined HubPages about 9 months ago, and when I did, it was just to write for the love of it. So the pennies a day (or sometimes no pennies for a few days) didn't bother me tremendously.
Now, very recently laid off from my job of 7 years, I find myself in a different position. I don't want my writing to lose quality by increasing my quantity of hubs, but my frustration is mounting every day as I find myself wondering how to spend my time, and sometimes I feel like writing for pennies a day should have no place in my days at all. Patience is becoming increasingly difficult for me, but I still find that writing helps to center me and keep me calm. Perhaps it is a sign?
I would love to see a hub from you about your experiences with Elance. Perhaps you already have one; I will see!
thanks again.
ohhhhhhh Cardisa, I see your hubscore is on the rise again and my clairvoyant spirit tells me that this hub will hit the 97 mark.........
Great information Cardisa. I'll try elance.
Hey Cardisa,
I've only been on HP for a couple of weeks now and did a bit of marketing analysis by writing about my true life experiences. First I wrote about my seizure issues and how I got past them and then I had to find out if more of an (adult theme) drew in more readers and sure enough the 357 magnum action series showed almost twice as much readership as the other.
While everything I write about is from my real-life experiences, the income generated is not enough to buy a piece of bubble gum. So, I was wondering if you think that part of the reason is because HP is making the decisions to (not charge the client) as they do with ad sense due to some sort of computer fraud platform that was created whereby clicks are being seen as not genuine?
To me it sort of smacks of another way to not pay people on the net and have it be seen as protecting their clients. I really don't know but,after over 300 people visiting 4 pages, you would think one of them might click on a site of mine that has ads like the one I wrote to inform others about the thousands of dollars a person can receive as gifts tax-free just by being an American. Does anyone know if this site is really more so just based upon people having fun?
Googman.
yeah, i am a rasta from Jamaica, please follow me. I need motivation from a senior hubber. I am using the information from your hubs to optimize my hubs just now.
It does take time to earn, but if you keep at it you will get paid- the ups and downs of traffic and less of hubscore are a common subject in the forums. I am sure that we all watch them like a hawk.
I can say that teh hard fact is that online income is hard work-- close to a day job in many ways, and you've said it right-- you have to find many circles to make money around here.
Great suggestions. It is important not to put all your eggs in one basket!
Great post...Thanks
Cardisa and all who are reading... I have also had the same feelings and experiences that you have. I signed up for HubPages about two years ago and honestly, it has had it's ups and downs. There are times when my traffic to Hubs is high, but there are dry times as well. I recieved my first check from Google in July of this year for $104. It took me two years to get there. More recently, I have enabled the HP Ad program to my Hubs. They are based on page views and not clicks, so I have a few pennies coming in each day. The main thing to remember here, is to stay vigilant and don't give up. Write what you are passionate about and use comments as a constructive means to improve on your works.
I really enjoyed reading this Hub and I wish everyone here all the luck in the world!!!
~E~
Really encouraging hub to have come across Cardisa. We need these timely reminders to keep persevering if this is something we really want to do. Its not a 'get rich quick' scheme, which is good really because its proof that it is a proper business and any business is tough at first and having profit at nil. I am also encouraged reading Eric2112's comment.
I was not under the impression that I could put Google Ads on a Wordpress account! I will have to look into that Cardisa...thanks! I actually have a couple of accounts there but I do not write on them much because I can get at least a couple cents from hubpages. lol I would say though that you are probably starting to get some better money in for your hubs. Good luck with that and I always appreciate you spending the time to read and comment on my hubs!
I would like to give my blog a makeover I guess you can say. I took a lot of hubs down and I need to rework them or keep them removed. I have made $0.07 so far this month on this account.
Superb. So really, really excited to have read all that you wrote. I printed it all up! I'm new to HP and working at getting to grips with it - so to have you write such helpful material, including so many useful suggestions where to write is like coming across a treasure trove. It is just so helpful. Thank you. Bless
Thanks for sharing. Feels good.
As I read I became more and more encouraged. Thank you for taking the time to share with the rest of us. This is very much appreciated.
Cardisa-- as alwys this is still striking to me, I've had some great days and some not so great days, but these sites are good ones, and yes, I forgot ot mention that you are correct diversification is key.
Thanks for writing this hub and keeping us all inspired!
Wow Very Impressive. I got to say you are a genius. I hate those internet Gurus that do nothing but throw in false hopes and bluff about it all day long without getting a back pain for sitting to long in the computer. I joined hubs 7 weeks ago. I knew it was no mistake I landed on the site. I have learned a massive amount about myself in the 7 weeks writing for hub pages. I definitely enjoy the way you write or say how you present your idea. Let me say like the structural lay out is excellent and complimented by proper grammars and other little things.
To make the story short. You write great hubs and your accolades are an inspiration to a newbie like me. Thank you for sharing, caring and MOST important your honesty. You give back and that is what life is about helping others. We do reap what we sow There are plenty of sly wolves in cyberspace. Writing on hub pages blesses me with the freedom to do my thing and stay clear of garbage and or the wanna be rich fast and suck your blood net workers.
My experience in here has been pretty much rewarding. Every day O learn new things which I could never possibly learn out side hub pages. You the, the good thing about hub pages is that it keeps leading you to greener pastures every day. What I mean is that every time you find a new information, that new information leads you to more new information. I just close my fingers and watch my earnings grow. Thanks to HP and thanks to you.
This is a great hub and I vote it up.
Sure we do. I totally love your hubs on hub pages. Simple and easy to follow. BTW, I didn't realize you changed your profile image. The image is cool as the hubs.
Regards
Great information - voted up. Would like to hear more ideas.












































stayingalivemoma Level 4 Commenter 8 months ago
Excellent resources! I am one of those people that watch my earnings. But I truly do enjoy writing and think I am pretty good at it. Thanks for these links, I am going to try a couple out.