My Hubpages Experiment

Writing has always been in my blood, so recently I started my quest to determine how to make money writing online.  My online writing experiment first started with my wife writing about skincare for the examiner.com.  Here is one of her articles on brush cleaning.   She's been a makeup artist and special effects artist for 20 years, and probably more comfortable with brush than a pen in her hand.  I can tell I am a writer because I hate writing, yet I love writing.  I think only a writer can understand that statement, but maybe you get the point.  I love expressing my self and creating.  So, okay, enough about me, I wanted to understand what writing online meant.  I dived right into the search engines and soaked up everything I could on the subject of writing online.  Maybe that's exactly where you are right now.  Content sites, search engine optimization and SERPs are all foreign language to you.  Don't worry, they were to me too about two weeks ago.  You will quickly learn!

After reading dozens of pages and articles on content sites, I decided to pick one and go for it.  I did not quite understand how the different sites paid their writers, but I took their word for it.  There have been many documented experiments on writing for different content sites, and after reviewing them, I decided to go with hubpages.com.  I went with them mostly because I could quickly sign up and begin writing right away.  Other content sites wanted resumes and writing samples.  I understand why they wanted them, trying to control the quality of their sites.  But I read good things about hubpages.  Here is an article (they call them hubs) about my first week on hubpages.

In my opinion, hubpages is a great place to start writing.  You will learn about Google Adsense, affiliates and get your feet wet.  Plus, you can do all that and it costs you nothing!  If you want to try your hand at hubpages, head to their website and sign up.  It's a painless easily navigated process.  Go to join in the top right corner, fill out the form and you are ready to create your first hub!

For your first hub, write about anything simple and something you are knowledgeable about.  My first hub was Building Muscle.  I thought it had to be this broad topic that would relate to lots of people.  Well, it helps, but really, you can write a hub on anything!  You can write a hub on the awesome breakfast you had this morning!  I was spending hours, writing these well thought out and researched articles, which were getting a few hits here and there.  Then I wrote a hub on a recipe that didn't take me five minutes to put up, No Bake Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Balls and the traffic hit my hub.  I was getting comments for the first time, and I was amazed.  The moral of the story is write whatever you want to write about, and let the traffic sort them out.

Just a last note.  Once you finish your first hub and publish it, head to Adsense.  Go to my account --> Earnings --> Affiliate Settings and you will see the affiliates you can use.  The two I'd suggest is Adsense and Amazon (because they sell everything).  Follow the sign up for them and apply them to hubpages.com and you will be ready to go!  After that, write, write and then write some more!

Good luck, and God Bless!  My next article will talk about how to write effective hubs.