A Very Special Hubpages Monday: What the heck is it anyway?

c. Hubpages

Seeing as how it's Monday and I can post whatever I damn well please on Mondays, I've decided to sit and squee about how much money I'm making on Hubpages lately. No, I'm not making hundreds, even dozens of dollars a day. But so far for the month of March I've made $2.02. Last month I made $0.82. The month before that? About 30 cents.

You see what I'm getting at here.

While I don't hold any delusions that I'll keep doubling my income on the site every month (payout is $50), there's a few things to keep in mind.

1) I wrote my first hub the day after Christmas.
2) It's been three months now.
3) I'm making money that actually adds up.

My goal is to hit monthly payout (that's $50 a month) by the end of the year. Will I make it? We'll find out. Right now I'm focusing on putting out more (quality) hubs and continuing to research SEO.

Well this is all well and good, but I'm sure by now most of your eyes are glazing over and going "wait, what?"

If you've been following me for a while, you know that every Wednesday I post an ad for my latest hubs. I mostly write about music, video games, and living in Japan. Right now my most acclaimed hub is one about the Legend of Zelda Timeline (which today became the highest ranking hub in the Adventure Video Games category!) and my most popular one by views is the first installment of my J-pop Oldies Idols series. There are people who are making more than me by this point, but there are way more people making less or nothing.

Hubpages is a freelance writing website. You sign up, write articles, and get paid by either ad clicks (Google Adsense) or ad views (Hubpages Ad Program). You can write about anything you want with the stipulation that it falls under specific guidelines (Hubpages is actively family friendly~) and that it's *original content*...you can write about the same topic as somebody else, but it has to be "original". As in, you can't just copy and paste from somewhere...including your own works! Anything you post at HP has to be there only. If you want to transfer, say, relevant blog posts, you'll have to delete them off Blogger first.

Writing articles is only half the battle though. You have to make sure they're appealing, well-researched, formatted nicely, and use the right keywords to attract a good Google ranking (you mostly get paid via visitors from Google searches). This includes building backlinks and generally advertising your hubs in relevant places. Not only do they give you more exposure, but they can help you rank higher as well.

Obviously like anything else, it's not a get rich quick scheme. You have to actually enjoy writing about things you love to eventually start to see earnings. =P And while I can't buy more than a couple candy bars a month with my earnings, that's still two more candy bars than I had at Christmas. And now I finally have a place to post my music reviews and video game ramblings and make a profit off them without much work.

My eventual goal is to hopefully make some decent passive income off this site. If I could even pay one bill from my monthly earnings, then I say it's an investment well done.

Anybody else on HP? Thinking about joining?