Is It Possible To Make A Living On HubPages?

Well I will start off by introducing myself and let you know why I am writing this. And I will tell you that I don't personally have the answer to give you from my own experience so what I am trying to investigate here is the answer to the above question!

I first heard of affiliate marketing (and I guess you could call hubpages a strand of affiliate marketing although more like article marketing) about a year ago. I went to a seminar in Dubai and came out feeling very excited and enthusiastic about the possibilities (and ease!) of making lots of money by selling things to people all over the world and just raking in the commissions. More fool me! Of course anyone who has ever tried affiliate marketing knows it is not that easy and it is only really the affiliate marketers that hit the newbies with magic products that promise you thousands within weeks, days or even hours, that make the money! Ok so there are some dedicated people who do make a living with affiliate marketing but I hear that it is only around 1% of those who try that actually make it.

Anyway, so I started in affiliate marketing using ClickBank and Commission Junction last January. I wrote a lot of articles (well it felt like a lot but needed to be more), set up a website and a blog and made some sales. Things are still ticking along in the background and I have cheques coming in but I decided to take a look more at hubpages.

So having looked at hubpages I decided that I liked the model of earning money by Google adsense as this did not require anyone to actually buy anything. I felt like I had a lot of information to share so I could give it a go. With HubPages you earn adsense revenue on any clicks on ads on 60% of the page impressions. This means that you are pretty much in control of earnings as long as you write useful and relevant articles (hubs) and write lots of them.

To start off with I struggled to see what earnings I was making in HubPages as I wasn't aware that you could have URL channels in Google Adsense, but once I set up the URL's for each of the hubs I had written, I could see much more easily which ones were bringing in the adsense revenue. I still have a bunch of work to do on linking it all in with Google Analytics so that I can get an accurate figure for my adsense revenue. In any case, I AM making some adsense revenue, so that is a start!

So anyway, what I then decided to do with regards to the affiliate marketing, was to concentrate for a while on trying to increase my adsense revenue. I found a really useful hub by a quite prolific HubPages writer which was very honest in his declarations of his adsense earnings and he said that in 2010 he had earned over $27,000 dollars just in adsense revenue from his hubs.

So basically, the answer to the above question is 'Yes', it is possible to make a living on HubPages just from adsense revenue (although I guess it depends on how much you class as a living). I have read a number of hubs from people claiming that they have made a significant amount of money online just by writing hubs, so now I want to set out and prove that point to myself.

The hub that I mentioned earlier says you need to write around 3 hubs a day for 6 months. This is quite a big ask of a lot of people (including myself!) and to keep that kind of momentum going is going to take quite some effort. However, you don't know until you try and so that is what I need to do. Even if I make $10,000 (which is still a hefty target!) then I will feel that I have succeeded in making some decent money online.

So I will try and keep this updated and let you know how many hubs I manage to write, so that this hub itself will be a work in progress. I have up until now written 32 hubs (this being the 33rd I think!) and have had over 6,000 views. I have taken it upon myself to maybe only write 2 hubs a day but if I can even do this then I will be happy. I did it yesterday and I did it today so now I just have to keep doing it tomorrow!

So to all of you who are trying to make a living (or extra income) on HubPages, I wish you good luck and feel free to share your efforts with comments on this page.

So earlier this year (2011) Hubpages opened their own Ad Program to all writers, and anyone who has a PayPal account and an Adsense account could elect to have the HubPages Ads on their pages rather than full adsense (actually there are still a few adsense ads shown with HP Ads). As it is still in its infancy, it is difficult to tell which program is better. The HP Ads program is based on a cost per view and adsense is on a cost per click so they are different models. If you get a lot of views of your hubs but not many clicks then maybe you would be better with HP Ads. I turned on HP Ads on my hubs and will leave it on until I at least earn enough to be paid ($50).

So, more options to earn money on Hubpages! If you want to sign up and you haven't done yet then you can sign up here.