Want to know a little secret about bloggers? We bloggers all have a bad case of verbal diarrhea! We just can’t stop spouting off and we all like an audience. Since we’re all doomed to suffer from this malady, we might as well get paid something while we suffer from it.
The downside to blogging
The way most blogging software arranges the posts in reverse chronological order guarantees that only your most recent post will get much attention. Sure, visitors are free to break it out by category or to search for a particular topic, but the fact remains that most visitors see the home page when following a root link to a blog.
Enter HubPages
I stumbled upon HubPages quite by accident. Not so chronologically focused and more search-engine focused, HubPages allows you to write a group of standalone articles (called hubs) that may or may not be related. They have a revenue sharing program for certain sanctioned programs, those being Kontera, Adsense, Amazon, and Ebay.
What I like about HubPages:
- When you publish your article it is available, just like in blogging. You don’t have to wait for editorial approval. They have automatic checking in place to blacklist spam hubs. They assume that most hubbers are decent, and they take action against the spammers after the fact.
- They allow longer articles to be broken up units called capsules.
- They are also much more liberal than other article aggregators about outbound links, although you will be penalized if your article is flagged “overly-promotional.”
- they have awesome statistics
- there is a social community, you can have fans, there are forums, comments, etc.
- it’s multi-level; i.e. members get bonuses for referrals.
What I don’t like about HubPages:
- It is pretty complicated to understand what will kill your ratings and what will improve them.
- You can only put a very limited amount of HTML in your hubs, and it has to be one of the options they have WYSIWYG for.
- Their WYSIWYG editor is non standard, and I find it a bit awkward to be able to format my hub like I want.
What has your faithful dork done on HubPages?
I’m sure you’re dying to see that. You won’t see it on the blog, at least not in the same incarnation, and not right away, because HubPages does penalize duplicate content and I’d like to crank up my scores. If you’d do me the honor of a visit to my latest hubs page, I’d be much obliged. Win/win! You can see what it’s like over there it would help my scores, because they LUUUUUUUV traffic! Basically I wrote some pieces that wouldn’t quite fit in this blog, and some that might eventually make there way over here. I plan on experimenting with it more.
Should bloggers join HubPages?
Absolutely. Once you get a feel for what the difference between a blog post and a hub is, you can use HubPages to complement, not replace, your blog. Seen enough and want to go for it? I conveniently made you a direct link to their signup page, so you don’t even have to look for it.
What is the difference between HubPages and Squidoo?
I think the two sites are very similar. In Squidoo your articles are called lenses. (What is it with these people repurposing words like “hub” and “lens”, anyway?) I joined Squidoo a long time ago but never got around to writing a serious lens. Maybe it’s their policy of not rolling over payment of small accounts if they don’t hit some minimum within a time frame. Or more likely I was just busy. I do intend to give Squidoo a second chance, because I respect Seth Godin, the founder of Squidoo, to a considerable degree. I can’t write intelligently about the differences yet, but here’s a couple of people who can.
- Here’s a hub that asserts that HubPages is Better than Squidoo.
- And here’s another hub that points up some subtle differences in the way you monetise on one vs. the other
- and for fairness a VERY excellent and comprehensive Squidoo lens covering the differences between Squidoo and Hubpages
Let Dorkage know what you think!
I’d love to hear other bloggers’ experiences with HubPages, Squidoo, or anything else in the niche.
Hmm interesting. Sounds a bit like Qassia, too. Seems like this is the new cool thing to come out, and there are a few of them fighting for being the lead. Will be interesting to see where it goes.
So much for 10-20 comments! Sheesh!
Hey! I enjoyed this article. I really need to get back over to HP and write something, but with two blogs and RL, it gets hard sometimes.
Thanks for visiting my blog.
Ive always used Squidoo more than Hubpages. I have had some excellent results from building lenses targetting long tail keywords.
I really like the ease of use of the squidooo interface and those handy little Amazon and Youtube modules. The only downside I can think of, is that unlike Hubpages, each of these modules has to be pain stakenly moved up and down if you want to change the order. With Hubpages, you can simply drag and drop each module to suit a lot quicker.
Henry | Mobile phone blogs last blog post..Scientists Study Risks Of Long-Term Mobile Phone Use
Like Henry, I prefer Squidoo. I think hubs are too strict and you could be banned in a second, actually both are a lot a like.
The positive is, if you can create a good lenses or hub page you will be rewarded with traffic and sales if you your content is good enough and you build a few links to it.
Squidoo pays half as much as hubpages. Squidoo gets half the amount of page views per user then hubpages. This doesn’t mean dont use Squidoo, but Hubpages IS the optimal article site on the net.
So I know you might like Squdioo or Helium and thats cool…
And ill let you get back to doing your thang…
But Hubpages is the best online writing article site!
Just Sayin….
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