Can You Make Money With HubPages? A Freelance Writing Experiment

As a professional writer, I enjoy working for a variety of clients and writing on a wide range of topics. While some people absolutely hate research, I love it. I consider it a challenge to learn about new topics and research them well enough to write quality web copy that drives traffic to the websites of my clients. 

Although I thoroughly enjoy writing for my clients, I'm also interested in writing for myself and creating residual income. If you're not familiar with residual or passive income, it's where you do some type of work one time and that work keeps earning money for you for years to come. Sounds great! 

Of course, the challenge is making this happen. When I first started working as a professional writer a couple of years ago, I heard about revenue sharing sites like eHow.com and HubPages and thought I would give it a shot. I wrote several articles for eHow and HubPages and, very disappointingly, didn’t make a penny. So, I concentrated on working for my clients and forgot about these sites.

A couple of years later, I began to notice something interesting. First, I began seeing $6.00 appear in my PayPal account. Being both a busy homeschool mom and writer, I just ignored it. Several months later, that amount was still appearing but had now reached $13 to $15 every month. I finally decided to check it out.

Turns out the mysterious money is from the handful of articles I posted on eHow.com eighteen months ago. Not bad. I'm thinking, I wrote (pretty badly) a couple of articles back when I knew very little about keyword research and SEO and yet these articles are producing income - sweet!

Unfortunately, a surprise to me, eHow.com no longer publishes content so I decide to check out other revenue sharing websites and begin my little experiment.

There are quite a few revenue sharing websites on the Internet. After all, this is a great business model. You encourage people to post original content to your site and you collect half the money from their work. In a way, it doesn’t seem fair...but it is. 

You can make more money if you start your own blog or website and collect 100% of your AdSense money. The problem is, your site may never be found. If it is, it's because you work your tail off constantly promoting it. All the while, never really being sure if it will make it or not or if all your work will end up being a total waste of time. 

This is where these revenue sharing sites come in handy. They have power. Google and Yahoo recognize these sites as "authority sites" and your content can make it to the first page of Goggle and Yahoo if you do just a little bit of keyword research. This means traffic and, as you know, traffic equals money.

In my quest to earn residual income, I began checking out revenue sharing sites. It appears that the top dogs are HubPages, Suite 101, and AssociatedContent. AssociatedContent can't actually be considered a revenue sharing site since you only get paid according to page views, but they are a powerhouse and are now owned by Yahoo, so there's potential there to get high page views and make money that way. They also make upfront payments so this can add to your freelance writing income while waiting on income from HubPages and Suite 101.

So here's the deal - I decided to perform a little experiment and write for all three of these sites for one year. At the end of that year, I'll see who the winner is and concentrate writing for that site.

This accomplishes several things. I'll be researching new topics that I can later rewrite and use for personal websites. I can also completely rewrite the content and package it as PLR for sale. Even if I don’t make enough money from any of these three sites, I figure it's still productive as I can repurpose the material for other uses later on.

Here are my not-so-impressive statistics so far in my little experiment. Hopefully, this will be helpful to others as I learn and you watch my progress. Maybe some of you will see things I'm doing wrong, give me some constructive criticism, and point these mistakes out to me.

As you can see, based on this information, I'm not going to be able to retire any time soon. You can also see that I'm getting the most "bang for my buck" at Suite 101. My hope is that like my eHow.com content, these hubs and articles will mature over time and gradually bring in regular income. This seems to be how these sites work - that's what I'm banking on.

In the meantime, I'm like many of you and am operating on blind faith in this system. I feel like a farmer that's planting seed and isn't really sure if the seed is good or not.

I'm not really expecting to see any worthwhile income from this work for at least another 6 months - possibly one year - and don’t intend to give up before then. If I don’t see any positive signs in one year, I'll repurpose my content and move on. Either way, I think it will be fun and a worthwhile adventure and experiment.

Join me in plugging away at making a viable residual income from these sites. Let's see what happens and have fun along the way! Stay tuned for updates on monthly income and performance at HubPages, Suite 101, and Associated Content.