Hubpages Review. Is it Still Possible to Make Money There?

The short answer is yes, you can still make money with Hubpages but the truth I eluded to is this:

There’s way better ways to make far more money outside of Hubpages:

Let me start from the beginning (my history with this place):

I used to have a Hubpages account a long time ago when I began internet marketing and when I did, Hubpages still had a massive weight in search engine rankings and I used it to create content that ranked very high, very quickly and got me a lot of traffic, which I monetized.

I basically used the Hubpages website to attract people interested in products and sold them those products through the affiliate marketing model and it worked for at least a few years. 

But that was many years ago. And since then, this site, it’s policies and opportunities have dramatically changed (not for the best either). And this naturally brings up the following question:

Can you still make good money with Hubpages? Well like I said before:

The answer is yes, but not nearly as much as you could a long time ago and it’s one of the reasons why I left and stopped using Hubpages and began doing things like creating my own blog, which has since been my main way of making money online.

As for Hubpages, while it still provides people a way to make money (it is legit, don’t get me wrong), it’s nowhere close to the opportunities it once had and that’s why I don’t recommend it.

If you still want to use it today, there’s some OK reasons to, but for the most part, as someone who earns a serious income from the internet (and teaches people how through a program called Wealthy Affiliate), I wouldn’t recommend it and I’ll explain why in this review!

Before I do, let me explain a few basic things to anyone who is reading this and is new to Hubpages, affiliate marketing, blogging and so forth:

Don’t know what Hubpages is? Here’s a quick review:

This is basically a website which allows people to blog about anything, but it’s within the control and supervision of Hubpages.

You can actually make some money though this site today by creating content on it (writing articles, just like in the early days). But the weight Hubpages used to have in search engines is gone and that lost weight is ultimately why the monetary potential of Hubpages also went away and why many successful affiliates don’t use it anymore.

Let me explain what happened to Hubpages to cause this:

About 10 years, there existed a number of certain websites that had immense authority in the eyes of Google, and one of them was Hubpages. The others included:

• Squidoo.
• Ezinearticles.
• Street Articles.
• Digg.
• And other similar article directory websites.

Anyone who knew something about SEO and affiliate marketing knew that if they wrote content on one of these websites and published it, that they could in most cases get 1st page rankings on Google within a few days. I first learned about these sites in 2007 from a program called the Bum Marketing Method.

But anyway, because these sites were so easy to use to get rankings, naturally, they were exploited, and I admit, I was one of the people who did utilize them (with great results).

Bu overtime, many of these places, including Hubpages fell from that privilege:

• Ezinearticles lost it’s SEO value due to too high low quality content.
• Squidoo was the next to go and they actually got absorbed by Hubpages.

In short, when most if not all of these places lost their SEO value, Hubpages was one of the last ones standing.

But eventually they too suffered in the ranking privileges due to the same reasons the other places fell apart (too many low quality articles were produced and they were looked upon as content farms).

If you still want to make money with Hubpages today, here’s how you can:

I am not going to deny that you can still make money with this place. In fact, their own homepage features cases of writers who make a few $100 a month writing content there.

These people write blog posts on whatever subjects they love and depending on the number of viewers they get, they can monetize that blog through Hubpages. In this screenshot below, you can see at least 2 case studies of people who currently do that:

But does this actually make this site worth signing up with? In my opinion, no:

And the reason is because the bulk of potential this place once had is lost. Let me explain:

In the above screenshot, I actually blurred out the 2 main success stories because of privacy (even though it’s a public site), but anyway, that’s not the point.

Here is what I want to get across about Hubpages (you can make more elsewhere):

1) Let’s take the first person in the screenshot who is making $350 a month.

2) Her focus is writing cooking articles and she’s written over a 100 of them.

3) I can tell you right now, as an affiliate marketer, if she knew how to market on Google through SEO and put that effort into a personal blog, and wrote 100+ articles on a personal site, this is what would likely happen:

She’d probably get 10,000+ visitors a month from Google alone and possibly be breaking a $1,000 a month from her efforts (vs a few $100 from Hubpages).

The downside would be that it would take about 6 months for your blog to get results, but it will build up and snowball into more profits than Hubpages could make you in my opinion.

Imagine being able to monetize a blog on a passion you like (here are 50 profitable niches so you get an idea). This is something you can do way better on a personal blog than on Hubpages.

 

You see my main argument against using Hubpages to make money in today’s online world is the fact that you can’t really get as much search traffic from Google anymore like you could 10 years ago.

This lost potential also means there’s lost money and while you can get paid today by it, it pales in comparison to what you could get paid back then.

But let me explain a little bit more clearly what I mean:

If you look up keywords on Google today, it is almost 100% UNLIKELY that you will find any Hubpages articles ranked high. It’ll probably be somewhere in the latter pages of searches, which actually get little to no traffic or visits. 

However, you WILL still get traffic from the internal network and community of this site still, but that is a small percentage of what you would get if your article on that site ranked high on Google. 

In my estimates, that’s about 90% of potential wasted and naturally 90% of potential profits wasted too.

2 other reasons I wouldn’t recommend using Hubpages:

1) As far as I know they do not allow you to do affiliate marketing through it.

This is actually one of the reasons they tanked in Google’s eyes long ago.

Too many people did too much low quality affiliate marketing (spammed promotions) and this caused poor content to be created on the site. If you want to make money with this place, you’ll likely only be able to do so through the internal network of this site.

2) You aren’t really in control of the content you create.

What I mean by that is that if Hubpages decided that you violated their TOS, they could shut down your account instantly. I don’t like the idea of putting up my content in places that essentially owns and controls how and IF that content is viewed, you are essentially “renting” a blog from this place and not really the owner of it.

Money wise, I think I already made the case there, but let me explain once again that in my professional opinion, a blog YOU own that ranks high on Google can make a TON more money than a blog you don’t own on Hubpages.

Going for a personal blog = more potential money made than on Hubpages.

And if making money is what you want to accomplish, then I can help you do this through the blogging option:

Now I am not discounting Hubpages or it’s use.

If you just want to create content somewhere and get likes on it and perhaps make a little bit of money, sure this is still a place that works, but I am a strong advocate of the following idea and that is.

If you have passion to create content on a particular subject, that passion can be monetized and you can make better money off that passion IF you have and own your own blog.

The only real negative to consider is that it takes longer to do initially, but in the long run, you can make way more with the effort you put into content production on a personal blog than on any site like Hubpages in my personal opinion.

The bottom line on Hubpages:

If you want to learn how to do blogging correctly to leverage this potential and make more than you ever could from Hubpages, then check out the Wealthy Affiliate program, which will teach you blogging, as well as affiliate marketing.