Guide to Hubpages

Joining Hubpages is very straightforward, and it's free - you just need an email address and follow the instructions on the sign-up page.

Once you have an account, click on the tab for affiliates and add your Adsense ID.

If you don't have an Adsense account, don't apply straightaway. They are getting choosy about who they accept. I would advise you to create some hubs, build traffic to them and then three months later, apply to join Adsense. Because it's getting harder and harder to get a new Adsense account, make sure the hubs you create are the best original work you can manage, and concentrate on non-commercial subjects. That way a Google engineer inspecting your hubs with a view to deciding whether to allow you into the Adsense program will have nothing to complain about.

When you have your Adsense account, create a separate URL channel within the Adsense account for every single Hubpage you create - that way you can tell which hubs are generating the most earnings.

In the affiliate settings, they also allow you to link to Google Analytics so that you can track all the traffic to your hubs.

Commercially minded people can also add their Amazon and Ebay affiliate IDs. l tend not to use these, but feedback from other Hubbers suggests that the Ebay affiliate works really well (as they have a 7 day cookie) and people make money from it. However note that Ebay has changed it's rules about allowing people to use it on third party sites. Only those who already had Ebay before the changeover can now use the Ebay modules.

Kontera have also recently changed their rules to allow earnings to roll over from month to month with no minimum (previously it was a $5 a month monimum). However, do note that people who have Kontera enabled report reduced Adsense earnings - the best thing is to pick either Adsense or Kontera on your hub and not mix the two.

Hubpages ranks authors with an author hubscore and also ranks individual hubs with a hubscore.

The hubscore is designed to weed out plagiarism, poor quality hubs, and to reward those hubs that are well-written and get a lot of traffic. If your author hubscore is less than 75 and the score for individual hubs is less than 40, all the links on your hub turn no-follow - so if you are using hubs to make backlinks, you need to aim for a high hubscore.

In my experience, writing long hubs - at least 700 words and including a lot of content, improves both the author hubscore and the individual scores. Participating in the community helps too - visiting and posting in the forums, commenting on hubs etc. When the score of individual hubs climbs, you also tend to get listed on their "best hubs" pages, which means you get additional backlinks to your hubs, which in turn means your hub is more likely to be picked up by the search engines.

Yes it is. Here is my account of how I made money with Hubpages doing the Hubpage challenge.

The Hubpage Challenge was a challenge to make 100 or 30 hubs in 30 days. It started because an Internet Marketer called Courtney Tuttle decided to prove to his readers that there really was potential with Hubpages. You can read the account of how he got on here. All in all, he made $400+ in four weeks.

The key to earning on hubpages seems to be to pick topics and keywords that people search for and to make good quality hubs on these topics. Once you get traffic, you get income. Of course some people are better than others at picking the keywords - that's where art and technique come in.

I urge everyone to have a go at making as many hubpages as they can. With trial and error, you eventually work out what makes money and what doesn't and will find that Hubpages generates a handy amount of income.