Hubpages Review, Pay, and How it Works

In this article I will discuss my review of Hubpages, what you can expect as a payout, and how I use the service. As a writer, my goal is to have my writing read. The best way to have that happen is through marketing and practicing my craft. However, marketing costs a fair amount of money. To help offset that cost, I write several non-fiction articles on Hubpages.

Before I begin my love letter to Hubpages, here is the niche this service provides in the market:Anyone can start a website blog and build content on that blog. However, search engines may not rank small blog information relevant. The market niche Hubpages provides is to bring your content alongside similar content. That makes the search engine rank your specific information higher. The higher the rank in the search engines, the more clicks you get. The more clicks you get, the more ads that can be shown. The more ads that are shown on your content, the greater your share of the revenue. In addition, Hubpages adheres to search engine best practices, so writing it their way will also work best for the search engines.

With that, here are six reasons I write on Hubpages:

1.) They practice SEO diligently and it shows.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tricky subject, because it is often a cat-and-mouse game. Poor players try to game the system, Google/Bing change to kick out the terrible players, and they hurt good players. However, the glorious thing about Hubpages is that they work towards being an excellent player. They know that the hand that feeds them is Google/Bing, and it shows that they care. In a recent Hubpages community forum, where people were asked where their traffic comes from, the vast majority say Google and Bing. There is a community of readers within Hubpages that drives traffic… but they are just a small part. The real big part of the traffic is coming from Google. So when a big search engine update comes down the line, Hubpages aggressively works to adhere to those updates. In the end, that means that I (as a content creator) do not have to pay attention to every little nuance. If my article makes Hubpages happy, it will probably make Google/Bing happy.

2.) They are one-on-one partners, not a corporate overlord.

Here is the next wonderful thing I love about Hubpages. Not everyone will like this. They will take your article and look to improve upon it. For example, if you have grammar mistakes or a broken image, they will work with you on those. If your header graphic isn’t that great, sometimes they will replace it. That seems cruel, but the truth is they are working towards getting you a higher ranking on Google. That makes writing articles on Hubpages feel more like teamwork than one man doing it all.

3.) They have an active community that wants to help.

The other significant thing about Hubpages is that they have an active community. If you notice some oddities, you can scroll through forums and see if anyone else is having that problem. If not, you can make a message for others to respond to. In addition, you can hear about the latest experiences of others, which can drive up your own success. The goal being simple: rising tides raise all boats. By pursuing success together, it is more likely the individual will succeed.

4.) They introduce quality scores to each article.

This may seem arbitrary on the outside, but I can tell you it’s very important. Knowing how your article ranks is a way you can measure against Hubpages benchmarks. Again, Hubpages benchmarks are made against SEO best practices. That means, the higher your article score, the more likely it will be liked by search engines. This gives you a sense of how to write wonderful articles.

5.) They look out for bad players.

There are two sides to this coin. The first is that if my content is junk, they let me know. Hubpages not only tells me what is wrong with the article I just wrote, but how to fix it as well. Besides helping inside the house, they look outside to see who is stealing content. That means that people that rip off your article are shown to you. You can then message them to cut it out, or message their host about the plagiarism. Keeping your content protected is a great way to ensure that Google knows who the original source of the article is.

6.) You own your content.

The last reason I love Hubpages is that you still own all your content. I can remove the articles from Hubpages and publish them elsewhere. I am under no obligation to keep them on Hubpages. That means that if I have a selection of articles that are simply not working well, I can republish them elsewhere. For example, I could take these articles and build an eBook from them. I could take these articles and repurpose them on my website. I could take these articles and simply go to a competitor. Whatever my decision, the content created is mine.Probably the number #1 question people ask is about payout. I don’t blame them. You want to know that your efforts are met with some type of reward. That’s what makes this writing thing so difficult. Let me tell you what I saw personally and then we’ll go into some averages.

The minimum payout is $50. That means you need to earn $50 for them to send you money. So how quickly did this happen for me?

I earned my first money on August 26th 2014 = 5 cents. I had only one article. I wrote a bunch more. I finally reached the $50 threshold on May 15th of 2016. That took nearly 21 months to reach the threshold. When I hit that threshold, I had 8 published articles (and a bunch unpublished). When I hit that threshold, on average, I was getting $1.32 per day. That experience is a lot worse than what average new Hubpage creators experience. Why did I fail so badly at Hubpages? I have 43 unpublished articles in Hubpages, most written in 2014. Their average Hubpage Score is a 69 out of 100, which is pretty bad. Ultimately, I learned that low content click-bait stuff wasn’t the road to success. I also wrote whatever I felt like in the moment, not caring about what was needed. Since I didn’t get paid quickly, I kinda forgot about Hubpages until 2018. When I came back to the platform, I was still getting about $1.08 per day, even though I had let it rot since 2014. That’s the power of evergreen content: It makes money for a long period.

I started writing for Hubpages again, making longer and high-quality articles. I made 16 articles in 2018, with an average quality score of 81. For 2018, I made an average of $4.02/day. In 2019, I made 15 more articles, with an average score of 82. For 2019, I made an average of $3.76/day. I know you might want to point to the additional work for less pay as a bad thing, but that’s how search engine traffic works. There is a natural flux, which is why I rely on Hubpages to help me ride those waves. In 2020, I made just 5 articles with an average score of 82. For 2020, I made an average of $4.50/day. This year (2021) I made 6 more articles, with an average score of 79. For this year, I am making an average of $6.29/day.

So that’s my experience with the pay. How does this compare against other Hubpage creators?

One user reports it took her a month to earn $2, but seven months until her first payout (Way better than my 21 months). Another user wrote 52 articles within 4 months until they hit their first payout. A small poll (30 Hubpage creators) was conducted about this topic. For 33% of those polled, they received their first payout within a year. Another 10% received it by the end of the next year (month 24). That means that nearly 57% never had a payout.

The biggest two reasons behind never having a payout are creating bad content and creating content no one needs. Creating bad content is easily fixed. You can read the Hubpages style guide and listen to their suggestions on your articles. In addition, creating content that is needed is also easy, if you know the tricks. Here is how I find content that is needed:

1.) Google Keyword Planner

This is a free tool that allows you to put in either a website or a set of keywords. It looks for similar keywords. The interesting thing about this tool is that it tells you the amount of competition for each keyword and the relative amount of traffic. I look for “long tail” keywords with low to medium competition, but good traffic. When I say “long tail” I simply mean phrases or sets of words that are 3 words or longer. It is easier to rank for keywords that are longer.

2.) Google Trends

Next, I take a list of potential keywords and I plug them into Google trends. I then set Google trends to 5 years. This allows me to rank potential keywords against each other. When I know a keyword with the most traffic after 5 years and that has low/medium competition, I write an article about that. I know the article may or may not succeed with Google. However, if you constantly look to fill needs, you will be more likely to hit a home run. That is an article that is desperately needed, which you rank in the top 10. You then gain a lot more traffic and make regular funds on Hubpages. When you have enough of these “home run” articles that are evergreen, you gain some sort of constant payout.

Hopefully, this article has been an excellent review of Hubpages. I’ve covered why this website exists, why I love Hubpages, what it took for me to get my first payout, other people’s average first payouts, and some tips on building articles. I am also going to include another video review below.