How to grow your writing and your income using Hubpages as a base
79Another Article Writing Opportunity
Here I am sounding off like I was some sort of expert on either writing "good stuff" or making money. Fact is, I am a rank amateur at those things. Even so, the games are good ones and, whenever a person wins at them, it feels like lots of fun.
In this "extra buck" version of the game it is of importance to pick out a sensible niche to which to direct your writing. It should be of a "serious nature." That is, fiction, poetry, and foolishness will not cut it.
It would be best to have your niche tied to your locale, and, if not your locale, to some locale. Your goal will be to become known as the expert in your subject area within some geographical area.
I chose Harris County, Texas which holds the city of Houston in its midst. For a niche subject, I selected "environmental news" because if anyone has plenty of anything at all, it is environment. Doggone – you cannot escape your environment, right? In Houston there is not only lots of environment, there are all sorts of folks and businesses determined to pollute it.
Another person might choose Houston’s dog population as their niche. Still others might want to concentrate on bicycling, or illegal gangs, or private schools. The idea is to select a subject area in which you have a bigtime interest that will also translate to be something in which others also have interest. Something like "surplus thread spools" or Tinyville, South Dakota, would not make the grade, for who, but you, would be interested in dealing with those?
It is a certainty that you get the idea. Now that you know to select your brand of tea, here is how you can get to brew it and to drink it.
One recent day I was just sort of messing around with things, basically attempting to see what was really on the desk here under all of the clutter. Up onto the computer screen popped a message telling me that an outfit named "Examiner.com" was casting about for writers – writers such as those described above – niche folks with sharp pencils and reliable computers.
They described themselves to be a lot like Hubpages as to how their writers could work their magic; that is, the writers would write most everything as they wanted to write it within some reasonably loose guidelines (200-400 words per article, legally permitted photos, attributions as needed, and so forth) but all within the writers’ selected niches and, if acceptable, within prescribed locales.
Writers on that site get paid much like they do here on Hubpages – by page views and the like. Writer exposure is heavily enhanced by virtue of Examiner.com usually, if not always, being one of the top 100 websites (so they told me), and I tend to believe them. An article I posted there late today made it onto a Google search list in the top 5 tonight. That was astounding to me. Not that Hubpages is any sort of slouch at that. If you would like to verify Hubpages power, just go to Google and search for these three things – Dumb Poem, Redneck Tale, and Redneck Recipe. Check out how Hubpages has pushed those to the tops of their lists.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on the mix of product showcases for you. I will relate those thoughts in the context of how I, myself, intend to proceed with them in order to maximize my own exposure and increase my own audience, not only here on Hubgpages but everywhere else possible. That includes my own locale and anywhere else as well.
I will write articles here first on Hubpages that I want to subsequently repeat on my page at Examiner.com. I have learned that I cannot repeat the articles exactly, for Hubpages objects to one's posting articles identically worded with any others on the Internet. There it will also be posted quickly and also be archived for a long, long time. One site’s article will point to the other, and vice versa. As soon as I develop a suitably titled new website of my own with correlating content, I will also be linking back and forth there, too. It is planned to make that personal site a peddling paradise of some sort. (Gotta think on that for a while !) Why publicize your stuff only for the fame of it all – why not do that plus pan for some gold as well?
Those articles will not be like this one, long and "boring." 200-400 pointed words, newsworthy and as locale-oriented as possible. That’s what they are going to have to be.
Why so? First of all, those well-aimed shorties are exceedingly easy to put together and to enter into both Hubpages and Examiner. It is feasible to think of doing five or ten a day without adding to one’s carpal tunnel pains. The combination of newsworthiness and localization of the articles brings bonus payment from Examiner and should not diminish in any way whatever page view and Google adsense revenue that can come to you through Hubpages. It seems to me as though this may actually be one of those win,win, win… deals.
To get involved with Examiner in much the same way you are already involved with Hubpages, you have to apply to them for a post, and that will take a bit of work from you. For example, part of the application requires you to submit a short (up to 300 words) article in your selected niche and locale choices. If they approve it, your acceptance there has begun. There is a lot more after that. Training and lots of teaching materials are provided to you. In fact, you will believe that your computer will be unable to hold all that they provide during the first day or two. Then, glory be, they look over your background information to make sure that you are not a criminal or on a lawman’s hit list. Some people may not like that sort of thing, but others will believe it to be a good thing that they will not be in a literary Mafia club.
Ahhh… the compensation. It is not extraordinary, but if you have active readers to news writings you directed to a local audience, for example, Houston and Harris County, Texas, there is a bonus to you (right away) of a dollar an article. That, plus the residual from page views, makes things quite interesting. For example, my first posting came up with 47 cents for readership on its first day, plus a dollar bonus because it was localized to Harris County. I have been kicking around here for something like 7 months with 160 hubs and the income has totaled right around $20. For these articles I will now be writing articles one time each and swimming in two income streams. Hard to lose doing that. (Well, maybe I could drown in my own words, right?)
Before I forget it, those nice people are recruiting like crazy right now. They are looking for good writers, and Hubpages is loaded with those. You can keep right on hubbing and let your Hubpages’ hubbing help you onwards and upwards like it should, but the extra exposure and the extra income can only help put a bigger smile on your faces.
No. I did not go to work for Examiner other than as you and I already work right here on Hubpages. I write there entirely as a freelancer, but when and how I want to write.
So, why would I consider helping them recruit good writers like you? The better their writers are, and the more of them there are, the better I look because of the good company I will keep. That is one thing. The other thing is that, if I recommend you and you are accepted, I get an extra fifty bucks on the spot. That would be the same for you, too, should you be accepted.
So, if you want to get the application form, use the contact eMail thingie on my profile or next to this article. I will be happy to send the stuff to you. If I have not yet read any of your postings here, make sure I get the pathway to your writings. I am not going to recommend anyone in whom I lack confidence – and that does not mean you must be an expert – just not the opposite, that’s all.
Now then, I have one problem remaining with this article, the one you are reading right now. I do not know if it is a "commercial" article or if it is one that I simply wrote to tell my fellow writers of yet one more opportunity for their growth as writers and toward their own extra income. We will see, bye and bye, how the powers that be view the thing.
Here is a URL you can click on to be able to take a look at some recent articles I posted on Examiner.com before I figured out how to double up on article posting as described above in this article - http://tinyurl.com/yjdouqq .
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Hello Hublord - In answer to your question - at this time, yes.
Gus :-)
Hey, Gus,
It was nice, no, make that magnanimous of you to share this interesting info. Thank you for your tyme and trubble. Guess my spelling will never gualify me!
Howdy Good Doctor bj - That's me, just plain magnificent! You have well-tuned perception, but you did spell "magnificent" rather oddly. I have been having fun over there at Examiner.com, almost as much as I do here. There is a difference, however. Here I can be "looser" with wording, grammar, and stuff. There I have to be more particular how I put things, for one can have only between 150 and about 400 words to an article. The added discipline will assists in writing and causes tightening things up somewhat. You, on the other hand, would eminently qualify, spelling or otherwise. You have great expertise in what you do other than just writing, but the writing part of you is both eloquent and nicely muscular, full of humor, but not full of nonsense.
Gus :-)))
great hub like it thanks
Already know about it but great hub anyhow! Thanks, Gus!
Hi Voice - Well, I am not so much into religious stuff (I visited your profile) but I greatly respect anyone who is. So, that means I greatly respect you and what you believe. Beliefs are great. I believe in helping people, people like you and others here on Hubpages. Another thing, I appreciate your kind comment and hope that my little article is beneficial to you.
Gus :-)))
Ms Audrey - What you already know "about it" is nothing compared to what you are fixing to find out from those folks. Tell you what - they have been putting me through college with their training stuff. It is really a lot of fun and maybe, just maybe, an entre' into lots of other good stuff. Hope so.
Gus :-)))
Hey, Gus - I write for them, too as Alberta Eco-Tourism Examiner (under my profile name, not RedElf ;)
I a currently lobbying for a new "channel" as they call topic areas, but it seems to be pretty good so far. Nice article!
RedElf - Thanks for the kind word about the article and they should grant your lobbying requests. About what does an "Eco-Tourism" Examiner write? Maybe I should ask, what is "Eco-Tourism?" That's a new one to me.
Gus :-)))
I think they're good. You're probably looking 4 referrals. That aint bad.
Hi brtaiwo - Thanks for the kind words. If you are interested in receiving a referral from me, let me know. Hope to hear from you.
And, by the way,I am having fun over there. Doing about an article a day and projecting a monthly income from those and new articles to soon come to several hundred dollars a month. That adds to the fun.
Gus :-)))
You must be retired to be able to write 5-10 articles a day! But the truth is that you should write about what you know! And always include Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How! (I wrote a hub about that).
I too am writing for Examiner in the Austin health technology section. You are right, they do have good training classes and adding more every day. I think it is a good place to write, but I do love the community here at hub pages!
Write on!
Howdy again, AustinStar - Retired? It doesn't feel like it. I am doing articles for both fun and money. At this moment I am also completing production of two medical CEU courses for two suppliers. One is about "superbugs" and the other is on pulmonary pharmacology. Both are large enough to make me wish I had not started work on them. Right now my deal is in environmental news - and it is a fun topic. I got started on this Examiner project about a week and two days ago. I posted an article there yesterday that was an altered version of a Hubpages article - the one about the 3 piles of radioactive slag at a company site in Pasadena. I had picked up some new info on their problems that told of the biggest pile of that stuff breaking loose and eventually sliding into the Houston Ship Channel, there to kill millions of critters and to contaminate the channel for at lest 7 miles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Like I said, it is a fun deal.
I am trying to convince Examiner to give me a second topic, the second one to be in health news. I started in medical stuff back in 1948 when I was 17 years old. Worked the midnight shift at a university hospital nights and did the college classes daytimes. Good training, but the pay was not the best - 75 cents an hour. It kept me in beans and shoes back then. When I got to the age of 76 I "retired" from the radiology department, but "retirement" spells well but it is a misnomer. My recent articles list on Examiner can be seen using this URL: http://tinyurl.com/yjdouqq
Gus :-)))
That was an interesting article. Certainly informative, shame it's only US based though. Thanks all the same.
Howdy WB - Well, I am not exactly certain that only US-based writers can work with Examiner, but that is what I understand. One can always make inquiry. It would be worth an eMail, right?
Gus :-)))
Gus-- this is a most enjoyable, interesting and informative artilce, consider this bookmarked and rated up! and stumbled of course. Thanks for the comment on my hub, I do need an expert from time to time telling me to put a smile on peoples faces! =)
Hi Rebecca - Now then, good and friendly reader and fine writer of articles... I have to tell you one more thing about sharing articles between Hubpages and other publishers. The first two articles that I did that with, Hubpages fussed at me. They do not like it when the articles being shared are "identical" or close to "identical." (Even though they told me originally that I could publish my articles anywhere else I wanted to...) So, live and learn, right? It is easy enough to change things around enough to make everyone happy, I suppose. Anyway, Rebecca, I am having great good fun doing little articles for "Examiner," and they are paying me well. I have taken my own advice about getting folks to smile a bit, particularly so with my latest 2 articles there. (http://tinyurl.com/yjdouq) Both articles were serious as to subject and all of that, but I had to stick some Redneck in there with the dross. Hubpages is also great good fun, and I am right now trying to think of a good way to make their yelling at me smile out of a future article here, too. It will happen.
Gus :-)))
p.s.: I wish I were an expert at this writing stuff. I am an expert at eating BBQ and that is probably as good as I'll get. ;-O
Rebecca ... I should know better than to close-in surround a URL with parentheses... that will always give a person an error message when they click on it. This next should work OK, at least it did for me.
Gus :-)))
I enjoyed reading your article. Truly easy to read, and that is not really common these days. Very informative for someone like myself who has always written for himself. I just decided to begin writing on hub pages and enjoyed writing my first short article a couple of days ago. I appreciate any feedback that anyone has to offer.
Wow Gus great info, thanks so much for sharing it with us. :)
Hello Mquee and Hello Isabelle - Thank you both for your friendly and welcome comments. After I write this note to you both, I am right now going to use one of my Hubpages articles as a "sample" with which to inveigle a prospect to allow me to write for them, too. As I mentioned in one of my most recent comments, above, Hubpages does not like it if you simply duplicate an "outside" article for Hubpages. They gave me a stern warning about that, so let me emphasize their proscription once again. Evidently it is OK to use one of your hubs elsewhere, but not vice-versa.
Gus :-)))
Thank you for this excellent report. I had heard of Examiner but I didn't know what it was all about. Now I do. Well done!
Hi James - Those who enjoy writing and do it as well as you do it can certainly have some fun with Examiner.com. If you'd like to give that a shot, let me know so that I might sponsor you. (We get a bonus for that). I have just now been accepted by "Demand Studios" as one of their writers, but I am having a bit of a problem with entering the writers' part of their Web site in that I do not have a password yet. Ergo, James, I cannot tell you much about them other than that they promise a high rate of pay per article.
Gus :-)))
This is an interesting hub. I was interested in Examiner and then I read a comment saying they are only concentrating in the US and I live in England.
By the way, are you allowed to repeat the exact same article that you have in hub pages on Examiner?
Hello Hummingbird - Examiner.com is a news-article site with contributors across the U.S. It is likely that England has a similarly constituted organization.
Examiner articles must be original and not repeats of articles published elsewhere.
That said, it seems to me that "examiners" could reside almost anywhere other than for those who are to write for localized audiences. For example, travel writers, food recipe providers, and so forth may be welcomed. I say "may be" because I do not know the answer in that regard. My own observation is that "examiners" obtain their "local" information from sources that can be accessible to anyone on the Internet. It would be worth exploring, for Examiner.com pays well for articles.
Gus :-)))
Thanks for this information Gus. Thanks for the email too. There is a lot of useful information in this hub and I will look into some of these sites and also see what there is here that is similar.
Thanks again.
Howdy once more, Hummingbird - Similarity is OK, whereas identicality is not. Early on I wrote several Examiner.com articles and repeated them, virtually verbatim, here on Hubpages. Hubpages complained to me about that. They use some software (available also to you and to me) that scans the Internet in order to determine if an article sent to Hubpages duplicates in large measure any other article the software finds on the Web. One such program is "Essay Rater." There are others. Here is a URL which you can check on - http://www.topshareware.com/essay-rater/downloads/ . At least one of the listed programs is free of charge.
Gus -)))
Sound advice, Gus. I'd love to make money on hubpages but, as you mentioned, it's not really going to happen with poetry, which is my niche. I guess I'll have to die penniless and hope some weird generation a hundred years from now discovers and loves my stuff. Your writing is always clear and concise -- thanks for the info. Cheers.
Doug - Thank you for your very nice and very welcome comment. I need to go back in and do a bit of editing of this article. I had mentioned that you could run a duplicate of an article on HubPages and on your deal with Exaniner.com. Not so. HubPages had a fit when I did that - put red ink all over my account listing. HubPages has a program that picks up duplication of your HubPages articles with any article on the Internet. I went back into HubPages when that happened and changed my HubPages articles enough to make them non-duplicates.
Doug, what I do here is to use HubPages more or less as a testing ground to help me see how people react to what I write. The Examiner articles go out as "news" items and they are really here today and gone tomorrow. If they are NG, the Examiner folks will pull them and then holler unhappy words at me.
In truth, I have forgotten how many months I have been on HubPages - I think it to be around 16 months or so - and I have yet to reach Google Adsense earnings of $50. I will also guess that my hubs number close to 170. I have read here that some Hubbers routinely do $100 a month and a rare bird does as much as $1,000. I do not really understand what they write about that brings in so many readers, but all things are possible.
Check out Examiner to see if there is something there for you. They have hundreds and hundreds of writing niches, one or two have your name on them.
Another outfit that encourages you to write what ly want is Triond. It is an Israeli company. They, too, pay per view, but they supply your writings to a number of Internet outlets that fit what it is you write about. They don't fool around by holding your earnings until you hit some elevated total. I started off there playing around to see what they might do, and one week they sent 15 cents to my PayPal account. I recommend that you take a look there.
Demand Studios also accepted me as a writer, but I have not yet written for them. They offer payment per article that seems to be on a professional pay level, and each submission you make is after you select an assignment of a pre-set title they provide at some pay level per article, like $10, $15, etc.
I have also written for TextBrokers. They supply an article subject and a rough outline of what their article customer wants, including SEO words (typically) to be included in your article. Generally, the pay is between $5 and $10 per article upon customer acceptance, and they pay every two weeks. I did make a lot of $$$ there but I found that I did not like to write under such restricted circumstances. It was fun, howevber, and I learned about a ton of stuff. As I recollect, my first article dealt with lubricant pumping from outfitted trucks sent here and there in the field. I recall doing an article on mini-motorcycles, one on fireplace inserts, and one on horses - all sorts of stuff. A person could really make a living doing their thing, but it seemed to not be what I wanted to do.
As to poetry writing, I think it to be great good fun, essentially because when I start writing one, I never know where it is going to go - that is, I have a possible thought at the beginning, but that thought may or may not be what happens either next or later. Unfortunately for readers, that is also the case for some of the crazy tales I spin here on HubPages. Most of those have some history behind them, but even with history, the lies do the real work.
At this moment I am in the final days of an experiment to see how well nonsense poetry might sell for me. My eBook of Dumb Poems is to be available for downloading on January 2nd. The trick there will be publicizing it. For that I have made up an (image) illustrated ad page to place on several websites and also use with ClickBank, the big eBook vendor, with whom I have a seller account. For my own "sales" I ask for a donation only. For "hard sales" as a download I am going to price the eBook at $27.00. Why so high? An old marketing experience we did some years ago. We had an extremely effective and very unique product we manufactured that cost us next to nothing to make, package, and put out the door. At first, we tried to sell it for $5, packaged and ready to ship. Couldn't peddle it worth a darn. Thought about it for a moment or two and raised the price to $12.95 + shipping. Sold a few. Then, to $22, then to $27.95. Every time we raised the price, it sold better than before. When we got it up to $37.95 we could not keep it on the shelf. Lesson learned. We'll start off with $27 for the poem eBook and see what happens.
Doug, I hope that some of this rambling helps you (and maybe others who might happen upon the conversation here).
Gus :-)))
Good information, I hadn't run across examiner.com before. Periodically I do look for new sites where I can write. At some point, I may need to check it out.
Hi mulberry - If you want to earn a bit of money from short writings, I have found that Examiner and Triond are the least restrictive and seem to pay more than many others. I like HubPages because it has the fewest restrictions on your range of subjects of all of them.
Gus :-)))
Hubpages is really nice but we should do keyword research first before writing the articles
Hi htodd - I would never argue against that.
Gus :-)))
Hublord 2 years ago
a good hub and indeed informing. is examiner centered on American citizens and their locality?