My 100th Hub! - What I've learned, How I've grown, Who I've helped and Who's helped me!

I noticed a tradition here on HubPages. When one hits their hundredth hub they often write a hub about their experiences and accomplishments. What a grand idea!?

I believe this lends to the new writers some wisdom of each persons journey and growth spurts, as well as their trials and tribulations so in my hundredth hub (this one makes 100) I will do just that.

The beauty of this system is that by the time you amass 100 hubs you should also have built up your fan base either naturally (as I did) or proactively (seeking out people to be-fan and often they will add you as well hence becoming your fan base).

This helps for you to have a base readership of your hubs as they are built but it also gives you a bunch of people over generally 6 months or more whom have read your work and can relate to your 100th hub!

Often it is them, the readers/fans that give you insight into your writing, and often these are the same people you meet in the forum (for many that is how they acquire their first 50+ fans).

The irony is that if you go through and read all the (authors' 100th hub) pages you'll notice that generally everyone nails down the basics that everyone learns however most of the page is about something THEY learned that others didn't share in their pages. This is what makes it valuable.

Even if they learned the same concepts i.e. back linking, digg(ing) etc.. Their point of view gives us a different way to see it which is as valuable as something new too!

In this hub I will briefly talk about my journey and things I've learned, as well as what being a HubPages writer has allowed me to accomplish. I hope to seed some wisdom to newbie's and to bring nostalgia to the veteran Huber's in our community. It's been an interesting trip let me tell you.

My Journey on HubPages has lead me to a whole new journey that is more lucrative than even any of my old jobs in pay, but I couldn't have done it were it not for the people here whom have helped shape me into a writer.

I started out green, I could write, I could even write interesting material but my focus and grammar were WAY off.

This hub is mostly for my friends and family and New Hub Page authors looking for some insight as to the road ahead. I will make no grandiose promises of wealth because unfortunately HubPages won't bring that, at least not for the writers- the HubPages team makes a killing though.

This is not to say it is impossible to make money here, because realistically you can, however their are much better ways to use HubPages and the built in traffic potential than to try to earn pennies from heaven using adsense. Adsense on HubPages is ok, but the real money with this is off on your on website where you get all the revenues.

How much have you made here? Can you make money on HubPages?

Yes but their are much better ways than writing articles on HubPages for adsense revenue.. Notice I said on HubPages.. As the better way still uses adsense revenue AND HubPages. You could make a lot on HubPages, some people make a couple grand but it's very rare. Why? Because its simply not worth the effort or expense you'd have to go through to generate money on HubPages.

On HubPages you're only putting pennies in your pocket and a lot in theirs. If your time is worth money and I hope it is, the work to payout ratio is very uneven. Once you pay yourself for all those hours of suffering, which you won't be able to do even, you're broke. No profit.

However if you get 100% of the profits/revenue it's feasible to get a backlinks membership for 150 a month, and all that sweat equity put out there. You don't want just one page though. The trick is to have LOTS of them. I'll explain later how this works.

Realize first of all your sharing almost half the page views/revenue that comes in, where as you could build your own site, and keep 100% then paying for traffic hits through an automated backlinks systems (along with the other ways to get them) is worth it. That's like going to work and sharing 40% of your paycheck and you did all the work... wait we do this already, its called taxes.. But I'm taking about 40% after you pay taxes!

The thing is HubPages does have built in traffic and it is accessible but the amount of work you'd have to endure to get it wouldn't be worth giving up 40% of your revenue.. However I have learned that you can write your hubs, take advantage of fans, comments capsules, and linking strategies that will allow you to get some amazing traffic.

But not enough to earn any decent money, hence not enough to make up for 40% of your revenue.. To effectively utilize this sites traffic resources you don't try to earn money here.. almost half of the generated income is given to the site owners for all that sweat equity.

As proven below with my earnings.. However just writing hubs for fun, or for backlinks does pose a profit as you don't spend anything and your writing for fun so its not work..

but the way you use hubpages to your advantage, while maintaining hubpages income is to use the site to generate traffic to your external adsense website (off hubpages), while giving hubpages some of your great work in the form of a great hubpage that has some information but only a teasers worth.

• You win because you get that targeted traffic.
• They win because your hub brings in adsense revenue for both of you, and you win again because that same traffic goes to your external site which you get 100% of the revenue from.

If I don't make money why should I write for hubpages? Why not spend all my time and resources on my external site?

Because hubpages is a valuable cog in the engine of your money making empire. You can actually use it to drive traffic to your site while helping them, helping you, and contributing a great page to a great site.

Since hubpages doesn't own your work, you retain your copywrite; this is a great place to put your site while you're working on your empire. It does some valuable things for you:

• 1. Puts it on the web which is proof of your copywrite and ownership of the content. If anyone steals it you have proof it was yours.
• 2. you can earn some revenue on it meanwhile your building your site
• 3. It helps you get writing practice and people can tell you if they like it, you get a sort of consensus as to how the public will respond to the subject matter, you can test keywords, tags etc.. and hubpages is set up to give you maximum Google formatting. The very way you build a hubpage is unique to making adsense revenue so it helps you focus your page to optimization! When you build it into a site and rewrite the hub as a teaser with some valuable nuggets, you will be 80% on page optimized!
• 4. Google considers a page more valuable that is "Aged" so in storing it here for the time being the hub becomes aged and when you rewrite it you will still get higher page ranking which means more traffic funneling. Also when you rewrite it the page will be in Google's eyes "updated" and fresh.
• 5. Look at hubpages as your trial run, your rough draft, your backlinks resource and traffic funneling engine.

Write hub and prosper

Writing hub pages now for fun will give you something valuable later.. So make them good valuable, optimized pages.. Use this time as on the job training.. Trust me on this.. Don't write to make money at first.. You don't know enough about the engine yet..

Once you get your other thing (automated backlinks generating membership) going (that I'll tell you about later in another hub) you can send traffic to HubPages with the same membership for your other sites backlinks and you won't lose a thing, including sweat equity!

You can even take all your HubPages and turn THEM into your own adsense websites when you learn the formula then you will of course have to remove the HubPages to avoid duplicate content issues, however you don't have to delete the hub article all together. You rewrite the hub as the short book report version of your site.

This way your data is still there, your still earning adsense revenue, HubPages is making the same money and your hub is efficient and optimized.. but you rewrite the rest onto your site, expanding on it and making 10 page sites out of it! Later when you start doing this you will start off making your adsense site, then building a hub from it to drive traffic to the site.

The beauty of this is the site will be complete where as the hub will be a teaser, a trailer to the amazing site they can go visit, yet even a trailer has good bits of information (but unlike most movie trailers all the good stuff is not in the trailer, the really good info will be on your off hubpages site)

The hub is converted into the teaser for your site and will do two things.

• 1. Provide a backlink from an "authority" site, a site with traffic in and out, with a high PR rating (Page rank) with Google
• 2. Sends TARGETED traffic to your site. One thing alot of people do is send their automated backlinks traffic to the hubpage as well as their site because when they pass through the hubpage they are filtering out those whom wouldn't be a targeted niche specific visitor.

If you write the hub right you will have a 2000 word or less, hub, written very concisely and complete by hubpages standards, yet you write it so you only dish out a few valuable insights and promise more on your personal site so they will get excited and bounce out to your site thirsty and ready for more. Your site will go to town and give them an information orgasm.

You will then put in a link to your adsense site off HubPages in the bottom of the hub to send traffic to your site from HubPages! If the hub is good they will undoubtedly go to your site to read more. This also helps those who can't write small hubs!

You write long but efficient hubs for now then use them later shortening them and trimming the fat to build your real money making "hub" site! Brilliant huh? More on this in another hub.

If anyone is curious I have over the past 7 months created and published (including this one) 100 Hubs, receiving (up till August 5th 08):

Collective Page views from HubPages hubs: 175,383

Earnings (collectively): 80.13

So you see for 100 hubs I've earned less than a hundred dollars in revenue. I've never advertised, created/generated backlinks, wrote blogs to promote HubPages pages, although I have linked to it from my myspace page but I doubt any hits came from it.

BUT I am only now learning how to utilize all this hubpages potential and thus my pages will start to do MUCH more for me now that I know what to do. Since their already built and people like them now I just need to optimize them more.

My other point here is that I've made 73.18 WITHOUT promotion, which to anyone wanting to make money online this appears pretty dismal (but in reality it is pretty dam good considering its free money I didn't try to earn, and everyday I make more doing NOTHING more with them)

Imagine if I actually advertised, created backlink blogs, used Digg or stumbleupon, word press, article sites, and so forth. I have since discovered how money is really made online (where I don't have to share the revenue but it works exactly like HubPages!).

My mission at first on HubPages up to my first 75 hubs was to make money but I never had time to promote. I wrote hubs and figured I'd get to it and procrastinated like crazy until I pretty much gave up. I tried to learn about backlinks and all that but my life got in the way.

What I put off learning became impossible at this point, I was too tired to write after working two jobs so for a while I didn't write.. But a couple months later I a friend of mine in New York (I live in California) linked me to an online job opportunity and everything changed. The first month I wrote enough to earn 355.00, the second month I made 1501.00 then the third month (May) I earned a whopping 2173.00. The funny thing happened after the 1501.00 check though.

I realized that I could make more there than both my jobs combined if I wrote full time, not to mention regained my freedom as I could work when I wanted to and even travel anywhere in the world and still do my job!

I grew tired of the idiosyncrasies of my crap job at Lowe's (cashier) and Mel's Diner (waiter) and decided that it had been interfering with my writing/online job, my passion. I get paid by how many blogs I write, and how many articles I write.. Their is seemingly unlimited work available.. and I started the blog job just before both Lowe's and Mel's called me.

I worked at those jobs for about a month and a half then quit to pursue this writing gig. I realized that I would make more money doing this full time than both jobs, and only had to spend 8 hours a day writing! I actually have been doing better than ok with it and I have ALL of my freedom back- Life is good!

My check for that first month working completely at home was $2173.00. my consolidated earnings from both jobs was a mere $1700.00. I was in heaven (still am). I was hired based on my HubPages here! My resume was my hubs!

Make no mistake, this was NOT easy money. I did enjoy the work, but I worked very hard to earn it. Writing can be one of the most taxing jobs in the world.

The difference between this and another job is that when your writing creatively your using your brain CONSTANTLY where by at a job you learn the "motions" of the position and more than not your just on auto pilot- redundant. Writing is by no means redundant.

But Hard work has never been something I tried to avoid, its the ridiculous ways that the bosses don't appreciate your hard work, the rules of the job that more often than not are too rigid to be realistically feasible with your life, and many more (I really don't need to list them as everyone knows the fallacies of working for a thankless boss).

I love the hard work but the difference is now I have a boss who actually appreciates my work, my intellectual property contribution, who compensates me for my time and tells me that I'm doing a good job and that they need me. The difference is the work is harder but I enjoy it MORE!

I went from learning how to write for money, to turning writing into a full time career bringing in thousands a month doing what I love. In this hub I will link to various hubs I've written that are hallmarks of my experience.

My Jerry Springer Final Thought

As much as we write to earn we write to vent out that wonderful wisdom we acquired over years of curiosity and learning. We write hubs to share knowledge and to get feedback from our fans and others whom are interested in what we have to say.

Our hubs are a great thing for the internet as they bring individual insight into a vast array of topics and themes. With every hub we add a new brick to the internet hierarchy and we submit our mark on the world.

The beauty of HubPages is not in adsense revenue, at least not on the site.. that is how the site authors are benefited not us.. The true wealth is in the jam packed pages of information as to HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE, and a million other things like traffic funneling and more.

I write blogs for a living and articles too and HubPages is where I do my research on a blog topic I have to write for that I don't know anything about. It's more convenient than Google for finding information fast because HubPages are often quite optimized with pure researched data that is to the point and easy to read.

Most hub pages also have links out to more information and more in-depth information on topics in the hub! I find hubs very useful in research because most hubs break down complicated awareness into the basics then point you to new vocabulary and resources to further help your research efforts.

For example say you wanted to learn about on page and off page optimization. If you're completely green the word SEO would be confusing to you.

Type SEO into the HubPages search engine and you get hundreds of sites explaining SEO then you learn more things in the context like "Back linking" "Key wording" and so forth, you even get a nice bunch of "name dropping" for software the experts use...

Hubpages has been a college for me in a sense.. But it's allowed me to share my own valuable acquisitions in wisdom (experience driven insight) and Knowledge (research driven insight) with others and to continue the cycle of growth in all respects.

In every journey their are always people who teach you things, even things you don't realize your learning like tolerance. You also inevitably make an impression on them and the cycle of life continues.

The true wealth in life is recognizing this and making it something you can use. In my journey on HubPages I've run into a lot of different characters, some nice, some downright rude and ruthlessly arrogant.

I would have to say however that aside from the forum elder's click everyone I've met has been wonderful. I could go into details about how the people in the forum were arrogant and rude, but that would get me nowhere. Truth is it was their arrogance that taught me the most about myself and my own arrogance.

Even in the negative situations, lessons leak out. If were humbled enough to step back outside our emotional bubble and to analyze the facts without prejudice, we will learn a great deal about how our interactions affect everything that happens, even how those people affect us.

In the end everyone external to you is a mirrored image of your internal baggage, lessons, and thoughts. We project what we feel onto the world and label others based on our own thoughts. If someone gets on your nerves it is more about how you need to learn why they get on your nerves than trying to "fix" their attitude. If someone gets to you then you have some unresolved issues that you need to deal with and thus I believe that's why they are there stimulating you.

Once I learned to do this, to see what was really there, I started my journey to self awareness at a new deeper level as a writer. I learned to listen and to stop placing judgments on others criticisms and to in fact take them as clues into my own growth.

It was a bumpy first couple of months here but I soon adapted and the result has been a smooth ride and I've become a better writer.

As a writer I have written many hubs on psychology, and a vast range of topics having to do with the human condition and many have commented that my insights helped them. I'm ecstatic that I could help people with my work. My hubs were written mainly to organize my thoughts and to open my own doors of awareness, but also to help others seek the same peace and contentment I sought out in the first place.

I thoroughly enjoy HubPages not only for making money and traffic and the other valuable resources it instills upon my other endeavors, but mostly I enjoy writing hubs because the very structure of HubPage capsules gives me a great way to express my thoughts into a page.

I find when I want to learn about something, nothing motivates me more than to start researching then write a hub to consolidate my thoughts into an explanatory hub that brings both me and my readers insights into the topic.

Writing has always been a great creative outlet for me and a release that brings me awareness and incubates the growth of wisdom. I figure things out in fact while I write so writing hubs is both a rewarding experience and a learning experience for me as well as my readers.

I appreciate everyone who's taken the time to read my hubs, and those whom have left comments to let me know how you liked it (or didn't like it). I plan to write plenty more hubs in the future and the topics will only get more interesting as I go.

I'm anxious to bring the insights in my next hub that has brought me some interesting lessons about re-growing teeth for example. Did you know you could do that? Read the hub and find out how scientists are doing it and how it will be available in 2 years or less! Imagine no more fillings! No need for dentures etc...

Thank you for reading this hub, my Hub Centennial. I couldn't have done any of this without my fans, readers, and yes critics

The secret to true writing bliss on HubPages is to...

"Come on writers-now.. Smile on your Huber's... come together... try-to-hub one another right now..."

Take care of your fellow Hubers. Read their hubs, become their fans, leave comments so they can feel good about what they wrote.. Leaving comments is also beneficial to you because it funnels some traffic your way (*more than you think*), and it helps the author/hubers inspiration.

Always inspire others, never put them down. Theirs a difference between constructive criticism and down right rudeness or jealousy.

I've written over 40 hubs on how to utilize the hubtronics (term I coined to describe getting the most out of HubPages technologies and "plumbing" for traffic etc...)

Have a great day and don't forget- When you reach your landmark 100th hub write your own "looking back" hub. Landmarks are at every 100th hub. i.e. 200, 300, 400. Silver Hub is 500 Gold is 1,000 Titanium is 10,000 (that I'd like to see!) lol!

Have a Fantabulous Hubtastic Day!

Jerrico